Aside from all this, it was splendid theater. One itched to put it on a stage. Alkibiades was a bravura role I would have given my ears for. Sokrates seemed to fall between tragedy and comedy (the modern writers are just starting to explore this ground), but the character arrested me, since I knew him mostly from the lampoon in The Clouds. If he was really such a man as Plato makes him, then his death was murder, and Aristophanes’ hands are far from clean. This set me thinking that it was not wonderful if Plato had no time for dramatists, nor much for actors.
When I gave the book back to Axiothea I asked her if this was so. Though it was long before her time, she had heard the tradition of the schooclass="underline" that at Sokrates’ trial Plato had got up to speak for the defense, which, considering the temper of the court and of the government, must have put him in great danger. He had opened with, “Gentlemen, though I am the youngest who ever stood up before you—” planning to say he spoke for the young men Sokrates was accused of having corrupted. But the dikasts all bawled out, “Sit down!” and, being an amateur, he could not make himself heard. I suppose it was hardly surprising that he never got over this; but, as I told Axiothea, it was a real loss to the theater. There was no doubt he had it in him.
I met her often in the park, because I liked her company, and for the sake of what she could tell me about Dion. Not having lost hope of bringing me to philosophy, she introduced me to her friends, one of whom was Speusippos, Plato’s nephew. He was an elegant young man, spare and wiry, with a face like a handsome monkey’s, who usually looked as if he had been up late, sometimes at his books, but sometimes not. In spite of this he missed nothing; Axiothea said he was one of their most brilliant men. He certainly had charming manners, and, though he knew every play worth hearing, always asked my opinion first.
On the other hand there was Xenokrates, a lean fellow with an untrimmed beard and dirty nails, who never moved any of his face but his mouth to talk, so that I often felt like telling him he could buy a better mask for ten drachmas. As coolly as if I had been a deaf post, he maintained to the company that it was casting nets for the wind to try and philosophize an actor, a man, he said, who lent himself to every passion, not to learn the mastery of pain and pleasure, but rather to display their worst excesses for the applause of the ignorant. As well expound chastity in a brothel. No one rebuked him for his rudeness; it was their custom that any proposition must be debated before it was condemned. Perceiving this, I kept my temper; the discussion lasted some time, but Speusippos took my side, and was agreed to have won the day.
They often talked about Dion without any prompting from me. They believed (getting it from Sokrates) that a memory of justice is born in man; and Dion was their favorite illustration.
His father, Hipparinos, had come of the highest blood in Syracuse, and had always spent like a king. What with race horses, palace-building and banquets, he was nearly broke when he backed Dionysios’ rise to power, and got his stake back fivefold. Dionysios must have liked the man as well as valuing him, for he bound their families as close as law allowed, marrying Hipparinos’ sister, Dion’s aunt, and, when she bore a daughter, betrothing the girl to Dion, whom he treated almost as a son.
Sicily, however, is not Greece, whatever the Greeks there tell you. Dionysios, a king in all but name, indulged a king’s whim and took two wives. Aristomache, the sister of Dion, was for friendship and support at home, Doris of Lokri for foreign policy. It might have set the kindred at each other’s throats if he had not been a resourceful man. He avoided disputes about precedence by marrying them both the same day; what’s more, he lay with them both that night, and no one was allowed to see which door he entered first.
It was Doris of Lokri who first bore a son; this was not, it would seem, what he had hoped, for after some time, Aristomache still not conceiving, he had Doris’s mother put to death for casting a barren spell on her. (As I was saying, Hellas stops at the straits.) Doris’ son was a growing lad when Aristomache’s first son was born.
Meantime, young Dion was growing up, all the gods’ darling: as free of the Archon’s house as of his own; so rich he need never ask what anything cost; ranking like a king’s nephew, or rather higher; and with the looks of some youth on a frieze by Pheidias. Courted both for his favor and his person, in that most dissolute of cities, he managed to keep his honor. It left its mark on him; though not vain, he learned aloofness in self-defense, and people called him proud. At sixteen he escaped, with relief, to war. The gods had stinted him of nothing; he was brave as well. Campaigning in Italy, he found time to study with the Pythagoreans. At twenty, with his brilliant youth dawning into a manhood not less splendid, he received news that Plato was their guest. He dashed at once across the straits to offer homage.
By now I had read one or two of Plato’s dialogues, written some time before this happened. There is nearly always, somewhere, a glorious youth, Lysis or Alkibiades or Charmides, as athletic in mind as body, who neglects his jostling suitors to alight by Sokrates, asks all the right questions, modest but keen, and goes off all radiant from the play of minds, sure to return. Here was the dream come true. I could imagine how Plato felt.
Before long they were in Sicily, climbing Mount Etna to view the craters. The pure form of the distant mountain, floating in ether, white as foam; the climb above the orchards among fierce shapes of black lava; the snows bathed in light sighing out dragon’s breath; the fire-fuming stithy plunging unfathomed from the skies to the core of earth—nothing less, I daresay, seemed worthy of the elements released within them.
Meantime, Dion had sent word to Syracuse; and Dionysios, who loved to think his court a Helikon of muses, sent the expected summons.
Young Dion was enraptured. Love and philosophy had opened his eyes; he saw all was not well in Syracuse where things had gone so well for him. But he had learned too that man only sins from ignorance. He must love the good, once seen. And—how not?—everyone must love Plato.
As I heard this tale in the Academy olive grove, I must say I felt for the man. He had been brought up to politics; lived, in forty years, through the bitter end of war and three kinds of misgovernment at home; had seen his own kinsmen, earnest reformers, turn to ruthless despots once they had seized power; had had to beg Sokrates’ life from them; then, having cut himself off from half his family and given up his career, he had been forced to watch, helpless, while his friend who had defied the tyranny with unflinching courage was murdered by the democrats under form of law. Now here was the beloved youth, who believed in him like a god, inviting him to bring the good life to Syracuse. What could he do?
I was told in full, by my friends at the Academy, what Plato and Dionysios said to each other. Even philosophers are human, and I never knew a man, repeating a set-to he had had with anyone, who did not improve it here and there; however, I believe most of it. Plato’s manners were superb and he must have begun with courtesy. But having lived under the Thirty, he could not miss the smell of tyranny where it sweated from the very walls. Meantime, he was made much of. In due course he was asked to do his act, and speak on the Good Life.
I don’t know if Dionysios expected to be used as an exemplar; in Sicily it would not surprise me. It turned out that Plato’s good life was that of just men in a just city, whose governors were chosen for merit without regard to rank, and trained up in temperance and virtue. He had been by now to one or two Sicilian banquets, where guests stuffed with food and soaked in drink finish up with an orgy on the supper couches; this, he made pretty clear, was how not to make life good. He quoted Pythagoras upon Circe’s swine.