Position and prospects of Kallippus, after the assassination of Dion

The assassination of Dion, as recounted in my last chapter, appears to have been skilfully planned and executed for the purposes of its contriver, the Athenian Kallippus. Succeeding at once to the command of the soldiers, among whom he had before been very popular,—and to the mastery of Ortygia,—he was practically supreme at Syracuse. We read in Cornelius Nepos, that after the assassination of Dion there was deep public sorrow, and a strong reaction in his favour, testified by splendid obsequies attended by the mass of the population. But this statement is difficult to believe; not merely because Kallippus long remained undisturbed master, but because he also threw into prison the female relatives of Dion—his sister Aristomache and his pregnant wife Aretê, avenging by such act of malignity the false oath which he had so lately been compelled to take, in order to satisfy their suspicions. Aretê was delivered of a son in the prison. It would seem that these unhappy women were kept in confinement during all the time, more than a year, that Kallippus remained master. On his being deposed, they were released; when a Syracusan named Hiketas, a friend of the deceased Dion, affected to take them under his protection. After a short period of kind treatment, he put them on board a vessel to be sent to Peloponnesus, but caused them to be slain on the voyage, and their bodies to be sunk in the sea.