XXXV. Matters now began to look ill for Sosis; and when his slaves, after torture, declared that he left the house while it was yet night carrying a razor, Dion's accusers withdrew their charges against him, and the people became reconciled with Dion and condemned Sosis to death. Nevertheless, they viewed the mercenaries with suspicion, especially after the great battles which took place at sea, when Philistus came from Iapygia with many triremes to rescue Dionysius, upon which they imagined that the mercenaries, being heavy-infantry soldiers, would be of no further use in the war, and would soon become their enemies, as they were all seafaring people, whose strength lay in their ships. They were further excited by their success in a sea-fight, in which they defeated Philistus, and treated him with the utmost barbarity. Ephorus states that Philistus killed himself as soon as his ship was captured, but Timonides, who was present with Dion throughout the whole of these events, in a letter which he wrote to the philospher, Speusippus, informs him that Philistus was taken alive from his ship which ran ashore; and that the Syracusans first stripped him of his corslet and displayed him naked, jeering at him, he being then an old man; and that after this they cut off his head and gave up the body to the boys of the town, bidding them drag it through Achradina, and cast it into the stone quarries. Timæus declares that Philistus was treated with even greater indignity, his dead body being dragged by the boys through the city by the lame leg amidst the insults of all the people of Syracuse, who were pleased to see this treatment inflicted on the man who had told Dionysius that far from requiring a swift horse to escape from his throne, he ought to remain until he was dragged from it by the leg. Philistus, however, gave this advice to Dionysius, not as having been said by himself, but by some one else.