PART THREE

Plato in Syracuse

The core story of the Letters, the center of its drama and the unifying narrative thread running through its winding literary structure, is that of Plato’s failed attempt to carry out Dion’s plan of educating Dionysius to philosophy. This failure is what renders Plato’s fateful decision to involve himself in the political affairs of the Syracusan tyranny so questionable in retrospect. How did Plato think that the reputation of Platonic philosophy would benefit from this fraught and risky venture, as he evidently did? We have learned from our examinations of the themes of Plato’s political counsel and Plato’s presentation of philosophy throughout the Letters that he never believed in Dion’s vision for a regime of philosophic rule in Syracuse and that he could never have been sanguine about Dionysius’s prospects as a student of Platonic philosophy. What precisely were the benefits—for himself, his friends, his school, and his project of promoting philosophy—at which Plato aimed in fostering a relationship with Dionysius?

Plato does not present his answer to this question simply or directly anywhere in the Letters. Instead, he slowly and methodically develops a complex portrait of his puzzling, tension-ridden relationships with both Dion and Dionysius over the course of the entire Letters, from its first page to its last. In order to arrive at an accurate understanding of Plato’s motives and intentions in pursuing and maintaining these relationships, then, we must try to follow his presentation of his dealings with these men as he unfolds it. What we find in adopting this approach, however, is that we cannot separate our questions about the story Plato tells in the Letters from questions Plato compels us to raise regarding his composition of the Letters. That is, Plato indicates in the Letters that his conception and composition of this astoundingly intricate and innovative text were themselves a response to the growing repercussions of his activities in Syracuse. We will not obtain a full picture of Plato’s strategy and plan in the Syracusan affair if we fail to include the writing and publication of the Letters itself as part of the story.

In what follows, then, we will seek to shed light on what it was Plato sought to accomplish in and through his dealings with Dionysius and Dion, and also how those relationships ultimately gave rise to Plato’s conception and composition of the Letters. We will begin with the opening cluster of letters, in which Plato indicates that his composition of the Letters became necessary as a response to the proliferation of harmful rumors about his associations with Dionysius and Dion. After we have gained some insight into Plato’s struggle to control the public perception of these relationships, we will be better prepared to seek out a properly nuanced view of the truth about those relationships, especially as regards the substance, and the reason for the failure, of Plato’s attempt to educate the Syracusan tyrant. By comparing and contrasting the divergent accounts of Letters Two, Three, and Seven, we can piece together an account of the Platonic education Dionysius received, giving particular attention to that education’s most sensitive subjects: theology and tyranny. For it was Dionysius’s failure to appreciate the nuances of Plato’s teachings on these subjects that produced the most serious problems for Plato and for his reputation.

Having clarified the details of Plato’s failure to educate Dionysius, we will have to take up one of the most puzzling features of Plato’s whole Syracusan saga. Why, after things had gone so poorly in his first attempt with Dionysius, did Plato agree to go for his third visit, to revive his failed project of educating the tyrant? We will find the answer by attending to one of the more intriguing and even mysterious characters in the Letters: Archytas, the philosophic and powerful Tarentine statesman and addressee of Letters Nine and Twelve. In considering the role Plato’s friendship with Archytas played in Plato’s Syracusan activities, we seem at first to round out our understanding of Plato’s motivations in going to Syracuse and associating with Dionysius—but Plato has a final twist in store for us. The Letters ends with Letter Thirteen, which suddenly brings to our attention, among other things, the financial benefits made available to Plato and his friends through Plato’s connection to Dionysius. We will conclude our study of the Letters by considering how the revelations in Letter Thirteen change our understanding of Plato’s Syracusan adventure.

The Opening Drama of the Letters and the Problem of Slander

Over the course of the first three letters, all of which are addressed to Dionysius, we find Plato referring repeatedly to the slanderous rumors that have plagued his undertakings in Syracuse since he and Dionysius first met, and that continue to follow and disturb him still. The opening of the Letters thus conveys to the reader that the fallout of Plato’s undertakings in Sicily, the problem to which he is still attending even after having concluded his third and final Sicilian visit, concerns the public perception of his activities and involvement with the Syracusan tyranny. In our investigation of Plato’s failed dealings with Dion and Dionysius and of his subsequent decision to write the Letters, then, we are naturally drawn to focus on the details of this opening trilogy—and indeed of its sequel, Letter Four, addressed to Dion himself. Before delving into those details, however, let us take a broad overview of these opening letters, noting the content and tone of each, so as to understand how they fit together and what impression they, as a group, convey to the reader about the character of the Letters as a whole.

Letter One is a portrait of Plato slamming the door shut behind him on his way out of Syracuse. Of course, he has retreated to a safe distance before penning this sententious reprimand of his erstwhile Sicilian host. By the time he writes, he has returned safely to Athens; he haughtily sends back the money Dionysius had given him for a travel allowance, as if to be sure not to owe him anything (in addition to which, the sum provided wasn’t even enough) (309b8–d1). Letter One, then, is full of Plato’s high-handed censure of the way Dionysius treated him while he was at the tyrant’s court—which is why we may be surprised to find in Letter Two that the embers of their relationship are not altogether extinguished. And it is not only because of Dionysius’s newly aroused interest in Plato’s teaching about “the nature of the first” that the lines of communication have been reopened at the time of Letter Two. What is really motivating Plato in this letter is the problem of rumor or slander (diabolē), which hangs over the Letters’ opening trilogy. We may say that the writing of the Letters became necessary—what seems in Letter One to be the end of the story must in fact be only the beginning—because the problem of slander against Plato that is raised in Letter One proves not to have been resolved.

Let us be more specific about this “problem of slander” as it arises in these letters. In Letter One, Plato bemoans the “vexatious” or “disgusting” slanders he endured during the time he spent managing Dionysius’s political affairs while Dionysius himself was “receiving the benefits” and was apparently unscathed by these onerous rumors (309a1–4). Plato indicates that he was willing to suffer this unjust state of affairs because he knew that the truth would ultimately prevail: witnesses to the events in question, “those taking part in the regime” together with Dionysius, for whose sake Plato had apparently stood up or had taken risks himself on previous occasions, would confirm that “the more brutal things” that took place under the tyrant’s reign could not possibly have received Plato’s sanction (309a4–b2). Plato’s quick dismissal of this matter notwithstanding, the reader is inclined to feel a measure of alarm on Plato’s behalf. Of what has he been accused, and how can he be so sure he will be acquitted?

Plato reopens his correspondence with Dionysius in Letter Two on account of additional troublesome rumors that are circulating and have now been relayed to Plato himself. Rumor has it (“they say”) that two men named Cratistolus and Polyxenus have brought damaging reports to Dionysius: one of them claimed to have overheard some of Plato’s entourage at Olympia “accusing” Dionysius, which has prompted Dionysius to express the opinion both that Plato “ought to keep quiet” concerning him, and that Plato’s “associates”—Dion excepted, for some reason—“ought to keep from doing or saying anything nasty” toward him (310b4–6, c7–d2). Plato, for his part, denies any awareness of his companions’ having said what Cratistolus or Polyxenus claims to have heard them say (310d2–3). The crisscrossing channels of communication through which this gossip has been conveyed, amplified, and distorted are characteristically difficult to sort out. What is clear is that the business has become enough of a problem for Plato that he is now writing to Syracuse to address it. These rumors, then, seem to be more troubling to Plato than those to which he referred in Letter One.

The map of the Letters provided to us by way of Letter Seven helps us greatly in putting flesh on the bones of this little story in Letter Two, thus allowing us to appreciate the story’s true but somewhat hidden significance. Letter Seven reveals that the meeting at Olympia referred to in Letter Two is Plato’s meeting with Dion at the Olympic games, when the philosopher was en route for the third and final time from Syracuse back to Athens. At this meeting, the exiled Dion solemnly swore to Plato that he would at long last return to Sicily to take revenge on Dionsyius (350b6–3). This tyrannicidal resolve of Dion’s appears to have been formed at least partly in response to hearing Plato’s account of what had most lately transpired for the philosopher in Syracuse. So in truth Plato was, then, “accusing” Dionysius in Olympia; and what is more, while Plato himself claims in Letter Seven to have refused, out of gratitude to Dionysius, to endorse or to join in Dion’s tyrannicidal undertaking, Plato also says that he explicitly invited Dion “to call upon [Plato’s] friends if they were willing” (350c3–4). We understand now that Plato is being quite disingenuous in his pretension to ignorance of what is troubling Dionysius in Letter Two: Dionysius’s warning that Plato’s associates must not say or do anything “nasty” to him refers, as Plato must well know, to Dion’s imminent return aiming to overthrow and to kill Dionysius. The details provided in Letter Seven also help us better to understand, in the opening lines of Letter Two, the strange exemption Dionysius is said to have granted to Dion among all Plato’s associates: at issue there for Dionysius is not exactly Dion’s hostility or his alarming preparations—Dionysius likely understands the grounds, and may even acknowledge the justice, of Dion’s grievance and thus of the need for war between them to settle their differences. What concerns Dionysius is Plato’s acquiescence to Dion’s recruitment of Platonic associates to the cause of the violent overthrow of Dionysius’s regime.

Plato’s response to Dionysius’s concern and warning in Letter Two points us to the broader significance of the grave situation at hand. Dionysius’s recognition that it would be too much to ask Plato to restrain Dion himself is an indication, Plato says, that Plato does not “rule [his] associates.” “For if I were thus ruling the others, and you, and Dion,” he continues, “then would there be more good things for us and all the other Greeks, as I claim” (310c1–5). If Plato cannot even control Dion, one of the most ardent Platonic disciples there ever was (327a5–b1), what hope could there be for his institution of such philosophic rule as would fulfill the Platonic promise of uplifting and enlightening the Greeks? Plato thus acknowledges that the power he has to direct the actions and affairs of others through speech or reason is extremely limited; whatever part he may have played in precipitating the events now unfolding, he is no longer in a position to direct the course of those events. Now, it is true that the passage in Letter Seven describing Plato’s meeting with Dion at Olympia leaves some ambiguity as to just how much power Plato could have exercised over Dion at the critical moment (350d7–351a1). But what Letter Two itself stresses more emphatically is that, at the moment to which this letter belongs, Plato’s immediate challenge regards how he might yet hope to control the rumors about his involvement in Dion’s coup.

We understand better now, then, why the need to address the problem of these rumors has prompted Plato to reopen the lines of communication with Dionysius—despite the fact that earlier rumors about his involvement in Dionysius’s tyranny (alluded to in Letter One) did not stop him from deciding to cut off ties in the first place. For the disaster of Dion’s failure will reflect particularly badly on Plato and on Platonic philosophy if Plato is believed, as he might easily be, to have been a co-conspirator in, or even the mastermind behind, the campaign to oust Dionysius. The problem of slander or rumor to which Plato must attend is precisely the difficulty of altering the manner in which he is perceived now that the gossip has begun to spread. The whole first half of Letter Two is taken up with the question of how Plato and Dionysius are going to “correct” the manner in which their association will be spoken of in the future—with a view, ultimately, to protecting the reputation of philosophy (311d8–e4). It is not enough for Plato to cut ties and wash his hands of the whole Sicilian affair; he must attend to the rippling effects upon his reputation of having involved himself so openly in an ordeal that is becoming increasingly messy.

Plato’s approach to this weighty challenge in Letter Two suggests that he hopes to work in concert with Dionysius to ensure that their relationship is publicly seen and discussed in a favorable light. By the time of Letter Three, that hope has evidently run out. The simplest explanation for this is that the relationship between the two former associates has soured on account of Dion’s campaign against Syracuse, which at this point can no longer be denied or disguised. Plato responds in Letter Three to allegations being spread by Dionysius himself, which suggest that Plato has long been plotting against him and is now at last attempting to realize his audacious scheme of usurpation. Specifically, Dionysius claims that Plato long ago prevented him from carrying out a two-part political program: “to colonize the Greek cities in Sicily,” that is, to reclaim and repopulate the towns desolated by the Carthaginians in their wars against Dionysius the Elder, and to “unburden the Syracusans by replacing the rule of tyranny with kingship.” Dionysius, that is, had ambitions—stymied by Plato, as he claims—to succeed where his father had failed by making Sicily a flourishing home for free Greeks. And now he is alleging that Plato’s intention is to “teach Dion to do these very things,” so that Plato and Dion, “by means of [Dionysius’s] own intentions, are taking [his] rule away from [him]” (315c8–e1). Evidently, Plato’s attempts in Letter Two to smother the nascent rumors of his involvement in Dion’s plot against Syracuse have utterly failed. Dionysius himself is now actively fueling the most damaging version of those rumors, making Plato out to be the puppet master behind Dion and his campaign.

Plato’s immediate response is a counter-allegation: “You do injustice to me by saying the opposite of the things that happened” (315e2–3). His next move is more surprising. Plato complains that Dionysius’s slander is particularly unwelcome on account of the copious slanders Plato has already endured, which allege that Plato had acted as puppet master over Dionysius himself while he was still in Syracuse, and that he was therefore responsible for “any error” or “transgression” (hamartēma) committed by the tyrant during that time (315e3–7). In other words, Plato decides to respond in Letter Three to the problematic slander he was already addressing in Letter Two by bringing up in addition the separate slanders to which he referred in Letter One. Hence, he sets out to deliver “a defense speech (apologia) against both the slander that occurred before and that which is now naturally growing greater and more vehement after it” (316b1–2). Plato surely means for us to think here of his Apology of Socrates, in which Socrates takes up the formal accusation against him—against which he, too, begins with a counter-accusation to the effect that his accuser has accused him falsely (24c4–8)—only after introducing and responding to older “slanderous accusations” against him, which he claims have long circulated the false rumor that he studied and taught natural science and sophistic rhetoric.

