Dionysius

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, points out three distinguishing marks of sovereign power;

The principal drift of our argument rests upon these justifiable causes, to which the sentiment of Coriolanus in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, particularly applies, he says, “in the first place, I beseech you to consider how you may find pious and just pretexts for the war.

And in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Latinus admits the proposal of Aeneas to be just;

and I was surprised that so great an authority on the canons as Dionysius overlooked it.

Your generosity and zeal concerning the most blessed bishop Dionysius bear witness to all your love toward the Lord, your honour toward those who have gone before, your zeal for the faith.

For we know, by the succession of memory — being taught both by our fathers who were asked, and from letters preserved among us even now — that that most blessed bishop Dionysius, who shone among you for rightness of faith and for the rest of his virtue, visited our Church of Caesarea by letters, and exhorted our fathers by letters, and sent ransom for the brotherhood who were being redeemed from captivity.

And Dionysius the Thracian, the grammarian, in his work On Indication, speaks thus, word for word, concerning the symbol of the wheels:

" And Dionysius the Iambic likewise:

And in the eighteenth year of the kingdom of Agamemnon Ilium was taken, in the first year of the reign at Athens of Demophon, son of Theseus, on the twelfth of the month Thargelion, as Dionysius the Argive says;

It was at the same time also that Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, was defeated in battle by the Carthaginians and lost Gela and Camarina.

So the year ended, in the middle of which Dionysius of Syracuse, the son of Hermocrates, became tyrant, after the Carthaginians had been defeated in battle by the Syracusans, but had captured Acragas by famine, the Siceliots abandoning the city.

Now the Athenian forces under Demaenetus, Dionysius, Leontichus, and Phanias, upon learning of his departure, followed after him in the direction of Proconnesus;

— Yes, and many indeed by Dionysius the Stoic.

Of these, a man truly trivial, Dionysius of Heraclea, when he had learned from Zeno to be brave, was untaught by pain.

And so not unskillfully does Dionysius of Heraclea argue against those words which Achilles in Homer complains, in this manner, I think:

he concedes that they are accommodated to nature, and denies that Plato, if he were not wise, was in the same case as the tyrant Dionysius;

To us that Dionysius of Heraclea seems shamefully to have deserted the Stoics on account of pain of the eyes.

For who can truly think that Dionysius did more, when by all his contrivance he tore liberty from his fellow citizens, than his fellow citizen Archimedes, when, seeming to do nothing, he wrought that very globe of which we were just now speaking?

That splendid city, which Timaeus calls the greatest of Greek cities and the fairest of all—its citadel worth seeing, its harbours flowing in even to the bosom of the town and to the foundations of the city, broad streets, porticoes, temples, walls—all these availed nothing the more, while Dionysius held it, to make it a commonwealth;

Again, perhaps they will say in their haphazard style that some citizens, by claiming to be Megarians and Messenians, at once gain immunity, whole crowds at a time, to say nothing of slaves and jailbirds like Lycidas and Dionysius;

Because slaves, like Lycidas and Dionysius and perhaps one other, were made Friends of the State by men who are readily bribed to propose such decrees, they must not try to take away the gifts that you have justly bestowed on men of a different class—mentorious, freeborn, munificent benefactors.

Nor again could the present Dionysius ever have exacted that Dion would come against him in a cargo-boat with a handful of soldiers and expel the master of so many warships and mercenaries and cities.

And one might see Dionysius in Corinth, a most beautiful spectacle, master of nothing;

and all the rest were broken up, except indeed Dionysius the elder of those clad in the form of Dionysus —

and, by Zeus, if a man should be entrusted by a king or a tyrant with gold or silver, or ships, or arms, or a citadel, or the whole empire—as Leptines often received Syracuse from his brother, and Philistus from the younger Dionysius, and the Magi the royal palace of the Persians from Cambyses, when he was on campaign in Egypt, and Mithranes the citadel of Sardis from Darius, and Persaeus the Acro …

The existence of a Monarchy such as that described for us by annalists like Livy and Dionysius, implies the existence of a consolidated State, with a central legislative and executive power and a tolerably uniform system of law.

According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus every Roman had to take an oath once in five years before the Censors that his book-keeping was honest and accurate.

For this the physical kind of theology forces, since they have so handed down the gods that Dionysius the Stoic divides them three ways.

But since they would have others received into divinity from men separately, and a distinction made between the born and the made, according to Dionysius the Stoic, I shall add also concerning this species.

The same Aristotle as basely flatters Alexander, to be ruled by him, as Plato sells himself to Dionysius for his belly's sake.

Zeno of Elea, when asked by Dionysius what philosophy could offer, having answered, "Contempt of death," and being exposed unmoved to the tyrant's scourges, sealed his sentence to the death.

look to that of Zeno, when the torments of Dionysius passed him by.

But Dionysius' tyranny over Sicily a certain woman of Himera dreamed too.

and he undertook to liken me to Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, and vehemently and with loud cries he called upon you to be on your guard against me;

'And the argument he was wont to use, at the time when it pleased him that nothing could be perceived, when he asked whether that famous Dionysius of Heraclea had comprehended, by that certain mark by which you say one ought to assent, either that which for many years he had held, and had believed his master Zeno — that what is honourable is alone good — or that which he afterwards defended, that …

For Dionysius the younger tyrant, having stripped off the golden cloak of Zeus in Sicily, ordered a woollen one to be put about him, wittily saying that this was better than the golden one, both lighter in summer and warmer in cold.

We, Dionysius of Aphidna and Antiphilus of Paeania, when our kinsman Nicodemus had met with a violent death at the hands of Aristarchus, the son of Moschus, prosecuted Aristarchus for murder.

However, if I may mention two instances to the exclusion of the rest, you gave your citizenship to Evagoras of Cyprus and to Dionysius of Syracuse, to them and their descendants.

When the Ionians heard this, they put themselves in Dionysius ' hands.

among those whom I suppose to have addressed them was Dionysius, the Phocaean general, who spoke thus:

but on the next day, untried as they were in such labor and worn out by hard work and by the sun, the Ionians began to say each to other:

(By Dionysius of Halicarnassus) The Deme of Erchia is summoned before the court by one of its members who has been rejected by its vote and who pleads that he is being unjustly disfranchised.

yet when, on the question of the marriage of the grandmother of his own children, he was obtaining, as he declares, a written deposition in Athens itself, he is shown to have summoned none of his own friends but Dionysius of Erchia and Aristolochus of Aethalidae.

again, that the tyrant Dionysius, and the king of Egypt, and the various dynasts throughout Asia, each so far as he has the power, would willingly lend us aid;

There is also the case of the tyrant Dionysius, who, when he was besieged by the Carthaginians, seeing not a glimmer of hope for deliverance, but being hard pressed both by the war and by the disaffection of his citizens, was, for his part, on the point of sailing away, when one of his companions made bold to declare that “royalty is a glorious shroud.

Ashamed of what he had planned to do, and taking up the war afresh, he destroyed countless hosts of the Carthaginians, strengthened his authority over his subjects, acquired far greater dominion than he had possessed before, ruled with absolute power until his death, and left his son in possession of the same honors and powers as he himself had enjoyed.

secondly, that Dionysius, the tyrant, taking charge of Sicily when the rest of it had been devastated by war and when his own country, Syracuse, was in a state of siege, not only delivered it from the dangers which then threatened, but also made it the greatest of Hellenic states;

on the other hand, they are assisting Amyntas, king of the Macedonians, and Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, and the barbarian king who rules over Asia, to extend their dominions far and wide.