the seventh letter   

your part that I have left Syracuse and am here now. And the
disgrace attaching to your treatment of me is a small matter. But
philosophy-whose praises you are always singing, while you say she
is held in dishonour by the rest of mankind-must we not say that
philosophy along with me has now been betrayed, so far as your
action was concerned? Had I been living at Megara, you would certainly
have come to give me your aid towards the objects for which I asked
it; or you would have thought yourself the most contemptible of
mankind. But as it is, do you think that you will escape the
reputation of cowardice by making excuses about the distance of the
journey, the length of the sea voyage, and the amount of labour
involved? Far from it." To reproaches of this kind what creditable
reply could I have made? Surely none.
I took my departure, therefore, acting, so far as a man can act,
in obedience to reason and justice, and for these reasons leaving my
own occupations, which were certainly not discreditable ones, to put
myself under a tyranny which did not seem likely to harmonise with
my teaching or with myself. By my departure I secured my own freedom
from the displeasure of Zeus Xenios, and made myself clear of any
charge on the part of philosophy, which would have been exposed to
detraction, if any disgrace had come upon me for faint-heartedness and
cowardice.
On my arrival, to cut a long story short, I found the court of
Dionysios full of intrigues and of attempts to create in the sovereign
ill-feeling against Dion. I combated these as far as I could, but with
very little success; and in the fourth month or thereabouts,
charging Dion with conspiracy to seize the throne, Dionysios put him
on board a small boat and expelled him from Syracuse with ignominy.
All of us who were Dion's friends were afraid that he might take
vengeance on one or other of us as an accomplice in Dion's conspiracy.
With regard to me, there was even a rumour current in Syracuse that
I had been put to death by Dionysios as the cause of all that had
occurred. Perceiving that we were all in this state of mind and
apprehending that our fears might lead to some serious consequence, he
now tried to win all of us over by kindness: me in particular he
encouraged, bidding me be of good cheer and entreating me on all
grounds to remain. For my flight from him was not likely to redound to
his credit, but my staying might do so. Therefore, he made a great
pretence of entreating me. And we know that the entreaties of
sovereigns are mixed with compulsion. So to secure his object he
proceeded to render my departure impossible, bringing me into the
acropolis, and establishing me in quarters from which not a single
ship's captain would have taken me away against the will of Dionysios,
nor indeed without a special messenger sent by him to order my
removal. Nor was there a single merchant, or a single official in
charge of points of departure from the country, who would have allowed
me to depart unaccompanied, and would not have promptly seized me
and taken me back to Dionysios, especially since a statement had now
been circulated contradicting the previous rumours and giving out that
Dionysios was becoming extraordinarily attached to Plato. What were
the facts about this attachment? I must tell the truth. As time went
on, and as intercourse made him acquainted with my disposition and
character, he did become more and more attached to me, and wished me
to praise him more than I praised Dion, and to look upon him as more
specially my friend than Dion, and he was extraordinarily eager
about this sort of thing. But when confronted with the one way in
which this might have been done, if it was to be done at all, he
shrank from coming into close and intimate relations with me as a
pupil and listener to my discourses on philosophy, fearing the
danger suggested by mischief-makers, that he might be ensnared, and so
Dion would prove to have accomplished all his object. I endured all
this patiently, retaining the purpose with which I had come and the
hope that he might come to desire the philosophic life. But his
resistance prevailed against me.