If this was a strange procedure for Socrates to adopt at his trial (cf. Isocrates, Busiris 5), it is even stranger for Plato here. What is the point of making a “defense speech” here at all, where there is no trial and no jury (315d5)? The futility of making this defense to Dionysius in a private letter is what makes Letter Three one of the more obvious cases of an “open letter” in the collection; the epistolary form would seem, that is, to be no more than a literary device. Plato’s Letter Three can easily be seen as having been written with the apologetic purpose of counteracting the damaging slander that has arisen as a result of his activities and influence in Syracuse. But when we consider that the need for such a defense was precisely what Plato described in Letter Two, that the problem of slander or rumor runs continuously through these first three letters, that Letter Three itself calls our attention to the literary elements of the epistolary form by beginning with a reflection on the salutation with which every other letter in the collection begins, and that the massive centerpiece of the Letters, Letter Seven, is itself obviously an open letter with the same apologetic purpose we are now clarifying, we are met with the compelling suggestion that not just Letters Three and Seven but the whole Letters has been written as a defense of Plato’s political activity in Syracuse. We must yet consider how similar the activity Plato defends (insofar as it arises from or involves philosophy) is to the activity his Socrates defends in the apologia to which Letter Three implicitly alludes.

Letter Four as Satyr Play

Before returning to examine the details of Plato’s opening letters to Dionysius more closely, we should pause to consider the helpful light shed on those letters by their sequel, Letter Four. Over the course of Letters One through Three, we see Plato’s desire to bid good riddance to his Sicilian misadventures sadly thwarted by the necessity of dealing with his perceived connection to the approaching civil war. Letter Four is set at the moment of Dion’s initial triumph in that war; it promises to reveal the truth of Plato’s connection to the Dionean coup d’état, which connection Dionysius has alleged and Plato denied in their correspondence contained in the preceding letters. Letter Four, then, both belongs together with the opening trilogy of letters and is clearly set apart from it. This alone may bring to mind the format in which the Greek tragedians presented their plays at festivals: each trilogy is followed by a “satyr play,” a kind of semicomic relief featuring a chorus of the eponymous, ribald, bestial minions of Dionysus. This interpretive suggestion is supported, to begin with, by the tragic motifs in the first three letters. Indeed, Plato quotes the tragedians three or four times in the brief and moralistic Letter One, all for the sake of chastening Dionysius: his tyrannical greed has cost him Plato’s friendship, which will prove in time to have been worth far more than the riches Dionysius pursued at Plato’s expense (309b7–8, 309d1–310a10). Moreover, Plato’s desire to inaugurate the Letters under the auspices of the god of tragedy is indicated by the name of the letter carrier, an otherwise unknown (and so quite possibly invented) man named Bacchius (309c1), that is, “the Bacchic one,” an epithet of Dionysus (aka Bacchus) himself.

The tragic tone of the Letters is struck at the outset with the emphatic reference to Dionysius’s tyrannical hubris: we are made to lament the clouding of his judgment that led him to abuse his would-be philosophic benefactor, ruining the hopes of a fruitful partnership between the two of them and thus dooming himself to the fate prescribed to tyrants by “the majority of the . . . tragedians” (309d5–6). True to tragic form, moreover, the fallout from the tragic figure’s blind hubris consumes not just the transgressor, but everyone in the drama. Plato, having been so undeservingly dishonored by the tyrant, says that he “will henceforth deliberate in a less humane way concerning [him]self” (310b6–7). Plato intimates that he has left Syracuse more cynical, more jaded, than he was when he arrived. His experience with Dionysius has disabused him of his former naive optimism, has taught him, so to speak, that the poets are right in their unqualified condemnation of tyranny. In this way, Dionysius has been responsible for a great disappointment of whatever the hopes were with which Plato began. It seems to be in retaliation for the pain of this bitter disappointment that Plato is venting his spleen against Dionysius in Letter One.

The scope of the tragedy broadens as the Letters continues. The partnership that Dionysius has spoiled promised to shine out far beyond the Syracusan court, “for if [Plato] were . . . ruling” Dionysius, there would “be more good things” not just for them, but also for “all the other Greeks” (310c2–4). By the time we reach Letter Three the disaster for Plato—and for the reputation of philosophy, with which his own reputation is inextricably bound (311d8–e6)—has become markedly more severe. For all of Plato’s sanctimoniousness in Letter One, some uncertainty has now arisen, among the public at least, as to whether Plato may not be guiltier of injustice than Dionysius. The letter ends with the question of which of the two men must submit to just punishment, Plato calling upon Dionysius to acknowledge the wisdom of the hubristic poet Stesichorus and to imitate his “palinode” by recanting the lies he has told about Plato (319e2–5). Letter Three—the only Platonic letter to refer to hubris—thus ends by reaffirming Plato’s prediction that Dionysius will suffer divine retribution for his misdeeds, but now with significantly less confidence than he evinced in Letter One, even opening the possibility that divine forgiveness may yet be available to the tyrant.

Letter Three gives a clear and consistent answer to the question why Plato would ever have allowed himself (and philosophy) to become embroiled in such a mess. Everything he did, from the moment of his arrival to his final departure, was out of belief in and loyalty to Dion, and especially for the sake of putting a stop to Dionysius’s unjust persecution of Dion (316c4–d5, 317a5–318a5). It is in the immediate wake of Letter Three, and under the impression that letter has given us, that we come to Letter Four, the only letter in the collection addressed to Dion himself. We turn to this letter, then, in anticipation of something more uplifting than the tragedy that has preceded it, a glimpse of the friendship that was worthy of Plato’s devotion all these years. The manner in which this anticipation is disappointed and deflated is precisely what gives this “satyr play” its tragicomic dimensions. It might seem at first blush that things have turned out well and that justice has been served after all: Dion and his collaborators have evidently deposed the tyrant (320e2). But Plato cautions that “the greatest contest concerns things yet to come” (320b3–4). Dion has distinguished himself as a general, but now he must prove himself as a lawgiver, and therefore must demonstrate his possession of virtues distinct from, and much rarer than, the ones that have carried him to this point (320b4–c3). Dionysius the Younger was a relatively paltry rival; Dion’s competition now is with the likes of the glorious Lycurgus and Cyrus. And the understanding between Plato and Dion—some parts of which Plato guards with notable secrecy (320c5)—is evidently that the regime Dion will now attempt to found will surpass any that has ever existed, that even Lycurgus and Cyrus themselves will come to seem “ancient” or “outdated” in light of Dion’s innovations (320d6–7).

The poignant humor in this letter arises from the enormous disproportion between the ambitions Plato and Dion have apparently fostered together and the actual scope of what is possible under Dion’s leadership. In fact, we have already had occasion to note, in our study of Letter Eight, Dion’s failure to grasp the hard problems faced by the founding lawgiver. Moreover, Plato’s insinuations here point to Dion’s belief (not shared by Plato) that he is to bring about, in some form or other, the rule of Platonic wisdom in Syracuse, and this under the eager scrutiny of “people from every inhabited region” (320d3–5). We may recall that in the letter following this one, Plato counsels the monarch Perdiccas with the political wisdom that one must never attempt to change the form of one’s regime (321e3–6). Indeed, it seems that the observing public is rather down on Dion’s chances of success. The expectation is that Dion will be unable to work together with the likes of Heraclides and Theodotes—friends of Dion’s for whom Plato stuck his own neck out according to a story that was just recounted in Letter Three (318c1–d1)—and that the struggle for preeminence among them will be the end of Dion (320d8–e4). Poor Plato must now look helplessly on as the reputation and legacy of his political philosophy hang in the balance of Dion’s quixotic mission.

But why is Plato so helpless? Can he not at least hope to direct Dion toward the path of least calamity? Perhaps we should have considered ourselves warned when Plato told us in Letter Two that he does not rule Dion. For what is more fully revealed in this letter than anywhere else is that, whatever Plato has claimed about his relationship to Dion in other places, Dion is not looking to Plato for guidance in this moment. Plato pleadingly calls upon him toward the end of this letter to write back; Theodotes and Heraclides are in communication with people back in Greece, but Plato and his associates have heard nothing from Dion’s camp (321a6–5-b). Thus Plato appears in this letter not exactly on the tragic stage, but rather in the audience: he likens himself to a child in the theater, “shout[ing] [his] encouragements in seriousness and with goodwill” in hopes of spurring Dion toward a happy result (321a2–5). Surely, the image will sooner put us in mind of a farce than of the gravity of a tragedy—Plato acknowledges that it may well “appear ridiculous” (321a1–2). The dark humor here comes not from the Bacchic satyr’s frenzied lust, but from the solemn Dion’s equally fervent, equally uncontrollable desire for much loftier ends and the immortal honor attached to them.

Specifically, Plato’s encouragements urge Dion to control the competition for this honor between himself, Heraclides, and Theodotes. He tells Dion to make a show of providing “a doctor’s treatment” if the competition ever threatens to rend the friends asunder and thus to ruin their endeavor (320e4–321a1). Plato directs them to compete rather as actors in a troupe—seeking individual honors only in such a way as will serve and elevate their common effort—and to write to Plato personally “if there is need of anything” (321a5–7). We are reminded of the other triumvirates in the Letters: the trinity of divine causes in Letter Two, the trio of addressees in Letter Six, and the Platonic Dion’s ill-conceived triple-kingship in Letter Eight. One can hardly deny that the ideal among these is the one most clearly organized into a hierarchy, that is, the one that is effectively a monarchy. Dion’s regime in Letter Eight helps us most clearly to see why Dion will fail: he does not appreciate the need for a singular leader to serve as the founding lawgiver (cf. 359b7–8). The comedy of the situation comes out most clearly in the comparison to Letter Six. For here in Letter Four, Plato has no chance of maintaining any control over this triumvirate through the regular correspondence he requests; there is a ridiculous disproportion between what Plato purports to be attempting with Dion and what is actually possible.

The problem in Letter Six was that of establishing a stable, trustworthy friendship. It is the same problem that Plato told us, in Letter Seven, turned him away from political action altogether (325d1–2). In various ways throughout the Letters, philosophy is proposed as the answer to this problem; but Plato tells us, also in Letter Seven, that Dion failed to appreciate the indispensability of philosophy in grounding stable, trustworthy friendships (333d7–334a6). Here, at the very end of Letter Four, Plato leaves Dion with a final piece of counsel. “Take to heart,” Plato advises, “that you seem to some to be rather lacking in the proper courtesy. Let it not escape your notice that it is through being agreeable to human beings that it is possible to act, but stubbornness dwells with loneliness” (321b5–c1). Needless to say, this was prescient advice, though naturally ineffective. Dion’s Platonic idealization of politics abstracts from the practical political need to appease real, flesh-and-blood human beings, with irremediable flaws, to whose preferences and desires Dion would have to pander in order to have success. It was not un-Platonic of him to disdain the idea of such pandering, but it was un-Platonic of him to fail to recognize how far away from political life that disdain should properly have carried him.

Letter Two on the Common Good between Philosopher and Tyrant

The first three letters highlight the disastrous consequences for Plato’s reputation resulting from his involvement with Dionysius; Letter Four, by revealing Dion’s ineptitude, must leave us wondering anew how Plato ever could have thought it was a good idea to accept Dion’s invitation in the first place. We may cast the puzzle in terms of the problem of trust Plato stresses in Letter Seven: Is it not strange that Plato took on his Syracusan project without the kind of trustworthy friend and partner that is, according to Plato himself, a prerequisite to any political success?

That a lack of pistis, trust, was at the core of Plato’s failure with Dionysius is indicated from the opening line of the Letters: Plato begins Letter One by recalling that he had once been the man “most trusted” by Dionysius in his court (309a2); the thrust of Plato’s reproach is that Dionysius has turned away such a trustworthy friend, something far more valuable than “shining gold” and the other trappings of tyrannical excess (cf. 322d1–4). The critical problem of Plato’s relationship with Dionysius was precisely the problem we encountered in Letter Six: for there to be stable trust between philosopher and ruler, the ruler must “really philosophize”; but this means that the trust in question cannot be counted on during the dangerous period of education toward genuine philosophy, during which it is quite unclear how the ruler will be persuaded to remain friendly. When Plato gives his own succinct statement on “the cause” of his failure in Syracuse, he says that Dionysius “came to light as not much trusting” him, and that this distrust concerned the question of what Plato’s “business” (pragma) was (312a3–6). As Plato puts it in Letter Three, the relationship between them was merely a “wolf-friendship” (318e4–5).

And yet, given that “the character of Dion’s soul . . . was by nature weighty,” that is, unlikely to be moved or changed, and “had already reached its middle age” (328b5–6), any hope Plato had for success in Syracuse must have relied on winning over the relatively young Dionysius. What is clear enough is that Plato’s attempt to gain Dionysius’s trust was, if not the sole purpose, at least a major goal of the program of education he offered to the tyrant. The most massive and pressing questions about that education, however, remain unanswered. For we have yet to clarify sufficiently how this relationship between Plato and Dionysius was meant to work. What benefit did Plato think he could plausibly offer to Dionysius that could entice him toward the pursuit of an education in Platonic philosophy? And what, ultimately, was the benefit Plato himself was seeking in return?

We begin our investigation of these questions with Letter Two, since Letter Two presents the height of Plato’s attempt to salvage his deteriorating relationship with Dionysius, to reestablish the tyrant’s belief in a common good between them. We have already examined the second half of the letter, in which Plato tries to entice Dionysius to embark on a very long journey of study under Plato’s guidance—it is itself an attempt to solve the problem of trust between philosopher and non- or pre-philosophic ruler. But we have not yet looked closely at what Plato does in the first half of the letter, before the theme of philosophy is explicitly introduced. There, by way of disclosing frankly to the tyrant “how things happen to stand” between the two men (310d5–7), Plato presents a kind of education drawn from his understanding of human nature—an education that differs starkly from, but stands obviously in parallel with, the education regarding “the nature of the first” in the letter’s second half. After observing that the nearly universal renown of both Plato and Dionysius among the Greeks has made their intercourse the subject of widespread discussion and gossip, Plato undertakes a lengthy explanation, “starting from the top,” of the grounds of his emphatic prediction that this public discussion is bound to continue “in the time to come” (310d6–e2). And this explanation begins with the claim that, “by nature, practical wisdom (phronēsis) and great power come together in the same place, and they always pursue and seek each other and come to be together” (310e5–6). Plato thus proposes to explain his relationship with Dionysius as an instance of an established pattern of human nature.

