Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece

An exclusive excerpt by James Romm

PAC would like to express their deepest thanks to James Romm and W.W. Norton for this exclusive excerpt from the upcoming Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Gr.eece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophical Masterpiece.

The banishment of Dion, the tyrant's brother-in-law and Plato's devoted follower, revealed to Plato how badly he’d erred in coming to Syracuse. Instead of strengthening Dion’s faction at the Syracusan court, he’d greatly weakened it by provoking the opposition. His very presence, and his bond with Dion, had helped create an air of mistrust in which Dion’s actions had seemed treasonous.

Plato found his own position at court becoming precarious. He and his allies—the friends and supporters of Dion—feared they’d be implicated and punished in turn. Plato heard of rumors going around that he was to blame for Dion’s alleged misdeeds and that the regime had put him to death.

The tyrant Dionysius, insecure in his first year of reign, feared that a rupture with Plato, either real or perceived, might create further strife. He entreated Plato to stay in the city and show himself not only alive and well but an ally of the regime. “Nothing good would come to me from your leaving,” he told Plato, “but it would come from your remaining." The sage’s departure now, Dionysius knew, would be an implicit protest against the exiling of Dion. He could not risk such a high-level defection.

Plato discovered he had no choice about staying or going. “A tyrant’s requests are mingled with compulsion,” he writes in the Seventh Letter. At Dionysius’s behest Plato’s quarters were relocated to "the acropolis," the fortress that served as the ruler’s own residence. Plato interpreted this as a sealing off of escape routes: In his new home he would have no contact with mariners nearer the shore who might conduct him to Athens. Dionysius’s grip on the compound was such that Plato could not even walk by himself toward its gate; to do so, he says, would have resulted in his immediate arrest.

Despite the tensions, Plato continued to offer the tyrant instruction. “I held fast to the original intention of my coming there,” he writes, “to see whether he would come to a desire for the philosophic life.” This tenacity was later portrayed in unflattering terms by Plato’s critics, who saw it as an attempt to curry favor. The question of whether Dionysius was educable therefore became a crucial one, and Plato returns to it several times in his letters. He’s careful to explain that, at this juncture, the young man still gave him hope.

Tensions arose when Plato used the tutorial sessions to try to get Dion’s sentence of exile reversed. Dionysius disliked these efforts, regarding them as a kind of rejection. “As time went on he grew more attached,” Plato says in the Seventh Letter. “He wanted me to praise him more than Dion and regard him more particularly as his friend.” The tyrant even offered Plato “honors”—the Greek word, timai, could also mean political offices or titles—as well as “money,” to take his side in the family rift and attest that Dion’s exile was justified. Plato makes clear in the letter that he refused, but not all of his contemporaries believed him.

Plato’s phrase “grew more attached” hints at a bond that Plutarch paints more colorfully. Plutarch describes tempestuous scenes in which the tyrant raged jealously over Plato’s closeness with Dion, a bond that excluded him. His anger, says Plutarch, would reach a crescendo, then give way to tearful apologies and attempts at reconciling. Dionysius at one point became so desperate, Plutarch claims, that he offered to hand the reins of government over to Plato, if only he could gain the sage’s favor.

This astonishing portrait of a young man’s infatuation is difficult to assess. It may have been based on some primary source, now lost, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone gathered such information from behind palace doors. The picture fits Plutarch’s general impression that the tyrant’s attraction to Plato was sexual at its core, though that idea, too, comes from sources unknown, or perhaps from Plutarch’s reading of Plato’s letters.

The tense encounters of ruler and sage might have gone on indefinitely, but war broke out and changed the equation. Syracuse marshaled its armies against their former allies, the Lucanians. For reasons that neither Plato nor Plutarch make clear, Dionysius saw this conflict as reason to send Plato home. Perhaps he needed support from his hardline faction, who’d long resented Plato’s presence and would be only too glad to see him gone from the city.

To lessen the impact of Plato’s departure, and perhaps because of his own “attachment,” Dionysius pressured Plato to promise he’d soon return. The tyrant’s insistence on this point gave Plato a certain leverage. He’d had half a year or more to brood on the fate of Dion, and he recognized now that he had the means to improve it—and also that Dionysius had the means to make it far worse. In a parley with Dionysius that Plato describes as “difficult”—unquestionably an understatement—he worked out a deal: He and Dion would both come back to Syracuse, at Dionysius’s summons, once a peace was concluded and things settled down. With that arrangement agreed on, Plato set sail for Athens.

Plato had spent the better part of a year in Syracuse and accomplished little, except to aggravate tensions within the tyrant-house. He’d been displayed by Dionysius as a kind of trophy, a mark of the regime’s enlightened values, but had not altered those values in any significant way. The court was still dominated by the hardliners, men who regarded Plato as a threat. Yet Plato had not given up on the Syracuse project, or on Dionysius.

Back in Athens, Plato returned to the Academia, where the banished Dion had also arrived or soon would. Perhaps Republic was largely complete by this time, though it’s more likely the work was still in progress.

Assuming Plato was at work on Republic, he had more to write about now than before. Once again he’d witnessed tyranny at close range, so close that he’d nearly become one of its victims. “The man we should listen to,” he has Socrates say in Republic, “is the one who’s lived with a tyrant in the same house.” Now he had lived with two tyrants, and he wanted the Greek world to listen to what he had learned.

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James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY.

He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), the Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11), and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City University of New York (2014-15).