Vol 6

This is an appendix to: How To Identify The Despotic Minority - 15

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"after Aurelian had given the Hellenic World a foretaste of the despotism that was to be imposed upon it, once for all, by Diocletian within less than ten years of Aurelian’s death, we find the Army engaging with the Senate in an unpre cedented contest in courtesy in which each party insisted, more Japonico that the other should accept the honour of electing Aurelian's successor, until at last the Senators admitted defeat by consenting to nominate one of their own number. [64]"

"Tacitus’s political explanation of the decay of eloquence is re-examined, but is rejected in favour of the alternative thesis that the root of the evil is not the public vice of despotism but the private vices of avarice and self-indulgence. [90]"

"In the first place Ducetius’s original enterprise, with its ambi tious aim of uniting all the surviving Sicel communities into a single commonwealth, was manifestly inspired by the example of two miniature empires which had recently been exercised by Greek city-states over Sicel periocci—the empires which had been won respectively for Agrigentum by her despot Theron (dominabatur circa 488-472 B.C.) [244]"

"No less than three times in his life Plato voluntarily, though reluctantly, emerged from his Attic retreat and crossed the sea to Syracuse in the hope of converting a Sicilian despot to an Athenian philosopher’s conception of a prince’s duty. [257]"

"but his hopes rose higher when the founder of the second dynasty of Syracusan despots was succeeded by a son who had been saved by his father’s criminal success in wading through slaughter to a throne from the horrid necessity of gaining his own throne by so unpropitious a method. [257]"

"‘When’, Plato wrote long after wards in retrospect, ‘I conversed with Dio, who was then still quite a young man, and instructed him in my notions of the prin ciples of ethics as a practical ideal for him to act upon, I suppose I had no idea that, all unwittingly, I was really in some sense paving the way for a future overthrow of despotism.' [257]"

"for Dio had the double advantage of possessing an aptitude for philo sophy without being either a reigning despot or a despot’s heir apparent; [262]"

"Dio aspired to transfigure his native city-state of Syracuse into Plato’s ideal commonwealth by appearing in the role, not of saviour-despot, but of saviour-liberator; [262]"

"but the sequel to his coup of ejecting his despot-nephew Dionysius was tragically ironic. [262]"

"benefit of the consent of the governed, it is evident that there would be no purpose in the philosopher’s surprising personal union with a potentate who is to be an absolute monarch unless the despot’s power of physical coercion is to be held in readiness for use in case of necessity; [265]"

"We here see the philosopher not only yielding to the temptation to exploit the use of the despot’s material power as a short cut to the translation of a Utopia into ‘real life’, but even being influenced by a self-regarding feeling which looks less like a genuine prick of conscience than like a twinge of the scholar’s painful sense of inferiority to the man of action; [268]"

"When Polycratcs the despot of Samos received a tempting invitation from Oroetes the Achaemenian satrap of Sardis, he suspected a trap but felt inclined to take the risk. [412]"

"But for a happy accident—contrived by Fortune when, for once in a way, she was in a propitious mood—this goodly company of the Hellenic slave-intelligentsia might have been adorned by the forcible enrolment into it of the greatest intellect to which Hellen ism ever gave birth, if there is any truth in the tale that Plato, on his first visit to Sicily, so deeply incensed the Elder Dionysius by the unheard-of freedom of his speech that the Sicilian despot handed over the Athenian sage to the Lacedaemonian Ambassador at the Syracusan Court to dispose of at the Spartan’s pleasure. [515]"