Plato’s focus in what follows, however, is not the natural relationship of phronēsis and dunamis, but rather the character and extent of the accounts that are generated and promulgated among human beings when great exemplars of these qualities meet and form partnerships (310e7–311a1). And this observation is not presented as a deduction from Plato’s understanding of human nature, but rather as supported inductively by extensive evidence: Plato lists eight or nine cases of well-known affiliations between wisdom and power, altogether comprising twenty figures well known from history and mythology, meant to illustrate the lasting notoriety that inevitably attaches to partnerships of this type (311a1–b7). The lesson Plato means to impart to Dionysius, then, is the following one: “When we meet our end, the speeches about us will not be passed over in silence either, so care ought to be taken over them” (311c1–3). The common ground to which Plato seeks to appeal to Dionysius here is the two men’s concern for their own reputations—especially their posthumous reputations. And yet, Plato’s list of historical and mythological phronēsis-dunamis partnerships does after all provide us a valuable starting point in thinking about what Plato may have thought he had to offer, and to gain, in trying to educate Dionysius. For, while its ostensible purpose is to demonstrate the lasting fame or infamy of all such relationships, this list also contains a rich source of possible motives for both parties, from which we may take our bearings.

Let us therefore turn to a close examination of Plato’s list of paradigmatic partnerships between practical wisdom and political power, so that we may then consider which if any of these models might correspond to the partnership Plato hoped to create with Dionysius. For example, Plato’s list begins with the provocative case of Hiero and Simonides. Hiero, like Dionysius, was the tyrant of Syracuse in his time; how closely did Plato’s intentions in approaching Dionysius match those of Simonides in going to the Syracusan tyrant’s court? Simonides is the only “wise man” among those listed by Plato who is mentioned in connection with two “powerful” ones. In this context, then, he stands out for his promiscuity: whatever it is he sought, he was apparently as happy to seek it from a Sicilian tyrant as from a Spartan general. From what is known of Simonides independently of this letter, we might speculate that he sought wealth and comfort above all: tradition has preserved Simonides’s reputation for covetousness and a gourmand’s appetite. But the image of Simonides “at the doors of the wealthy” is incongruous with the contempt for riches Plato expresses in all of these opening letters (cf. also Republic 489b6–8).

Perhaps Plato is more like his next paragon of phronēsis, Thales, of whom he has made use in his dialogues to represent the theoretical philosopher’s total disinterest, and resulting laughable ineptitude, in practical affairs (Theaetetus 174a3–b1; Greater Hippias 281c3–8). But Plato did not remain aloof from politics as did Thales—of whom, incidentally, no attestation of any relationship to Periander has come down to us. Was the relationship between Dionysius and Plato, then, rather in the mold of Pericles and Anaxagoras? In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates tells us that Anaxagoras helped Pericles to become a more skillful orator by teaching him about the things aloft and the nature of mind and mindless things, whence Pericles derived crucial lessons, necessary to the art of rhetoric, concerning the soul (Phaedrus 269e1ff., and cf. 270a4–5 with Apology of Socrates 23d5); in the Apology of Socrates Anaxagoras is the prime representative of the notorious impiety of natural philosophers, and hence of their imperiled position within the political community (26d1–6). At a crucial moment, it appears that Pericles was able to help Anaxagoras survive the pious Athenian backlash against his naturalistic doctrine. The case of Anaxagoras reminds us that Plato, as a philosopher, is prone to being suspected of impiety, which alone might explain his desire to befriend a politically powerful man such as Dionysius.

We come next to Croesus, Solon, and Cyrus. Here, for the first time, Plato reverses his ordering of the pairs: the exemplars of wisdom precede the exemplar of power. Plato highlights this by referring to Croesus and Solon as “wise” (sophous, not phronimous), which he must stress or specify since both Croesus and Solon were also powerful statesmen. The reversal of the two categories makes us aware of the special case of the founding lawgiver, Solon: he represents the synthesis of power and practical wisdom; his political power protected him during his lifetime, and the influence he exerts through his legislation does much to protect his post-humous reputation. In all three cases where Plato reverses the exemplars of dunamis and phronēsis, we find lawgivers, and in each case we can see that the lawgiver is more self-sufficient, less concerned to “pursue and seek” his counterpart, than the exemplars of practical wisdom who are not lawgivers: the wise Solon never even met the powerful Cyrus; Zeus’s “prudent” partner Prometheus was mostly a thorn in his side; and as for the legendary Minos, while he may be thought to have depended on Polyidus for his art of divination in some matters, these matters would not have encompassed his crowning act of lawgiving, which was said to have been inspired directly by Zeus, the god of law himself.

In suggesting a parallel between the acts of lawgiving of Solon and Minos, however, we have blurred the line Plato has drawn between the two sections of his list: the first section, Plato says, lists people about whom “human beings enjoy conversing” among themselves, whom we know from prose works of history and philosophy, while in the second section Plato proceeds to the “imitations” thereof produced by the poets, which refer to ancient, mythical characters. And there is a critical shift in the meaning of phronēsis when we cross over to the poets’ presentations. The education Thales and Anaxagoras may have made available to powerful statesmen, and even the teaching of Simonides, a poet himself but famously portrayed by a philosopher and historian, are hardly identical to the divine wisdom of Tiresias and Polyidus, the “prudent” counterparts of Creon and Minos, respectively, who possess their wisdom through divine revelation or the art of divination. The “prudence” or “practical wisdom” of these latter exemplars as they are portrayed by the poets is compatible with, because it is dictated by, their piety; and their usefulness as political advisers lies in their ability to communicate what the gods want or intend. The juxtaposition of these seers to Thales and Anaxagoras points to a great and abiding question of political philosophy: Is the highest wisdom, and therefore the ultimate guide for human action, accessible to reason and the senses unaided by revelation, or is divine revelation necessary for the most prudent human life and therefore for the best possible regime and laws (cf. Meno 99b1–d5)?

The question is pertinent here with respect to Plato. Is the prudence or practical wisdom that Plato would have offered to Dionysius on the basis of his political philosophy, whatever he may have hoped to receive in exchange, more akin in the crucial respect to the prudent counsel Anaxagoras gave to Pericles or to that which Tiresias gave to Creon? What, in Plato’s view, is the place of piety in counsel to a tyrant? Plato’s speculation, at the end of his list, that “the first human beings brought together Prometheus and Zeus in the same way” as the poets brought together their own sets of exemplars, does not settle the matter (311b2–4). For we have already seen from later letters, and from later in this letter, that Plato can uphold the importance or appearance of piety without relying on traditional beliefs in the Olympian gods.

The list we have been examining offers not only a source of suggestions as to Plato’s modus operandi in dealing with Dionysius, but also a variety of possible modes in which he may hope or wish to portray the relationship in retrospect. The explicit purpose of this portion of the letter to Dionysius is for him to come to see that “care must be taken over” what will be said about the two of them after they have died (311b7–c3). But we know from the Letters itself that Plato never succeeded in recruiting Dionysius to this “care” or task. We must recognize, then, that the Letters itself is Plato’s way of “taking care over” what will be said about the two of them after they have died. Now, Plato concluded his list of exemplars by noting that the postures of these famous figures with respect to one another varies in the various accounts, “some coming into conflict with each other, others into friendship, and still others into friendship at one time and into conflict at another, being like-minded about some things and conflicting about others” (311b4–7). This refers especially to the pairs of examples presented by the poets, though we might note, with respect to the first half of the list, the tendency of Xenophon (in his pseudo-historical Hiero and Education of Cyrus, to which Plato implicitly refers) to bridge the conflicts between phronēsis and dunamis by means of the sharing of wisdom. The poets, for their part, appear from the evidence of Plato’s list to have been especially fond of portraying the baneful dissolution of partnership between potentate and seer.

The depiction of the place of wisdom in the political realm is a matter of no little importance to those poets and prose writers who have generally been responsible for the depiction—and this is certainly the case also for Plato. The Letters extends and belongs to the project of refining or reinventing this depiction, to which Plato’s writings may be said to be generally devoted. This would explain the otherwise baffling implication later in Letter Two that each of these letters, and the Letters as a whole, as instances of Platonic writing, “are of a Socrates become beautiful and new” (i.e., the Socrates of the dialogues, as opposed to the Socrates of the Letters itself). Plato certainly presents the relationship between himself and Dionysius throughout the Letters as “friendship at one time,” “conflict at another,” but according to a complex and novel literary pattern.

Greetings and Salutations

We have gathered from Letter Two that the Letters is Plato’s “correction” to the widespread rumors about his relationship with Dionysius. But Plato does not suggest that this “correction” is equivalent to his presenting the truth of the matter. Plato’s concern was rather that he and Dionysius come to be “better spoken of” with respect to anything that “has not been nobly done” in the course of their association, his highest end being service to the reputation of philosophy (311d6–e4). A full account of the relationship between Plato and Dionysius, which accurately describes not only the original intention of that relationship but also its ultimate failure, must surely include some reference to the things that were “not nobly done” between them and which might have otherwise reflected poorly on Platonic philosophy. And yet these will be precisely the details that Plato would have needed to present in a delicate or guarded way, and which called for Plato to explain himself to his readers by means of such an unusual and puzzling text as the Letters. We turn next to Letter Three, then, with a view to understanding what elements of Plato’s relationship with Dionysius called for the greatest sensitivity in Plato’s composition of the Letters.

Dionysius’s and Plato’s postures of accusation, defense, and counter-accusation in Letter Three speak to the failure of Plato’s attempt in Letter Two to work with Dionysius to “correct” public perception of their mutual affairs. Letter Three is the flagship of Plato’s mission in the Letters to defend his activities in Syracuse. With this in mind, we find that its introductory section is particularly intriguing. For here Plato comments on the meaning of the special Platonic salutation that begins every other letter in the collection: “Do well!” This opening of Letter Three shows us that the care with which the Letters has been written, which was indicated by Plato’s treatment of the theme of writing in Letter Two, extends even to the apparently minor matter of the salutation. Moreover, this passage turns out to provide a key to understanding the major difficulties involved in Plato’s education of Dionysius, and thus reveals something critical about what has made the Letters necessary.

Plato opens Letter Three by asking whether it would not be more appropriate for him to greet Dionysius with the conventional “rejoice” (chairein) than with Plato’s customary and idiosyncratic “do well” (eu prattein). He claims to have been led to this question by the manner in which Dionysius addressed Apollo in a written inquiry he sent to the oracle at Delphi. According to his envoys on that occasion, Dionysius addressed the god, “Rejoice and preserve a tyrant’s life of having pleasure!” (316b6). Of course, Plato is quick to condemn Dionysius’s addressing a god in this shocking way. But his condemnation may not only be for the sake of correcting Dionysius’s behavior; it may also be an instance of Plato’s attempt to “correct” the public perception of his relationship with Dionysius. For Dionysius’s attitude toward the gods might well be thought to be a reflection of the education he received from Plato. Has he not sought Plato’s instruction regarding “the nature of the first”? Have we not gathered that his soul was in the throes of labor pains on account of his doubt concerning the character of the first cause connected to the noble things? What is to prevent people from surmising on the basis of Dionysius’s flagrant immorality and impiety that his relationship to Plato resembles Pericles’s to Anaxagoras more than Creon’s to Tiresias?

To be sure, the Letters provides good support to Plato’s defense against these insinuations. Plato wrote to Dionysius in Letter Two of honorable behavior, pious devotion (to philosophy), and of a cosmos ordered by a divine king as opposed to a tyrant. Indeed, it is just the point of the Letters that it should document Plato speaking and acting in such a way as to contradict the most dangerous rumors that might arise. Since the Letters contains no explicit indication that it is anything but a somewhat disorganized sheaf of letters, and especially because Plato makes such a fuss in Letter Two (and elsewhere; 359e1–2, 363b1–6) about the contents being a matter of secrecy, the reader of the Letters will get the impression that these are private and candid communications from Plato to his associates. Our exploration of the Letters has revealed, however, that Plato is merely adopting a posture of candor in this text. One is tempted to say that Plato speaks in the Letters as a man who has arranged for his own telephone to be wiretapped without letting on to the eavesdroppers that he knows they are listening. A man who publicly defends himself in writing against slander and rumor will be suspected of distorting the facts in his own favor. He stands a better chance of winning the trust and favor of his judges if his private correspondence concerning the very matters in which he requires a defense appears to exonerate him. In this way, Plato has created the Letters as an authorized source of biographical material without giving the impression of having significantly edited or redacted any details. Of course, the Letters differs in a crucial respect from the decoy conversation of a man who knows he is being spied on: for Plato not only writes “in character” to the addressees but also, in some cases, will give a small indication to the eavesdroppers themselves regarding the circumstances that brought him to be in need of a device such as the Letters, and the manner in which he tried to handle them.

To return to Plato’s condemnation of Dionysius’s greeting to Apollo, we find that Plato’s need to defend himself as the erstwhile tutor of Dionysius is driven especially by the tyrant’s regrettable lack of prudence or practical wisdom. The impious or hubristic manner in which Dionysius addressed Apollo at Delphi explains much about Plato’s efforts in Letter Two. We can see better now why he tried so hard to persuade Dionysius to take care to be reputed for piety and decency. What is more, we get yet another indication as to why Plato was so concerned to have Dionysius refrain from writing. For Dionysius’s manner of greeting Apollo might not have caused Plato any trouble had the tyrant not sent his inquiry, introduced by his impious and unseemly salutation, in a written letter, which was, predictably, read and exposed by his messengers. Nor is this the only important reference to writing in Letter Three. Before taking up the task of his “double apology,” Plato makes note of a rumor he has heard: it has been said that Dionysius, “or someone else” from his circle, has been adding to Plato’s “preludes to the laws,” which had been the object of Plato’s diligent work for a time in Syracuse. Plato responds dismissively, evincing confidence that “it will be clear which [parts are which] to those capable of discerning my style” (316a4–6). A discerning reader will be able to tell the difference between an authentic work of Plato and a forgery.

