And we should in very truth always believe those ancient and
sacred teachings, which declare that the soul is immortal, that it has
judges, and suffers the greatest penalties when it has been
separated from the body. Therefore also we should consider it a lesser
evil to suffer great wrongs and outrages than to do them. The covetous
man, impoverished as he is in the soul, turns a deaf ear to this
teaching; or if he hears it, he laughs it to scorn with fancied
superiority, and shamelessly snatches for himself from every source
whatever his bestial fancy supposes will provide for him the means
of eating or drinking or glutting himself with that slavish and
gross pleasure which is falsely called after the goddess of love. He
is blind and cannot see in those acts of plunder which are accompanied
by impiety what heinous guilt is attached to each wrongful deed, and
that the offender must drag with him the burden of this impiety
while he moves about on earth, and when he has travelled beneath the
earth on a journey which has every circumstance of shame and misery.
It was by urging these and other like truths that I convinced
Dion, and it is I who have the best right to be angered with his
murderers in much the same way as I have with Dionysios. For both they
and he have done the greatest injury to me, and I might almost say
to all mankind, they by slaying the man that was willing to act
righteously, and he by refusing to act righteously during the whole of
his rule, when he held supreme power, in which rule if philosophy
and power had really met together, it would have sent forth a light to
all men, Greeks and barbarians, establishing fully for all the true
belief that there can be no happiness either for the community or
for the individual man, unless he passes his life under the rule of
righteousness with the guidance of wisdom, either possessing these
virtues in himself, or living under the rule of godly men and having
received a right training and education in morals.
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