How unworthily you
live, Dionysius." Dionysius answered him, "Thank you, Diogenes, for
sympathising with my misfortunes." "Why," said Diogenes; "do you suppose
that I sympathise with you, and am not rather grieved that a slave like
you, a man fit, like your father, to grow old and die on a miserable
throne, should be living in luxury and enjoyment amongst us?" So, when I
compare with these sayings of his the lamentations which Philistius
pours forth over the daughters of Leptines, that they had fallen from
the glories of sovereign power into a humble station, they seem to me
like the complainings of a woman who has lost her perfumes, her purple
dresses, or her jewels.

These details, I think, for readers who are at leisure, are not foreign
to the design of biography, and not without value.

XVI. If the fall of Dionysius seems strange, the good fortune of
Timoleon was no less wonderful. Within fifty days of his landing in
Sicily, he was master of the citadel of Syracuse, and sent back
Dionysius to Peloponnesus. Encouraged by his success, the Corinthians
sent him a reinforcement of two thousand hoplites and two hundred horse.
These men reached Thurii, but there found it impossible to cross over
into Sicily, as the Carthaginians held the sea with a great fleet. As it
was necessary for them to remain there for a time, they made use of
their leisure to perform a most excellent action. For the Thurians made
an expedition against the Bruttii,[A] and meanwhile these men took
charge of their city, and guarded it carefully and trustily as if it had
been their own.

[Footnote A: The natives of Southern Italy.]

Hiketes meanwhile was besieging the citadel of Syracuse, and preventing
corn from being brought by sea to the Corinthians. He also obtained two
strangers, whom he sent to assassinate Timoleon, who, trusting in the
favour shown him by the gods, was living carelessly and unsuspectingly
among the people of Adranum. These men, hearing that he was about to
offer sacrifice, came into the temple with daggers under their cloaks,
and mingling with the crowd round the altar, kept edging towards him.
They were just on the point of arranging their attack, when a man struck
one of them on the head with his sword, and he fell. Neither the
assailant nor the accomplice of the fallen man stood his ground, but the
one with his sword still in his hand ran and took refuge on a high rock,
while the other laid hold of the altar, and begged f