More to the point may be the alternative reading, made possible by Plato’s pregnant ambiguity: tois to emon ēthos dunamenois krinein may equally mean “to those capable of judging my character.” Plato’s moral character (ēthos) is to be distinguished from Dionysius’s. The danger represented by interpolation or addition to Plato’s text is therefore the danger of having Plato’s moral character besmirched, his reputation contaminated. It is precisely the danger of which we have been speaking—namely, that of Plato getting caught up in Dionysius’s reputation for immorality and impiety. Plato thus indicates to us the importance of coming to understand precisely what the difference was between him and Dionysius. And that is what makes Plato’s commentary on the salutation at the beginning of Letter Three so important. For Plato explains that he would never bid a human being, and certainly not a god, to do as Dionysius has bid Apollo: “a god, because I would be commanding against nature, for the divine lies far away from pleasure and pain,” “a human being, because pleasure and pain engender much harm, the pair of them begetting badness at learning, forgetfulness, imprudence, and hubris in the soul” (315c2–6). Thus Plato distinguishes himself from Dionysius in two ways: by his understanding of human things and by his understanding of divine things.

Regarding the human things, Plato distinguishes himself not only from Dionysius but from the general run of human beings. For it is common practice among human beings to greet each other with the word “rejoice” (Charmides 164d6–e5), and yet Plato thinks that with this greeting people fail to bid each other to obtain what is best for them. Pleasure is not simply the good, nor is pain simply the bad (though it is bad). Each must be evaluated according to its utility in fostering intellectual virtue, and both pleasure and pain are found to be positively harmful when measured by this standard. But it does not seem as though the intellectual virtues to which Plato points—aptitude for learning, a good memory, prudence, and either moderation or piety depending on how we understand “hubris”—can by themselves constitute the human good. They are mainly means to doing or learning other things well. Surely the human good cannot be indifferent to what things are learned or done by means of intellectual virtue (consider Republic 504a4–506a7).

But if Dionysius’s view of the good is implicitly reflected, as the many’s view of the good may be thought to be reflected, in the use of the greeting “rejoice” (see Republic 357b6–8a7, 586a1–b6; Protagoras 352b2–357e8), Plato’s alternative greeting does little to clarify his own considered opinion. Eu prattein is deliberately ambiguous: does it mean “do well” or “do good”? Is the ambiguity a sign of Plato’s humility in the face of the difficulty of the question of the human good (cf. Second Alcibiades 142e1–143a5)? Or does it rather direct us toward a consideration of the relationship between the two readings: prosperity and fulfillment on one hand, and selfless dedication to the demands of moral virtue on the other (Alcibiades 116b2–d6)? At any rate, the only sense in which Plato’s customary greeting can be said to prompt us to employ our intellectual virtue toward any particular end is that the greeting itself poses a riddle that demands our careful thought and attention (cf. Apology of Socrates 21d4–6 with Symposium 204d8–e7).

What is surprising about the terms in which Plato condemns Dionysius’s greeting to Apollo, however, is that, while Plato’s denigration of pleasure seems to entail a fortiori a rejection of “a tyrant’s life of having pleasure,” he makes no explicit reference to, does not explicitly condemn, tyranny itself. If the goodness of pleasure and pain must be considered only in relation to the good of the soul, must not tyranny, on its own terms, be measured by the same standard (cf. Republic 586e6–587b10 with Symposium 204a8–b4, 205d1–8)? This same observation is relevant to the manner in which Plato distinguishes himself from Dionysius with regard to his understanding of divine things. Dionysius’s greeting to Apollo was ambiguous: one might suppose that the he was asking the god to preserve the life of pleasure for human tyrants such as himself; but Plato draws our attention to the other reading—namely, that Dionysius bids Apollo himself to continue living a tyrant’s life. The grounds on which Plato criticizes greeting a god in this way imply that he possesses some substantial theological knowledge. Not only is he able to say with confidence that “the divine lies far away from pleasure and pain,” but he claims that for a god to partake in pleasure would be “against nature.” According to Plato, gods are constrained by nature; knowledge of nature can indicate to us such limitations as may exist on the power of the gods. Plato’s silence on Dionysius’s reference to tyranny, then, is all the more striking when it comes to what Plato has to say about the divine. Is it against nature that a god should be a tyrant? Again, if the tyrant’s life is necessarily a life of pleasure, then it is a fortiori against nature for a god to be a tyrant in Plato’s account. Plato’s theological knowledge cannot be complete without some knowledge of what characterizes tyranny—that is, without some political knowledge or political science.

What can Dionysius himself have had in mind by suggesting that Apollo either might endorse or partake in tyranny? In the Charmides, Critias, a future tyrant, claims that the famous Delphic inscription “Know thyself”—which effectively means nothing other than “be moderate” according to Critias’s definition of moderation—is a greeting rather than a counsel, and implies that it would be incorrect for Apollo to greet those entering the temple by exhorting them to “rejoice” rather than to “be moderate.” “Thus, the god,” Critias says, “greets those entering the temple somewhat differently than [do] the human beings” (164e3–4). Dionysius, an actual tyrant, greets Apollo as though he were a human being, bidding him, not to be moderate, but to endorse tyrannical excess. This is not to say that Dionysius does not believe in the existence or divinity of Apollo. The fact that he sent a delegation to Delphi indicates his belief that he has something to gain therefrom. Indeed, this belief is connected to his manner of addressing the god. For it is not at all clear whether the Platonic god who partakes neither of pleasure nor of pain will have cause or power to be moved by prayer and sacrifice or that he will be concerned in the slightest with honor. Dionysius appears to believe that a god who can be propitiated, whose providence can be won, must share the disposition and outlook of a human tyrant. Plato no longer seems particularly hopeful that he can educate Dionysius (315c5–7).

The comparison of Plato’s and Dionysius’s modes of address at the beginning of Letter Three has shed some helpful light on the subject of Plato’s education of Dionysius. We can now see more clearly that there are some subjects of education that the Letters must treat with particular sensitivity: it is critical that Plato not be seen as having been responsible for Dionysius’s troubling attitudes toward the gods and toward the tyrannical life. Hence, we must next strive to clarify what influence Plato had on Dionysius’s thinking regarding, on one hand, theology, and on the other hand, tyranny.

Plato, Dionysius, and the Gods

Insofar as Letter Three reminds us of Plato’s Apology of Socrates, we are led to consider the danger that Plato might himself be charged with the capital crimes with which Socrates was charged—impiety and the corruption of young students, to put them briefly. We recall that, in referring to Socrates’s trial in Letter Seven, Plato refers only to the former charge (325c1–2). We will begin, then, with that: Is Plato guilty of having educated Dionysius to impiety? We have seen from the anecdote that appears at the beginning of Letter Three that Dionysius must have held some quite unconventional views of the Olympian gods.

Plato, for his part, will hardly be suspected of being an orthodox believer in the Olympian gods. One need only read his Socrates’s critique of the poets’ depictions of the gods in book 2 of the Republic, and subsequent description of the true god, to recognize that Plato was at least open to questioning theological views common among the Greeks. The Letters does nothing to contradict that impression. Plato presents himself as a believer in divinity, but one whose idea of the divine does not hew closely to Greek religion typically understood—we have gathered this much from his opining that the story of Zeus and Prometheus was concocted by “the first human beings” (311b2–4). The Letters contains only one oath sworn in direct discourse; it is Plato’s totally unspecific oath, “by the gods” (349b6; cf. 350b7–8). Plato’s indications (in Letters Two and Six) that philosophy reveals the great, sovereign god of the cosmos do not specifically preclude the possibility that this god is, say, Zeus, but neither does Plato invite that interpretation in any way. The Letters consistently suggests that true (i.e., Platonic) philosophy is equivalent to true piety because it discloses true knowledge of the divine, which is not necessarily compatible with the stories of Homer and Hesiod.

To be thorough, we should note the three places where Plato invokes Zeus by name in some way. All are in Letter Seven, the letter that is most explicitly composed as an “open” letter. In the first instance, Plato says that by agreeing to go to Syracuse after Dionysius took the throne, he “both liberated” or “acquitted [him]self in relation to Zeus Xenios and rendered the philosopher’s part unimpeachable” (329b3–5). In this case, Plato’s relationship with Zeus is effectively adversarial; Zeus represents a danger or threat, which Plato seeks to escape. Plato forestalls any possible charge of having failed in his pious duty of xenia toward Dion, and it is precisely in doing this that he serves the reputation of philosophy. We may note conditionally that, if service to philosophy is Plato’s highest end, then “liberation” from Zeus Xenios could refer to the establishment of the philosopher’s reputation for piety among pious human beings, rather than the evasion of divine punishment. In any case, Plato’s concern with Zeus here pertains only to the possibility of suffering retribution; he does not suggest that pious service to Zeus is a form of moral virtue that perfects the soul.

Plato’s final invocation of Zeus in Letter Seven also points to the question of the goodness of piety. It comes as an expression of incredulity at the notion that Dionysius might have come to a genuine understanding of Platonic philosophy from their “single intercourse”: “how that ever came to be, ‘Zeus knows,’ as the Theban says” (345a2–3). The only other appearance of this Theban phrase is in Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates’s Theban companion, Cebes, utters it with a laugh in response to Socrates’s paradox concerning piety: If it is better for some to be dead than alive, then why in such cases would piety forbid suicide (62a1–9)? Can it be that piety requires one to do what reason teaches is imprudent and bad for oneself? Plato cannot dispose of the possibility that Dionysius was granted an understanding of Platonic philosophy through some act of divine providence; but if such gods exist, their concern with human beings is instrumental to their own ends and not for the sake of human fulfillment or prosperity as an end in itself (see Phaedo 62b1–9).

It is Plato’s second invocation of Zeus that pertains directly to Plato’s actual education of Dionysius. In Letter Seven’s first digression, Plato repeatedly compares his present counsel to the comrades and intimates of Dion to the past counsel he and Dion had jointly been giving to Dionysius (331d6–7, 332c6–7, 333a5–7, 334c3–4). Plato says that his advice in this letter makes the third time he is giving “the same counsel and the same speech,” which culminates in the conclusion that those who unscrupulously pursue political gain are “the small and illiberal characters among souls,” who know “nothing of the good and just things, both divine and human, in the future and the present propitious moment” (334c4–d5). Plato says that he “undertook first to persuade Dion [of these things], second Dionysius, and third now” his addressees, begging these last to “be persuaded . . . for the sake of Zeus Third Savior” (334d5–7). This is, then, a very traditional, even somewhat superstitious invocation of Zeus: the third time is the charm, and may Zeus Savior rescue the Syracusans from their plight. Of course, the intervention of Zeus is said here to depend on Dion’s comrades’ obedience to Plato (cf. 340a3–b1, 353b4–7).

That of which they must be persuaded is, then, the moral-political principle in which Dion strongly believed. In Dion’s view, philosophy means the acquisition of knowledge of “the good and just things, both divine and human,” and it teaches us how to behave in politics, at every moment and with a view to the future. Specifically, it teaches that it is the great, liberal, just soul, never the avaricious lover of pleasure, money, and vengeance, who procures the good for himself and for his community. Dion, of course, was persuaded by and obedient to Plato and his teaching on these points, while Dionysius never was (334d8–e9, 335c2). But even in writing to Dion’s followers, Plato must explain himself further if he is to succeed in promoting the point of view adopted by Dion. For one might well ask how Dion’s observance of these purportedly Platonic principles has benefited Dion and his city when Dion’s actions have brought about the horrors of civil war in Syracuse and led to his assassination, while Dionysius still lives in the hope of regaining his throne.

Plato therefore elaborates upon the correctness of the path chosen and followed by Dion and eschewed by Dionysius. Dion, he says, has died nobly, since he “aim[ed] at the noblest things, for both [him]self and [his] city,” while Dionysius “lives but not nobly” (334d8–e3). Plato implies that not even the badness of death can outweigh the importance and choice-worthiness of the noble. The corollary of this, which Plato states, is that eternal life would not by itself make us happy—contrary, as he says, to the opinion of “the many” (334e4–5). The position represented by the tyrant Dionysius is thus associated with the common opinion of the many: that death is the ultimate evil and pleasure the ultimate good. But by what rational argument does Plato profess to be able to defend the Dionean alternative against the tyrannical view shared by Dionysius and the many? Given Dion’s manifest failure to bring prosperity to himself or to Syracuse during his life, it seems Plato must demonstrate that the soul persists after death, “for no bad or good worthy of account belongs to the soulless, but this will turn out to belong to each soul, either while it is with a body or after it has been separated” (334e5–335a2).

In fact, Plato fails to offer any rational argument to support the idea that Dion is better off in death than Dionysius is in life. Instead, Plato’s attempt to persuade the intimates and comrades of Dion to follow their leader’s example despite his recent, grisly demise now turns to an appeal to religious authority: “One really always ought to be persuaded by the ancient and sacred speeches” (335a2–4). These speeches, as Plato explains at length, “reveal to us” not only that our souls are immortal, but that they are judged and punished according to the sins we have committed in life, “wherefore ought one to believe that it is a smaller evil to suffer even the great sins and injustices than to do them” (335a5–7). It is helpful to recognize that this, according to Plato, is a part of the teaching with which he persuaded Dion. Dionysius, for his part, did not buy it. And while Plato indicates that the tyrant is worse off for having failed to be persuaded on this score, since “one really always ought to be” so persuaded, Dionysius’s resistance to accepting what can only be known through hearsay speaks in his favor, intellectually. After all, Plato’s lesson here is hardly unproblematic: the old religious dogmas that teach “that the soul is deathless” stand in need of some reconciliation with Plato’s own claim that no one is “naturally deathless.”

