This, however, I must reserve for discussion in another place; and now, in this my twelfth book of parallel lives, I will first proceed to deal with the elder man of the two. III. Dionysius the elder, as soon as he had raised himself to the throne, married the daughter of Hermokrates of Syracuse. However, as his power was not yet firmly established, the people of Syracuse rose in revolt, and committed such shocking outrages upon the person of Dionysius's wife, that she voluntarily put herself to death. Dionysius, after recovering and confirming his power, now married two wives at the same time, one of whom was a Lokrian, named Doris, and the other a native of Syracuse, named Aristomache, the daughter of Hipparinus, one of the first men in Syracuse, who had acted as colleague with Dionysius himself when he was appointed to the command of the army with unlimited powers. It is said that he married them both upon the same day, and that no man knew which he visited first; and of the remainder of his life he spent an equal share of his time with each, as he always supped in company with both of them, and spent the night with each in turn. The populace of Syracuse would fain have hoped that their countrywoman would be preferred to the stranger; but it was the stranger who first bore a son and heir to Dionysius, to counterbalance her foreign parentage; while Aristomache remained childless for a long time, although Dionysius was anxious to have a family by her, and even put to death the mother of his Lokrian wife on a charge of having bewitched her.