Plato's Seventh Epistle

Plato · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 25 pages

From John Harward, “The Seventh and Eighth Platonic Epistles,” The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 22, issue 3/4, July–October 1928, pages 143–54. The frontispiece is by Herbert Gandy. The letter is addressed to the relatives and friends of Dion and opens with the single word of greeting, “Welfare!”

Plato answers a request for support by saying that he will help if the writers hold the same opinion and desire as Dion did, and will think more than once about it if they do not — adding that he can state what Dion's purpose was from positive knowledge rather than conjecture, since on his first visit to Sicily, when he was about forty, Dion formed the belief he always afterwards retained, that the Syracusans ought to be free and governed by the best laws. He then turns back to explain how such an opinion is formed, and gives the autobiographical account the letter is chiefly known for. In his youth, he says, he went through the same experience as many other men, fancying that once he became his own master he would embark at once on a political career. What he met with instead was revolution: the existing constitution being generally condemned, fifty-one men came to the front as rulers, eleven in the city and ten in the Peiræus in charge of market and municipal matters, and thirty appointed with full powers over public affairs as a whole. Some of them were his own relatives and acquaintances and invited him to join them as something to which he had a claim; and the effect on a young man, he notes drily, was not surprising — he assumed they would govern well. The remainder of the letter follows what happened to that assumption, and to the later hopes he placed in Sicily.

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