The last piece of evidence for us to consider regarding Plato’s education of Dionysius regarding piety comes in Letter Two, where Plato does offer something that sounds more like a reasoned argument for the immortality of the soul. Plato is concerned to show that the exemplars of phronēsis and dunamis he has cited “would very seriously strive to be better spoken of than they are now,” if only they could (311d3–5), in order to persuade Dionysius that “it is necessary, as is likely, for [Plato and Dionysius] to care about the time to come” (311c3–4). Plato explains this necessity by reference to “a certain nature,” according to which “the most servile” human beings neglect the matter of their post-humous reputations, “while the most decent do everything in such a way that, in the time to come, they will hear” people speaking well of them. From this, Plato dares to draw the inference “that those who have died have some perception of the things here; for the best souls divine that these things are so, while the most depraved ones don’t say so, but the divinations of the divine men are more authoritative than those of the men who aren’t” (311c3–d3). Plato’s principle, then, is to imitate “the most decent” (epieikestatoi), to whom he also refers as “the best souls,” and “the divine men.” That is, Plato speaks as if it were evident that the correct models of prudent behavior, that is, “the best souls,” are the most decent ones, and moreover that their behavior is indicative of some crucial revealed wisdom without which we could not hope to guide our lives aright.

It would seem, then, that in the wake of his impious implication concerning the origin of knowledge about Zeus and Prometheus in Letter Two, Plato puts himself in the camp of Polyidus as opposed to Thales and counsels Dionysius accordingly. Or at least, this might be our conclusion but for one important detail: Plato does not claim to receive the divinations himself. He claims only to interpret the behavior and utterances of others, evaluating them as “evidence” (tekmērion). His interpretation indicates that he has made some important observations about the relationship between decency and piety. He has noticed that the most decent, whose concern to protect their posthumous reputations suggests that they anticipate being able to be benefit from their present labors after they are dead, are also the ones who profess to have divined that they will indeed still be able to learn of the state of their reputation after death. Plato’s interpretation of the evidence suggests that the most decent, perhaps not always consciously but consistently, act on the basis of revealed knowledge about the fate of the human soul, and that this is the well-grounded and well-calculated justification for the sacrifices they are willing to make to ensure their posthumous glory.

This is not the only conceivable interpretation of the evidence Plato examines. But it is the interpretation Plato presents in this context, advancing it as evidence for sensation—or at least hearing—after death, in order to support his plea for Dionysius to concern himself with what will be said about him in the distant future. Plato does not present himself as a Polyidus or a Tiresias, then, since he possesses no special access to divine revelation. But neither is he a debunking Anaxagoras—at least that is our impression from the counsel he now gives. Plato has taken the position that moral decency is the surest way to a happy afterlife on account of the good repute one earns thereby. It is at this moment, at the spiritual and moral high point of his self-presentation so far, that Plato introduces to the Letters two central themes that will remain closely linked throughout: philosophy and piety. Assuring Dionysius that, “to speak with god,” they can yet “correct” anything that has occurred ignobly between them, Plato finally clarifies what seems to be his guiding principle: “I myself say that opinion and speech about the true philosophy will be better if we are decent, but if we are petty, the opposite. And in fact, about this thing, we could act no more piously than to take care, nor more impiously than to be careless” (311d8–e4).

The importance Plato accords to the matter of his own reputation, and thereby to his own afterlife, here becomes somewhat unclear by the suggestion that he is, and is attempting to make Dionysius into, a pious apostle of philosophy. That is, Plato’s concern to promote good “opinion and speech about the true philosophy” now appears to be the determining factor in his adherence to the principles of decency. The best souls or divine men are decent because they sense that their reputations will determine the quality of their afterlives, but the most pious course of action adheres to decency for a more selfless reason: dedication to the reputation of Philosophy. There is some reason to think that the phrase “to speak with god” in this passage is a Platonic euphemism indicating his doubt that what he proposes is likely to turn out. Apart from this instance, the phrase appears twice more in the Letters, both in the short Letter Four to Dion (320b3, c7), where it is clear that the hopes Plato expresses are in vain. But Plato’s double use of the phrase in his letter to Dion, compared with his single use in the longer letter to Dionysius, is a reminder that Plato’s education of Dion, and their subsequent relationship, took a very different course than his education of Dionysius.

We are left, at any rate, with the impression that Dionysius presented stouter resistance against the portions of Plato’s moral education calling for religious leaps of faith. That Plato had a heterodox religious teaching is obvious—if one means that he was impious in this sense, one may have the point. But it seems likely that Plato never presented Dionysius with any atheistic teaching, or with any teaching that explicitly opposed decent moral behavior (cf. Apology of Socrates 26b8ff.). It is conceivable, however, that the process of considering and attending to Plato’s theological teaching served to hone Dionysius’s awareness of some critical difficulties in moral philosophy. That his concern about these difficulties may have deepened with time, even after Plato’s departure, is suggested by the second half of Letter Two.

Plato, Dionysius, and Politics

Connected to the question whether Plato taught Dionysius to challenge Greek religious dogmas is the question whether he corrupted his view of morality. More specifically, as we have already seen in regard to Dionysius’s greeting to Apollo at Delphi in Letter Three, the question is whether Plato encouraged Dionysius toward a greater embrace of tyranny. This proves to be a delicate matter. To begin with, we took note earlier of the curious fact that—in stark contrast to the thrust of Letter One—Plato’s firm rejection of Dionysius’s greeting to Apollo in Letter Three makes no reference at all to its implications about tyranny. The significance of this detail grows as the letter continues. Plato proceeds to lay out the latest slanderous accusations against him, which allege that he had prevented Dionysius from “coloniz[ing] the Greek cities in Sicily and . . . replacing the rule of tyranny with kingship” (315d1–3). Now, his “defense” against these slanders consists in a story, in which he and Dionysius discussed before two witnesses the reasons for which Plato had told him to delay in recolonizing the Greek cities—Plato had insisted that this must not be done before Dionysius had been educated (319a2–c3). Yet there is no reference in this defense to the matter of tyranny and kingship. In fact, neither tyranny nor kingship is mentioned anywhere in the letter after the initial statement of Dionysius’s accusation, until the charge is repeated, and once again decried as slanderous, in Plato’s closing statements (319c7–d2).

Thus does it turn out that the earlier slanders, which Plato himself brings in, are crucial with regard to the issue of tyranny. For those slanders alleged that Plato was responsible for certain unpopular political decisions made under Dionysius’s reign, referred to here as “errors” and in Letter One as “the more brutal things” (315e6, 309a4). But Plato’s defense against this charge in Letter Three mostly skirts the issue. For Plato rebuts these earlier slanders by telling the story of how he came to Dionysius’s court in the first place, stressing that his allegiance was always to Dion, that he always distrusted Dionysius, and that, once Dion was sent into exile, it was all Plato could do to “bid farewell to the political things” and “to attempt to make [Dionysius and Dion] friends with each other as much as possible” (316c3–e4ff.). But this means that the beginning of Plato’s account of events comes after the critical period in which he was actually involved in “the political things” at Syracuse. After all, he went as far in Letter One as to begin by saying that he had at some point “become most trusted of all in managing [Dionysius’s] rule” (309a1–2), and that he “often kept guard over [his] city as a ruler with full powers” (309b2–3). His retelling in Letter Three would seem to have cut out these crucial periods.

In fact, however, Plato does speak briefly to the time prior to Dion’s exile in the passage that precedes his “double apology” against the two sets of slanders: “I was voluntarily engaging in a few of the political things in common with you at the beginning, when I supposed I could do something more; I was taking seriously, in a measured way, some other, minor things and the preludes to the laws” (315e7–316a2). Although we cannot know in what “few political things” Plato was taking part with the tyrant, we must give some attention to the one thing he indicates more clearly: his work on “the preludes to the laws.” This refers to an important idea presented by the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws. In book 4, the Stranger suggests an innovation in lawgiving: the laws themselves should be preceded by “preludes” that will help render whoever is to be commanded by the laws “more tamely and favorably disposed,” to make him “more favorable and a better learner,” so that “the order, which indeed is the law, be received more favorably by the one to whom the lawgiver speaks the law, and, because of this favorableness, more in the manner of a good learner” (718d2–7, 723a4–7). This is said to add an element of persuasion to the violence or compulsion ordinarily employed as the law’s chief mechanism (718b2–4, 722b4–c2). The preludes to the laws are meant to usher the would-be citizen or subject by persuasion into a broad horizon of opinion concerning every matter of practical importance to human life in such a way as to prepare him willingly to take on the yoke of the new laws, with confidence that obedience to them will result in his greatest happiness (see 715e7–734e2)

It is in this same context that the Athenian Stranger makes one of his more shocking statements, and one that is directly relevant to the Letters. Just before explaining his idea of preludes for the laws, the Stranger asks his interlocutors to consider what someone who possesses the perfect art of legislation, a “lawgiver who has hold of the truth,” would pray to receive from the god for the sake of founding a city, namely, that which, “if it were present to him through fortune, he would need only the art” (709c5–d3). To Cleinias’s dismay, the Stranger reveals that the lawgiver would pray for “a tyrannized city,” since in “tracing out, by his own acting, everything” the subjects ought to do and not to do, “praising and honoring some things, laying censure upon others, and dishonoring the one who disobeys,” the tyrant can produce the quickest and easiest changes to the habits of those he rules; it is in a tyranny that the wise lawgiver can institute the necessary changes most quickly and easily (709e6, 711b4–d4).

Is it possible, then, that Plato had in mind to be a new legislator for Syracuse, with Dionysius as the partner through whom to implement the tyrannical but necessary political measures? Let it be said by way of clarification, if not quite in defense, of such a project, that, according to the Stranger in the Laws, tyranny is here merely a means and never itself the end. Thus the Stranger says that if the right tyrant should have the “good fortune” that there “come to be in his time a lawgiver worthy of praise, and that some fortune lead them to the same place . . . then nearly everything will have been achieved by the god, which [he does] whenever he should wish for a certain city to do surpassingly well” (710c7–d5). The end is a regime in which it is least possible for those occupying the ruling offices to rule in their own interest at the expense of the ruled, calling their own advantage “justice”; it is a regime in which the ruling offices will be filled by “servants of the laws,” so that the law “is master of the rulers and the rulers are slaves of the law”; the regime will in this way avoid the “ruin” that awaits any city in which the law is itself “ruled over” and thus “lacks sovereign authority” (713e3–715d6). The harshness of tyrannical government, it seems, is to serve as a means to the production of genuinely virtuous political ends.

The Stranger’s account of how this paradox may be resolved, however, casts new doubt on whether Plato’s misadventures in Syracuse could ever fit the bill of the ideal founding conditions described in the Laws. For it is not just any tyrant who is suitable for this purpose. Aside from having the good luck to fall in with the “lawgiver worthy of praise,” the tyrant will ideally be “young, having a good memory, a good learner, courageous, and magnificent by nature,” as well as possessing moderation in the sense of self-restraint (709d10–e8). And what is more, it will also be necessary that “a divine eros for moderate and just practices should come to be in” the ruler with whom the legislator is to collaborate, which the Stranger suggests will be particularly unlikely (711d6–7). Now, perhaps Plato believed that he could help to inspire this “divine eros” in Dionysius: “It is nothing amazing,” he says, “for a young human being, hearing about affairs worthy of account, if he is a good learner, to come to a passionate desire (erōta) for the best life” (Letters 339e3–5). If so, Dionysius’s reported greeting to the god at Delphi serves as evidence enough that Plato never succeeded in his task. But how should we evaluate Plato’s decision even to make the attempt, given how unlikely his prospects of success were sure to be? He has said that Dionysius was “very unknown” to him before he sailed to Syracuse (316d1). Could he reasonably have hoped for him to possess all the extraordinary virtues the young tyrant of the Laws must exemplify?

Even the account of the partnership between wise lawgiver and young tyrant in the Laws, then, casts doubt on the suggestion that such a partnership was Plato’s purpose in writing his “preludes to the laws” in the acropolis. That suggestion faces even greater difficulties once we begin to examine it in the light of other relevant passages from the Letters. What, for example, of Plato’s claim in Letter Seven that the “laws of a lawgiver” can never have been “the most serious things” to him, “if indeed he himself was serious” (344c4–7)? It is not impossible for this statement to accord with Plato’s saying in Letter Three that he was “taking seriously, in a measured way, . . . the preludes to the laws” (316a2–3), for perhaps this “measure” is exactly appropriate for a man for whom certain other things are “most serious.” Yet what this comparison brings to our attention is the failure of Letter Three to indicate what it was that Plato was most serious about.

Let us make this point by reference to the contrast between Letters Two and Three. Letter Two introduces the theme of philosophy to the Letters, and contains one of the most significant portraits of philosophic education in all of Plato’s writings; Letter Three scrupulously avoids mentioning philosophy at all (consider 319c4). This contrast—which makes the pair Two-Three akin to the pairs Five-Six and Ten-Eleven—is particularly significant when we recognize that Letter Three contains the fullest account of Plato’s activities in Syracuse outside of Letter Seven. How has Plato managed to narrate an account of his projects in Syracuse without reference to philosophy? Consider especially the relevant statement from Letter Two: “I myself came to Sicily with a reputation of being quite distinguished among those in philosophy; and I wished, by coming to Syracuse, to get you as a fellow-witness in order that, through me, philosophy would be honored even among the multitude” (311e5–312a2). Moreover, in Letter Seven, of course, Plato says that he took his first visit to Sicily (during the reign of Dionysius the Elder), with his doctrine of philosophic rule in mind (326a7–b5). The account of Letter Three, in which the whole of Plato’s activity in Syracuse is said to have been for the sake of his loyalty to Dion, is at the very least misleading. We cannot have a full picture of his political activities there without understanding the place of philosophy in his intentions. And yet, the evidence continues to mount that Plato makes a point of keeping his discussions of his philosophizing separate from his discussions of his involvement in political action.

