THREE:Their commanding officer was the worthy head of such a mob, a heartless creature, who did not show the slightest remorse for the destruction of those magnificent libraries, set on fire by his order.There still remained one form of government to be tried, the despotic rule of a single individual. In the course of his travels Plato came into contact with an able and powerful specimen of the tyrant class, the elder Dionysius. A number of stories relating to their intercourse have been preserved; but the different versions disagree very widely, and none of them can be entirely trusted. It seems certain, however, that Plato gave great offence to the tyrant by his freedom of speech, that he narrowly escaped death, and that he was sold into slavery, from which condition he was redeemed by the generosity of Anniceris, a Cyrenaean philosopher. It is supposed that the scathing description in which Plato has196 held up to everlasting infamy the unworthy possessor of absolute powera description long afterwards applied by Tacitus to the vilest of the Roman emperorswas suggested by the type which had come under his own observation in Sicily.
