the seventh letter   

governments carried on by his own supporters, either by men who had no
ties of blood with him, or by his brothers whom he had brought up when
they were younger, and had raised from humble station to high office
and from poverty to immense wealth. Not one of these was he able to
work upon by persuasion, instruction, services and ties of kindred, so
as to make him a partner in his rule; and he showed himself inferior
to Darius with a sevenfold inferiority. For Darius did not put his
trust in brothers or in men whom he had brought up, but only in his
confederates in the overthrow of the Mede and Eunuch; and to these
he assigned portions of his empire, seven in number, each of them
greater than all Sicily; and they were faithful to him and did not
attack either him or one another. Thus he showed a pattern of what the
good lawgiver and king ought to be; for he drew up laws by which he
has secured the Persian empire in safety down to the present time.
Again, to give another instance, the Athenians took under their rule
very many cities not founded by themselves, which had been hard hit by
the barbarians but were still in existence, and maintained their
rule over these for seventy years, because they had in each them men
whom they could trust. But Dionysios, who had gathered the whole of
Sicily into a single city, and was so clever that he trusted no one,
only secured his own safety with great difficulty. For he was badly
off for trustworthy friends; and there is no surer criterion of virtue
and vice than this, whether a man is or is not destitute of such
friends.
This, then, was the advice which Dion and I gave to Dionysios,
since, owing to bringing up which he had received from his father,
he had had no advantages in the way of education or of suitable
lessons, in the first place...; and, in the second place, that,
after starting in this way, he should make friends of others among his
connections who were of the same age and were in sympathy with his
pursuit of virtue, but above all that he should be in harmony with
himself; for this it was of which he was remarkably in need. This we
did not say in plain words, for that would not have been safe; but
in covert language we maintained that every man in this way would save
both himself and those whom he was leading, and if he did not follow
this path, he would do just the opposite of this. And after proceeding
on the course which we described, and making himself a wise and
temperate man, if he were then to found again the cities of Sicily
which had been laid waste, and bind them together by laws and
constitutions, so as to be loyal to him and to one another in their
resistance to the attacks of the barbarians, he would, we told him,
make his father's empire not merely double what it was but many
times greater. For, if these things were done, his way would be
clear to a more complete subjugation of the Carthaginians than that
which befell them in Gelon's time, whereas in our own day his father
had followed the opposite course of levying attribute for the
barbarians. This was the language and these the exhortations given
by us, the conspirators against Dionysios according to the charges
circulated from various sources-charges which, prevailing as they
did with Dionysios, caused the expulsion of Dion and reduced me to a
state of apprehension. But when-to summarise great events which
happened in no great time-Dion returned from the Peloponnese and
Athens, his advice to Dionysios took the form of action.
To proceed-when Dion had twice over delivered the city and
restored it to the citizens, the Syracusans went through the same
changes of feeling towards him as Dionysios had gone through, when
Dion attempted first to educate him and train him to be a sovereign
worthy of supreme power and, when that was done, to be his coadjutor
in all the details of his career. Dionysios listened to those who
circulated slanders to the effect that Dion was aiming at the
tyranny in all the steps which he took at that time his intention
being that Dionysios, when his mind had fallen under the spell of
culture, should neglect the government and leave it in his hands,
and that he should then appropriate it for himself and treacherously