A couple of passages help to clarify the difficulty we face in determining Plato’s political influence on Dionysius’s regime. In the first digression of Letter Seven, Plato describes the counsel that he and Dion jointly gave to Dionysius (331d6–7, 332c6–7). This, then, is the only place in the Letters where Plato describes the critical time before Dion’s exile (apart from his saying in Letter Three that he was involved in some political things and was writing the preludes to the laws). Moreover, the fact that Dion and Plato in this vignette jointly counsel Dionysius reminds of Letter Eight, in which Plato describes his and Dion’s common counsel to the friends of Dion in Syracuse (355a3). But as we saw in Letter Eight, this means that Plato’s own thoughts and intentions are blurred in their mixture with Dion’s less coherent understanding. The joint counsel to Dionysius described in Letter Seven, then, accords more or less with the story in Letter Three: Plato and Dion counseled Dionysius to take up an education in virtue before undertaking any serious political activity, promising that, if he did, he could succeed where his father had failed, recolonizing the Greek cities of Sicily (332c2–333a5). What stands out in this account to Dion’s followers in Letter Seven, as opposed to the account written to Dionysius himself in Letter Three, is Plato’s indication that he and Dion were “speaking in riddles,” “for it was not safe” to speak clearly about the tyrant’s need to acquire virtue (332d5–7; cf. 319c4–6): the hope they held out to him about recolonizing the Greek cities of Sicily was something of a ruse (332d7–e4). In other words, the account in Letter Seven gives some credence to Dionysius’s accusation in Letter Three: Dion and Plato were misleading him, and this may explain why he was so confused about the education he was supposed to receive (in “geometry,” for example) before actualizing his political vision (319b7–c2).

It is possible that Dionysius’s confusion was, in its own way, a further product of the complication involved for Plato in having to work and counsel jointly with Dion, whose hopes for the power of Platonic philosophy were always exorbitant. Dion envisioned the realization of philosophic rule in Syracuse (327e3–328b1), while Plato must have been deeply skeptical (326b6–d6). Perhaps it was at Plato’s urging that he and Dion agreed to avoid broadcasting this vision—there is evidence throughout the Letters that Plato was hesitant to speak openly during Dion’s life about what Dion had in mind for Dionysius (cf. 320c5 with 319c4–6, 332d5–7)—since Plato knew better than Dion that the hyperbolic flights of fancy to be found in the Platonic writings contain much besides the solid core of his understanding, and are likely to arouse derision more than anything else (314a2–7, 327b4–6, 328d1–2). There is a place in the Letters, however, where we are made privy to more mundane examples of political counsel offered by Plato to Dionysius—Dion, in this case, not being involved. The final section of Letter Two is something like a postscript: it comes after he bids Dionysius to “be strong” (erroso)—the same valedictory phrase with which he closes Letters One and Ten (310b1, 358c7)—and to burn the letter after reading it many times (314c4–6). In this final section or postscript, then, which comes to serve as a kind of connective tissue between the philosophic Letter Two and the political Letter Three, Plato advises Dionysius on a motley host of issues.

The strangeness of this section of Letter Two is not so well described by saying that the matters in it are prosaic as that they are discussed perfunctorily and without context, so that their import is somewhat difficult to ascertain. And yet, this brief and difficult passage does provide some important information. We can begin by breaking it down into four sections. First, Plato discusses a group of men, naming Polyxenus and Lycophron in particular—intellectuals it seems, sophists perhaps—whom he has sent to spend time at the court of Dionysius (314c7–d7). Plato flatters the tyrant by assuring him that he “altogether surpass[es] them, both in nature and in method concerning speeches”; he approvingly acknowledges the gifts Dionysius has given them; and he finally suggests that Dionysius should not pay them too much mind. Second, Plato takes up an issue concerning a man named Philistion—known to us from much later texts as a physician influential in the history of ancient medicine—whose return to Athens Plato requests on behalf of Speusippus (314e1–4). This matter is touchier than the first; Plato must vouch for Philistion, assuring Dionysius that the doctor will not simply flee if allowed to leave. We here catch a glint of the genuinely tyrannical character of Dionysius’s reign. We catch another in the third section (314e4–315a2). Plato commends Dionysius for releasing an unnamed man from confinement; he seems to acquiesce, however, to the necessity of treating more severely some other characters in the case. To judge him harshly, we could say that Plato thus condones brutal tyrannical measures; more charitably, we would say that he is doing his best to influence Dionysius to rule with as much justice and humanity as possible. In any case, Plato is here involved in life-or-death matters of individual subjects accused of injustice, such as every regime must deal with prolifically. Finally, Plato singles out one man for special commendation (315a2–5). Someone named Lysiclides is deserving of favor and recognition for continuously speaking in the best possible terms of the relationship between Plato and Dionysius. Here the main concern of the letter reappears.

What we get from this section, then, is a snapshot of the relationship between the two men with emphasis on two features, or rather, on the manner in which these two features are intertwined. The first feature of their relationship stressed here is the traffic back and forth between them of Platonic companions. The gifts some of them have received from Dionysius remind us of the benefits available to such men in such circumstances. And the reference to Speusippus reminds us, much more directly than we are used to in the Letters, of the Academy back in Athens and of the weight of Plato’s responsibility to care for his friends and students there. The second feature stressed, however, is the danger, in which Plato is constantly involved, of dealing with a tyrant. At least one man important to Plato and Speusippus, namely, Philistion, seems to be trapped in Syracuse—much as Plato himself had been, and more than once (329d1–330a2, 347c6–348a4). Plato tries to extricate him from the tyrant’s clutches; the gravity of the situation is highlighted by the discussions of the rock quarries (used as prisons) and of the unfortunate Hegesippus. Inevitably, not only counsel must be provided to the tyrant, but also flattery. And all the while, it is critically important that the public perception of Plato’s relationship with Dionysius remain consistent with the image of Platonic philosophy Plato wants to promote. Long after any dream of philosophic rule in Syracuse has dissipated for even the most hopeful observer, Plato persists in fostering Dionysius’s interest in philosophy (cf. 330b4–6). It is all for the sake of his own philosophic companions and associates, who stand to gain from an open invitation to live and work under the tyrant’s patronage.

But does this final section of Letter Two not also suggest that there were significant dangers involved for Plato’s friends who went to Syracuse? What would have been the appeal for a Platonic associate to leave life in democratic Athens for the perils of the tyrant’s court? In answer to these questions, we may at least begin by adducing the fate of Socrates as evidence enough that the Athenians were no guarantors of safety for philosophers in Plato’s time. The focus of the final sections of our exploration of the Letters, then, will be Plato’s attempts to foster a stable and stimulating environment for intellectual life under Dionysius’s reign. As we will now see, the character in the Letters whose relationship to Plato is most of all connected to Plato’s hope to nurture the life of philosophy in Syracuse is Archytas of Tarentum.

Archytas and the Meaning of Plato’s Third Visit

The character of Archytas is introduced just after the midway point of Letter Seven, which is to say the midway point of the entire Letters. It is the point at which Letter Seven’s first digression, which contains Plato’s counsel to Dion’s followers, ends and gives way to the continued narration of Plato’s history with Dionysius the Younger. It is significant for our thinking about Archytas that Plato indicates a shift in the audience for whom he is writing at this point in Letter Seven. The first digression, which ends here, has resulted from Plato’s insistence that his counsel to Dion’s followers not be put off as a peripheral matter. Before beginning that digression, however, Plato promised that, once he was done providing his counsel to the Syracusans, he would return to “go through thoroughly” “how many things [Plato] did,” and why he did them, on his final journey to Syracuse, to show “that they were appropriate and just,” and that he would do all this “for the sake of those repeatedly asking what indeed [he] was wishing when [he] went” (330c3–7). Thus Plato has told us that the whole second half of Letter Seven, which he begins by addressing anyone “who cares” that “the later journey and sailing came to pass at once appropriately and harmoniously” (337e4–6), is written for a different audience from the first half. This second audience “asks repeatedly” about the justice and appropriateness of Plato’s final journey (cf. Republic 519d8–9); they are not so interested in Plato’s political counsel regarding the contemporary situation in Syracuse as they are perplexed by Plato’s decision to return yet again to the tyrant’s court. Comparing the second digression to the first, we might say that the second audience is more interested in philosophy than politics. In Letter Seven, it is only the second digression that presents philosophy as an activity of critical questioning.

The second half of Letter Seven begins with the story of Plato’s being urged, from many quarters, to return to Syracuse. This story is a good example of the contrast between Plato’s narratives in Letters Three and Seven, as the version in Letter Three is full of holes on account of that letter’s abstention from any mention of philosophy. In Letter Three, we hear that Plato, a year after declining an initial invitation to return, began receiving heaps of letters from Italy and Sicily encouraging him to change his mind and accept, and that Dion himself, and many others, added their voices to that chorus. In this version, the only explanation Plato offers for their zeal is to say that Dionysius had vaguely threatened to confiscate all of Dion’s property—and this indeed is what Plato claims swayed him in the end (317a5–e1). In Letter Seven, however, we learn what was really behind the great push for Plato to return to Syracuse when he tells us that “word from Sicily was spreading far that Dionysius had at present returned amazingly to a desire for philosophy” (338b5–7). Here Plato reveals that his reticence to accept Dionysius’s initial invitation was not truly in protest of the terms of the invitation being unfavorable to Dion (cf. 317a5–8); nor was it that Plato dismissed the reports about Dionysius and philosophy as obviously or necessarily false, since he “had surely known many such things to come to pass for the young with respect to philosophy.” Rather, Plato says in Letter Seven that it “seemed to [him] safer . . . to bid a great farewell to both Dion and Dionysius” (338b8–c3). In this telling, then, Plato’s loyalty to Dion was not a determining factor in his decision-making at this point; he simply did not believe anything worthwhile could be achieved in going back to Syracuse (cf. 322b5–c1).

In the sequence of events reported in Letter Three, Plato’s rebuffing of the initial invitation is followed immediately by his receipt of a letter from Dionysius one year later with a threat against Dion’s property. That same letter is indeed described and even quoted in Letter Seven (with the salutation discreetly redacted; cf. 339c1–2 with 315b4–6, 327b5). But in Letter Seven, there is a substantial passage that intervenes between his initial rejection of Dionysius’s invitation and his receipt of the letter a year later. In this intervening passage, Plato describes a crucial event that took place in Syracuse during that year, an event not mentioned in Letter Three: the arrival in Syracuse of Archytas, a famed statesman and Pythagorean philosopher and mathematician, whose guest-friendship with Dionysius had been arranged by Plato prior to his previous departure (338c5–d1). Archytas’s arrival coincided with an explosion of interest in philosophy in the city. And while much of the philosophic discussion with which the city was abuzz was confused or misguided because it built upon older misunderstandings spread by Dion (338d1–4), it was nonetheless this cultural development in Syracuse that brought Dionysius to desire to be honored for his privileged relationship to the great master himself. It was that concern for honor on Dionysius’s part, in Plato’s estimation, that genuinely sparked the tyrant’s desire to have Plato return (338d4–339a3).

When Plato describes his decision at last to relent from his refusal to go back to Syracuse in Letter Seven, he gives the following account of his reasoning: “Yet again the same speech was coming, that there was a need [for me] not to betray Dion, nor my guest-friends and comrades in Tarentum; and lurking beneath this for me was that it is nothing amazing for a young human being, hearing about affairs worthy of account, if he is a good learner, to come to a passionate desire for the best life” (339e1–5). Of the three considerations presented here, the first and third—loyalty to Dion and the possibility of a change in Dionysius—were said explicitly to have been insufficient to move him the previous year. The only thing that has changed is the addition of consideration for Archytas. The letters from Italy and Sicily of which we heard in Letter Three are revealed in Letter Seven to have been “from Archytas and those in Tarentum,” who warned that, if Plato “did not go now, [he] would be altogether rending apart their friendship with Dionysius, which . . . was no small matter with respect to the political things” (339d1–5). For Plato to cut ties with Dionysius would be to undermine whatever grounds he had given the tyrant for believing that the relationship with Archytas was worthwhile. Archytas and his friends, Pythagorean philosophers, had found a home at the Syracusan court and were successfully cultivating active interest in philosophy there. It was to avoid jeopardizing them and their work that Plato once more “veiled” himself (340a2) and set out from home “for the third time into the strait by Scylla” and “destructive Charybdis” (345d8–e2).

Our thesis about the centrality of Archytas in Plato’s decision to make his third and final journey to Syracuse is confirmed by the presence of Letters Nine and Twelve, each addressed to “Archytas the Tarentine.” In this alone, Archytas is already doubly distinguished among addressees in the Letters: he is the only named recipient apart from Dionysius himself to have more than one letter dedicated to him, and he is the only one apart from Dion, to this point in the book, to have his demonym included as part of his address. His being likened both to Dion and to Dionysius, even if only in these superficial ways, is appropriate, as we learn immediately in Letter Nine. For Archytas is both an eminent statesman devoted to his fatherland and a man with aptitude and affinity for philosophy. Archytas is the closest thing we find in the Letters to a philosopher-ruler.

Letter Nine, however, demonstrates with great clarity how far below the ideal this reality lies. The occasion for this letter is the successful completion of some unspecified business between Plato and Archytas in Athens, at least part of which was political in nature: “the matters concerning the city,” Plato reports, were taken care of “without difficulty—for it was not altogether laborious” (357e2–3). The political affairs in which Archytas is involved are presented, in this respect, as not particularly challenging. It is not Archytas himself, however, who came to Athens for this purpose—otherwise there should have been no letter at all—but his proxies, some men affiliated with Archippus and Philonides, two men whom we may suppose, on the basis of much later accounts, to have been Pythagorean philosophers close to Archytas. The reason for Archytas’s sending proxies rather than coming to Plato in person is evident from what Plato says he has heard about Archytas’s situation—namely, that Archytas suffers from “the lack of leisure” that comes with attending always to “the common things,” that is, the affairs of the community (357e4–5). The political things may not always be challenging, but they are constantly demanding. Plato expresses his sympathy on this point; in contrast to “the common things,” Plato identifies the doing of “one’s own thing” as “the most pleasant thing in life,” “especially,” he specifies, “if someone should choose to do things of such a sort” as Archytas has (357e6–358a1). The political life is mainly tedium, especially for the philosopher.

Plato offers some words of consolation and encouragement to Archytas in the form of a twofold argument against giving up his office. The first is, so to speak, a moral argument: “it is not only for oneself that each of us has been born,” Plato reminds his friend, but also for one’s fatherland, one’s parents, one’s friends, and the other “propitious moments that overtake our life” (358a2–6). Without the individuals and communities who give birth to us and sustain us, who provide us with access to daily necessities, who protect us and allow our lives to contain more than mere life, we could not exist. Plato speaks to the debt of obligation we seem to ourselves to incur by our reliance on these other human beings, and encourages Archytas to remember that one can claim no right to live life for oneself alone. His second point, however, is less deontological and more consequentialist: “When the fatherland itself calls one to the common things, perhaps it is strange not to hearken; for that . . . leave[s] a space for paltry human beings, who do not proceed from the best [motive] to the common things” (358a6–b3; cf. Republic 347a10–c5).

Some light is shed here on Plato’s own political activities. Plato’s attainment to a position of fame and influence as a philosopher has brought him to a position of unique opportunity to help and protect his own community, including the community of philosophic friends he has fostered in Athens (cf. 311e5–312a2, 347e6–7). To let pass this opportunity for the sake of doing his “own thing,” much as this would have been safer and more pleasant, would have been to allow a need felt by Plato and his friends to go unmet. Moreover, Plato would thus have left to others the tasks of demonstrating and of reporting, to the world and to posterity, what happens when one attempts to bring together philosophy and political power according to the vision of his Republic (see Letters 328b8–c2). Plato’s presentation of his own political undertakings in the Letters, even when, through its mixture of tragedy and farce, the Letters may portray him as imprudent or bumbling, is, from Plato’s own point of view, the best possible version of such a presentation (see 341d2–4). The first letter to Archytas admits that the suspension of philosophic activity for the sake of political activity may present itself in some cases as a necessary evil. This theme quietly pervades the Letters from its very first words: the opening phrase to Dionysius, “after I had been occupied for such a long time with you,” brings to our attention the strangeness of Plato leaving behind his own “occupations, which were not indecorous, [to go live] under a tyranny that didn’t seem to be fitting with respect to [his] things or to [him]” (309a1, 329b1–3).

The second letter to Archytas, Letter Twelve, is an understated reminder of that for the sake of which all this has been done. Plato refers to texts, which he calls “reminders” (cf. Phaedrus 276d3, 278a1), that he and his associates have been delighted to receive from Archytas (Letters 359c6–d1). Their admiration for the author of these texts—possibly Archytas himself, though we cannot be sure of this from what Plato says in the letter—has led them to declare him a worthy heir to the legacy of his ancient ancestors, “good men” who were said to have been expelled from Troy in connection with the gross and hubristic impiety of the king Laomedon against Zeus and Poseidon (359d1–6). Plato also responds to Archytas’s inquiry concerning Plato’s own “reminders.” Plato says that they are “not yet in sufficient condition,” but has sent them anyway in their unfinished state (359d6–7). There is nothing here of Plato’s concern that “it is not possible for things written not to be exposed,” and Plato makes no request that Archytas burn this letter or his unfinished drafts (314c1–6). The reason for his confidence is clear: “Concerning the guarding, the both of us are in accord, so that there is no need for encouraging” (359e1–2). Plato and Archytas share an understanding of the need for discretion. As opposed to the lengthy Letter Two, which is presented in full despite Plato’s instruction to burn after reading, Letter Twelve survives only as this tiny, enigmatic note. Plato’s unfinished drafts referred to in this letter were never exposed.

Plato’s Surprise Twist Ending

There is a remarkable parallel between the postscript to Letter Two and the whole of Letter Thirteen. To state this formulaically, we could say that the final section of Letter Two is to that letter as Letter Thirteen is to the entire Letters. The postscript of Letter Two is preceded by Plato’s bizarre disavowal of authorship for all the supposed Platonic writings, not excluding the very letter in which that disavowal is expressed; Letter Thirteen is headed by a bizarre note disclaiming Plato’s authorship of that letter in particular. The postscript of Letter Two stands in jarring contrast to the letter to which it is appended, moving suddenly from lofty philosophic subjects to a hodgepodge of quotidian matters; Letter Thirteen is teeming with statements and implications about the transaction of Plato’s business with Dionysius that clash scandalously with impressions left by the preceding letters. These are also the only two places in the Letters where we find mention of Speusippus.

It is not difficult, then, to imagine reasons why the note “It is denied that this is by Plato” would have been appended to the beginning of this letter (359e3). The shocks begin even in the salutation: Plato addresses Dionysius, for the only time, as “tyrant of Syracuse,” bidding him, as usual, to “do well,” without a whiff of condemnation (360a1–2). This is only the beginning of the dissonance between Letter Thirteen and Letter One, which of course was marked by strident denunciation of tyranny in general and Dionysius’s tyranny in particular. To be sure, the generally cordial tone of Letter Thirteen is explained by the fact that it belongs to the period between Plato’s second and third journeys. In a way, this is a surprise twist all in itself: the final letter in the collection is by far the earliest of those we can clearly date. All the other letters directly connected to Dion and Dionysius, at any rate, refer to the time after Plato’s final departure. Letter Thirteen, then, belongs to a time before the ultimate collapse of Plato’s relationship with Dionysius, and perhaps that fact will be enough to assuage some readers’ concerns about its carefree tone—after all, Plato must at some time have been on friendly terms with the tyrant. But with all we have learned about the shabby way Dionysius treated Plato’s loyal acolyte, Dion, and the fuss Plato has consistently made about the unwavering, principled stand he took against that shabby treatment, the dating of this letter to the time between Plato’s second and third visits to Sicily—that is, during the time of Dion’s lengthy exile—cannot alleviate all of our concern about the cheery tenor of this letter to “Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse.”

Lest we be too quick to take solace in the thought, promoted by the unusual superscription, that this letter may be a forgery, Plato begins immediately by offering to Dionysius assurance that the letter is genuine. Which of the conflicting claims are we to believe: the mysterious note alleging the letter’s spuriousness or the author’s opening profession of its genuineness? Plato was confident in Letter Three that an authentic work of his could be distinguished from a forgery by “those capable of discerning [his] style,” or perhaps “judging [his] character” (316a4–6). It seems the intimacy of our knowledge of Plato is to be put to the test in this final chapter: Letter Thirteen challenges us to make a determination, on the basis of the style or character of its author, as to whether that author could have been Plato himself.

Plato says that “the beginning of this letter” is to be the “token” of its authenticity. Could this refer to Plato’s characteristic salutation? Could it even refer, an extreme paradox, to the very note denying the letter’s authenticity? Let us settle here for the simplest interpretation: Plato proves to Dionysius that the letter is from him by beginning with a story, the details of which virtually no one but the two of them would have known. Plato fondly recalls a feast Dionysius had put on during his time in Syracuse. Among the details he includes in his reminiscence are Dionysius’s jovial friendliness toward him at the time, the beauty of the youth by whose side Plato sat, and especially some witty repartee between the youth and the tyrant. The youth, impressed by some witty or elegant phrase Dionysius had turned, observed that the tyrant must be benefiting in “wisdom” by his relationship to the philosopher; to which Dionysius replied that he “straightaway . . . was benefited” from the moment he invited Plato to come from Athens (360a3–b5). The idea seems to be that Dionysius’s reputation is enhanced by the mere notion of his being associated with Plato, the eminent (political) philosopher.

Plato follows his story by expressing a wish that its essence “must be preserved,” so that the mutual benefit of their relationship “may always increase” (360b5–6). Juxtaposed to this passage, with its depiction of the tyrant’s feast filled with witticisms and beautiful youths, Plato’s huffy denunciation in Letter Three of Dionysius’s salutation to Apollo—“Rejoice and preserve a tyrant’s life of having pleasure!” (316b6)—begins to ring hollow. At any rate, Plato’s contemptuous reproof of “Syracusan tables,” through which we suffered patiently in Letter Seven (326b6–d6), does not echo here in Letter Thirteen. Have we been misled about how best to “judge” Plato’s “character”? Is it precisely because Dionysius knows better than most what the “real” Plato is like that this vignette will be, to him, such an unmistakable token of his authorship? The question here comes down to the matter of the mutual benefit to which Plato refers. If Plato simply endorses Dionysius’s use of their highly publicized relationship for the sake of Dionysius’s reputation, and if Plato seeks nothing more in return than the proverbial Syracusan delights, Letter Thirteen presents a major puzzle, to say the least, for our interpretation of the Letters.

There is more to it than that, of course. Plato immediately explains his intention to continue to benefit Dionysius by reference to some texts he is sending along: “both some of the Pythagorean things and some of the divisions” (360b7–8). Plato continues to encourage Dionysius toward serious philosophy—Pythagorean and, as it would seem, Eleatic. In addition, Plato sends along a pupil of Eudoxus, who has spent time with students and comrades of Isocrates and Bryson. This man, Helicon of Cyzicus, Plato thinks will be of interest both to Dionysius and to Archytas (360b8–c5). He is hopeful that, already, less than a year since his departure from Syracuse (361c7–d3), Archytas has arrived at the tyrant’s court (cf. 338c5–d1). Plato’s concern is not only for Dionysius, then: in the first place, there is the benefit Archytas and Helicon may enjoy from discourse with one another; there is also the advantage available to Helicon in the form of the tyrant’s beneficent friendship; and this service Plato has done for Helicon may in turn constitute a favor to Helicon’s teachers and other associates—Eudoxus, Isocrates, Bryson—who are also solicitous for Helicon’s well-being. Nor are we to forget that Plato’s decision to maintain his ties with Dionysius by making his third and final journey was said to be for the sake of preserving Archytas’s ties to the Syracusan court (339e1–3). Letter Thirteen confirms what we have been saying on the basis of several other letters, including the postscript to Letter Two: Plato was intensely active in benefiting his philosophic friends.

Where does the philosophic education of Dionysius himself fit into these affairs? Plato recognizes that Dionysius may not even have the time to study with Helicon at all. The “lack of leisure” from which Archytas was said to suffer in Letter Nine is at least as great for Dionysius. If anything, it seems Plato was hopeful that Archytas’s sojourns in Syracuse could afford him greater leisure to spend time with people like Helicon. The problem is not that Dionysius is altogether ill suited to philosophy. Plato has said in Letter Seven that Dionysius “is not ill-natured with respect to the ability to learn, having an amazing love of honor” (338d6–7; cf. 314d3–4, 328a1–7, 333d4–7, 339e4). But Plato was also very clear in that same letter that intellectual virtue alone, unaccompanied by moral or character virtue, is totally inadequate (343e3–344b1). Plato’s praise for Helicon is based on the fact that he is not only smart or “graceful” regarding the thought of Eudoxus, but—what is really rare—that he is graceful generally, and seems rather to be of “good character” than “bad character”—and even still, Plato is wary of trusting him (360c2–d7). Dionysius’s own problem, as Plato has it, was that same love of honor that also made him a good learner (338d7–339a3). It is clear throughout the Letters, for example, that Dionysius was unendingly jealous of the favor Plato showed to Dion and Dion’s comrades and desperately desirous of gaining the reputation of being the most highly esteemed by Plato (318c4–6, 319a4–6, 329d3–6, 330a3–6, 349e4–8). This jealous love of honor was so great as to make the genuine pursuit of philosophy impossible for Dionysius (345c2–d5; see also 344d3–345a1).

If Plato was so wary even of someone as promising as Helicon, he cannot have been willing to put much trust in Dionysius’s love of philosophy (see 328b2–5). Plato does not, then, restrict himself, in his attempt to “benefit” the tyrant, to sending along books and scholars. For one thing, Plato appeals directly and repeatedly to Dionysius’s concern for honor. He is happy to use Dionysius’s love of honor, to play on it for the sake of keeping a hold on the tyrant’s tenuous interest in philosophy and, therewith, his attachment to Plato (360e2–3). But even this is a problematic strategy, the difficulty being most evident in Letter Two. There, Plato says as clearly as one could wish that his purpose in Syracuse was to use his relationship with Dionysius so that “philosophy would be honored even among the multitude” (312a1–2). But that means that Plato, too, is seeking honor in this relationship: he needs Dionysius to show publicly that he has become enthralled by Plato and his philosophic education. It will not do, then, to flatter the tyrant endlessly for his philosophic ability, to make him believe he has no need of Platonic philosophy, and thus to make a show of fawning on the tyrant without receiving anything in return. The whole passage in Letter Two wherein Plato is wrangling with Dionysius over the seemingly petty matter of who should be seen honoring the other first is a testament to the seriousness of this problem (312b5–d1). Getting Dionysius to honor Platonic philosophy was so critical to Plato’s project of promoting philosophy in Syracuse that, in the end, Dionysius’s unwillingness to honor Plato seems to have been decisive in the failure of Plato’s undertaking (309b4–5, 312a2–b2, 341b3–4, 345b7–c3).

Since Plato cannot rely sufficiently on leveraging Dionysius’s love of honor, he must engage in still other means of maintaining his usefulness to the tyrant. In Letter Thirteen, this is reflected in the rapid decline in subject matter from philosophy—whether for the sake of wisdom or honor—to material gifts Plato sends to Dionysius and his family. There is still a tinge of something loftier in Plato’s helping Dionysius to acquire a fine sculpture of the god Apollo (361a1–4)—here, Plato seems to make himself useful as a liaison for Dionysius to the cosmopolitan center of fine arts and culture that is Athens. Plato then turns to a description of gifts that he has sent to the women and children of the tyrant’s household, beginning with another sculpture, this one for Dionysius’s wife, in gratitude for the care she took of Plato during his stay, particularly during a bout of illness (361a4–7). With this, we enter even further into the corporeal and quotidian: Plato’s illness, his friendly relationship with the members of Dionysius’s family, remind us of the little things with which everyone, even Plato, must deal, the minor and minute affairs and challenges that must be navigated every day. Here is an example of what Dion never understood: one will never succeed by insisting that everything and everyone must be held to the standard of the loftiest ideals; the individual is weak and needs help, and so must be ready to propitiate others in accordance with custom (321b5–c1, 327b4–6). Finally, Plato sends along sweet wine and some honey “for [Dionysius’s] children,” with apologies that he did not get back to Athens in time to send figs or myrtle-berries—the season having passed and the berries having rotted—and a promise to do better in the future (361a7–b3). (Are we not prompted by this detail to reflect on what other propitious moments Plato may have missed in Athens for the sake of his “occupation” in Sicily—moments in the cultivation, not of fruit, but of philosophy in young minds?) It seems Plato is sending some plants to Dionysius along with everything else, perhaps so that the tyrant can grow his own figs and berries. The letter carrier Leptines “will tell [Dionysius] about the plants (phutōn)” (361b3–4). This last appearance of any word related to “nature” (phusis) stands in stark contrast to the discussion of “the nature of the first” in Letter Two, which that letter’s carrier, Archytas’s companion Archedemus, was to explain to the tyrant. This contrast between Platonic instruction in the “highest and first” things and instructions on caring for plants brings out Plato’s willingness in Letter Thirteen to do what Dion was constitutionally unable to do (321b5–c1): to engage with Dionysius on a level far below that of Plato’s genuine interest and concern for the sake of cultivating something bigger and more important in Syracuse.

Letter Thirteen’s next revelation, however, contradicts much more glaringly the impression we have received from the rest of the Letters. Plato now explains how he “got the money for these things,” as well as for “certain taxes for the city”: from Leptines (361b4–c1), which in turn proves to mean that he got it from Dionysius himself (362b6–c2). This introduces the longest section of the letter, in which we learn in detail of the financial arrangements between Plato and Dionysius. Plato documents in this letter a number of expenses for the sake of which he has been drawing, or may yet need to draw, from a considerable reserve of funds that Dionysius and his agents maintain in Athens. The expenditures discussed include civic duties such as the outfitting of triremes and choruses (361b4–8, 362a2–5), dowries Plato must pay out to the husbands of his grandnieces (361c7–e4), gifts to friends (363a1–4), some additional discretionary funds (361b8–c1) that Plato used to pay in part for the sculptures and other thoughtful gifts he is now sending along (361a1–b2), and, planning ahead, a tombstone for his own mother (361e4–5). It is to be noted that in each and every one of the other letters to Dionysius (Letters One, Two, and Three), Plato explicitly emphasizes his disdain for the wealth prized by tyrants, and his concern lest people be allowed or encouraged to draw the conclusion that Plato consorted with Dionysius merely for the base purpose of acquiring money (309b8–c5, 310a2–7, 312c4–6, 317c8–d4, 318d4–e4; see also 333d4–7, 334b3–4, 335a5–c1). The Letters opens with the staunch and indignant denial that Plato was at the court of Dionysius as a Simonides, a wise man at the doors of the rich; but it closes with a Polaroid of Plato with his hand in the Syracusan cookie jar.

The shock worsens the more we examine the tone and direction of the discussion. Having itemized his expenses, Plato makes a point of providing some counsel to Dionysius: the tyrant must “habituate and compel” everyone who deals with his finances to be as meticulous as Plato himself has been in reporting their expenditures (362c5–e1). This counsel constitutes a glaring violation of the pedagogical principle Plato vaunted in Letter Seven: that he absolutely refuses to counsel anyone “concerning any of the greatest things in his life, such as the acquisition of money or the care of body or soul,” unless that person’s daily life and habits meet Plato’s rigorous standards of decency and self-discipline (331a5–b7). Indeed, Plato seems to have paid for this breach of his principle, as we see when we examine the details of Letter Seven in light of the suggestion that Plato may have been motivated in part at least by the prospect of financial gain. To appreciate this, let us take note of two patterns that emerge from such an examination of Letter Seven.

First, we find that, in the description of Plato’s third and final visit—a description that extends from the end of the second digression to the end of the letter—Plato’s concern for Dion is repeatedly cast in terms of Dion’s property, which Dionysius has flagrantly stolen (345c4–d1; cf. 317e7–318c1). Plato estimates that Dion’s estate was worth some hundred talents—an enormous sum—and cites his desire to keep that money in Dion’s hands as the only reason he agreed to stay in Syracuse after learning that Dionysius’s desire for philosophy was superficial (347a6–b3). In other words, the possibility emerges that Plato’s loyalty to Dion had something to do with his virtually boundless wealth along with his being an adoring zealot of Platonic philosophy, and, relatedly, his conviction that excessive attachment to one’s own wealth was a moral vice (327a5–b4, 335a2–c2, 355a8–c5). (Here we may make reference to some disputed ancient accounts according to which it was Dion who provided the funds with which Plato purchased the land that became the Academy; Diogenes Laertius 3.20.) Dionysius, at any rate, used Plato’s concern for Dion’s property as leverage for the duration of Plato’s final stay, until Plato finally gave up hope altogether (348a2–3, 349c5–7, 350b3–5). For his part, Plato maintains that the civil war in Syracuse could have been avoided if only Dionysius had relented and restored Dion’s estate to its rightful owner—without that, Plato lost the will or the ability to hold Dion off (350d5–e2). The whole ending of the letter is a condemnation of the tyrannical grasping for wealth (351a5–c1). But, in light of Letter Thirteen, we are brought to wonder whether Plato’s frustration with Dionysius’s tyrannical grasping was not made especially sharp by the financial loss to Plato himself that resulted from the tyrant’s confiscation of Dion’s property.

The second thing we notice about Letter Seven in light of Letter Thirteen’s emphasis on Plato’s financial needs is that, despite Plato’s lessons to him in household management, Dionysius seems to have done a very poor job at managing his finances. When Dionysius finally decided to liquidate Dion’s estate, he did so in a haphazard and unprofitable way (347c8–e5). Moreover, the final collapse of Plato’s position in Syracuse is precipitated by a terrible political-economic decision made by Dionysius. He “undertook, against the customs of his father, to reduce the wages of his senior mercenaries”—already a sign that he had found himself in bad financial shape—and when this plan predictably failed by turning the mercenaries against him, Dionysius caved in completely to their demands, costing himself more money in the end than if he had done nothing at all (348a4–b5). The chaos surrounding this debacle elevated the danger to Plato to unbearable levels, and he finally contrived to flee—his philosophic friend Archytas plays the deus ex machina in this drama (350a5–b3). But it was Dionysius’s terrible squandering of his finances that crushed any hope of meaningful restitution to Dion.

The final and most distressing shock of Letter Thirteen comes toward the end, when Plato mentions, in veiled terms, some scheme in which he is conspiring with Dionysius against Dion (362e2–8). The evidence in this letter overwhelmingly suggests that Plato’s whole association with the Syracusan regime was pursued and maintained, in large part at least, out of concern to acquire financial support, including from Dion (361d7–e1). But if the Letters is a book artfully composed and arranged by Plato himself, this massive, revelatory twist at the end must have been intended. Why would Plato do such a thing? We must think more broadly about the effect of Letter Thirteen on the reader. Immediately, it gives the impression that the beans have at last been spilled. A cynical or hostile reader might rush to conclude that all of Plato’s huffing and puffing about the evils of avarice and the harmfulness of wealth has been a hypocritical attempt to cover up the truth about his affairs in Syracuse: he was always out for the money. But reflection on the details Plato provides impels the candid reader to a more sympathetic conclusion. What was the money used for, after all? Was it not for the sake of Athens, in the form of payments for liturgies and other taxes? For the discharge of Plato’s civic and familial duties in taking care of his orphaned nieces and building a tomb for his mother? Was Plato not merely following his own advice to Archytas in Letter Nine, doing his best to pay his dues to his fatherland and his family? Are these not worthier uses for the money than the dissolute tyrant would have found on his own? And if Plato spends some of this money on gifts for the tyrant, shall we not be pleased that at least he buys him a sculpture of Apollo? Plato allows readers to judge him to have been naive in underestimating the moral or practical cost of depending on a tyrant for financial support; but the angry denunciation of Dionysius’s tyranny with which the Letters began is likely to resonate in the reader’s memory, and since this denunciation came in fact at the later date, the reader may well take Plato at his word that his experience with Dionysius taught him certain lessons the hard way (309b6–7).

What must be recalled beyond this is the reason Plato’s financial needs were so great. He was supporting not only himself, and not only his extended family, but also certain friends, whose names—especially those of Speusippus and Cebes—remind us of the true core of Plato’s life in Athens. It was the life of the Academy, the support for his philosophic friends’ ability to live the philosophic life, that put Plato in the position of needing to raise funds in places like Syracuse. The need for this was made as clear as anyone could wish with the case of Erastus and Coriscus in Letter Six. What we get in addition in Letter Thirteen is the sudden, brief reminder of the immense dedication of time and energy involved in Plato’s (probably not lucrative) composition of his dialogues: this is the only letter in which any of Plato’s dialogues (the Phaedo) is referred to directly (363a5–8). We may note that, in Letter Seven, it is following his narration of Dionysius’s squandering of Dion’s assets that Plato laments the failure of his efforts to come “to the aid of philosophy and of friends” (347e6–7). The choice to end the Letters with the shocking revelation of Plato’s enrichment at Dionysius’s hands may be intended partially to overshadow the question of why the pursuit and promotion of philosophy should be thought to excuse the lengths to which Plato was willing to go for this cause. Like Letter Two, Letter Thirteen also has a short “postscript,” which follows what otherwise seems to be Plato’s final valediction, “be strong” (363c9). The very last piece of business in the Letters refers to a man “set free” by Plato in Syracuse. We are thus reminded of the political position Plato seems to have held there (cf. 309b2–3), and of all the questions that remain about how he used it.

If anything is clear from the Letters it is that Plato’s dedication was to protecting the life and public reputation of philosophy; we are given no reason to doubt that, unless the cause of philosophy needed material support, Plato’s concern for honor or money was quite limited or subsidiary (321a3–4, 333d4–7, 334b3–4, 361d1–2). Considering the bustle of traffic between Athens, Syracuse, and Tarentum that we observe, even in Letter Thirteen alone, we must conclude that Plato succeeded in finding a safe place for many of his students and friends to become acquainted with new ideas and brilliant minds, to discuss, to think, and to write. Almost his last counsel to Dionysius in the Letters is to “philosophize, and urge on the other youths” toward philosophy, “and offer fond greetings to your fellow-spherists” (363c9–d1)—a reminder of Plato’s education of Dionysius in the matter of the “little sphere” in Letter Two (312d2–3). What for Plato was evidently most important was not that Dionysius himself make great progress in philosophy, but that Dionysius’s interest in philosophy contribute to the blossoming of the philosophic life in Syracuse. The goal was not the regime of the Republic, but rather that, with the help of Dionysius, “through [Plato], philosophy would be honored even among the multitude.”

Plato’s Secret Sign

Letter Thirteen, like several others in the collection, contains reflections on the difficulty of ascertaining the genuineness and authorship of the letter itself—a curious bit of irony (or prescience?) given the controversy over authenticity into which the Letters has descended in recent centuries. Following the disclaimer that the letter is not by Plato, Letter Thirteen begins with a “token” of proof that it is by Plato. And then this matter of the “token,” the sumboulon, by which the genuineness of the letter is to be recognized by Dionysius, is taken up once more toward the end of the letter, after all the minutiae of Plato’s and Dionysius’s financial arrangements have been thoroughly reported. Plato says that he has already agreed with Dionysius on a secret sign by which he will distinguish “those letters [he] would send in seriousness”: “A god begins the serious letter, gods the less [serious]” (363b1–6). The suggestion is that Plato has shared with Dionysius his secret monotheistic philosophic doctrine, a flagrantly impious rejection of the traditional Greek pantheon, and that the signals he gives to Dionysius reflect the tyrant’s initiation into these Platonic theological mysteries.

The device is hopelessly clumsy. Plato knows, as we have seen from Letter Two, that it would be folly to reveal dangerous secrets, or the passwords to those secrets, in a letter, which one cannot protect against exposure once it has been sent. In fact, in almost comically sharp contrast to Letter Two, Plato not only fails to tell Dionysius to burn this letter after reading it—a directive that one might think would have been well advised given the cascade of ticklish financial revelations Letter Thirteen contains—but ends the letter by telling the tyrant to keep a copy of it (363e4–5). And yet Plato makes an emphatic point in Letter Thirteen about the untrustworthiness and changeability of human beings, including human beings much closer in disposition and turn of mind to Plato himself than to Dionysius (360d1–7). To be precise, Plato says that almost all human beings are “easily changeable”; he excepts “some very few, and with respect to few things.” It is not possible that Plato thought simple “passwords” like the one that he proposes in this letter could be reliable or effective. This discussion of his secret password arrangement with Dionysius in Letter Thirteen should be compared, moreover, to the parallel passage about the secrecy of letters in Letter Twelve. There Plato says to Archytas that there is no need for them to remind or to exhort each other about the necessity of “guarding” their correspondence (359e1–2). Perhaps, then, the monotheism signal that Plato here claims to share in secret with the tyrant—but which, as we have noted, is a very poorly kept secret indeed—is itself something of a smoke screen.

The “password” passage in Letter Thirteen does, however, make an illuminating point about Platonic writing. For Plato here explains the reason why any secret device should be necessary in his writing at all. “There are many directing [me] to write,” Plato explains, “whom it is not easy to refuse openly” (363b4–5). Plato indicates that he produces his less “serious” writings because he is compelled to do so (cf. 344c1–d2). This passage is followed immediately by a reference to a number of different people who are already spreading elaborate stories about Plato and Dionysius (363b7–c3). This is already, then, the problem of rumor that pervades the first several letters, and which Letter Two suggests rather clearly is a major reason for Plato’s having written the Letters at all. It seems that the whole Platonic project, which belongs to “a Socrates become beautiful and new,” may be Plato’s response to an abiding political necessity for him to give an account of himself and his philosophy to the world.