The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 165

DION OF SYRACUSE, a pupil of Plato, and an austere man; was from his austerity obnoxious to his pleasure-loving nephew, Dionysius the Younger; subjected to banishment; went to Athens; learned his estates had been confiscated, and his wife given to another; took up arms, drove his nephew from the throne, usurped his place, and was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 353 B.C., the citizens finding that in getting rid of one tyrant they had but saddled themselves with another, and greater.

DIONE, a Greek G.o.ddess of the earlier mythology; figures as the wife of the Dodonian Zeus; drops into subordinate place after his nuptials with Hera.

DIONYSIUS THE ELDER, tyrant of Syracuse from 406 to 367 B.C.; at first a private citizen; early took interest in public affairs, and played a part in them; entered the army, and rose to be head of the State; subdued the other cities of Sicily, and declared war against Carthage; was attacked by the Carthaginians, and defeated them three times over; concluded a treaty of peace with them, and spent the rest of his reign, some 20 years, in maintaining and extending his territory; was distinguished, it is said, as he might well be, both as a poet and a philosopher; tradition represents him as in perpetual terror of his life, and taking every precaution to guard it from attack.

DIONYSIUS THE YOUNGER, tyrant of Syracuse, son of the preceding, succeeded him in 367 B.C. at the age of thirty; had never taken part in public affairs; was given over to vicious indulgences, and proved incapable of amendment, though DION (q. v.) tried hard to reform him; was unpopular with the citizens, who with the help of Dion, whom he had banished, drove him from the throne; returning after 10 years, was once more expelled by Timoleon; betook himself to Corinth, where he a.s.sociated himself with low people, and supported himself by keeping a school.

DIONYSIUS OF ALEXANDRIA, patriarch from 348, a disciple of Origen, and his most ill.u.s.trious pupil; a firm but judicious defender of the faith against the heretics of the time, in particular the Sabellians and the Chiliasts; _d_. 264.

DIONYSIUS, ST., THE AREOPAGITE (i. e. judge of the Areopagus), according to Acts xvii. 34, a convert of St. Paul's; became bishop of Athens, and died a martyr in 95; was long regarded as the father of mysticism in the Christian Church, on the false a.s.sumption that he was the author of writings of a much later date imbued with a pantheistic idea of G.o.d and the universe.

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNa.s.sUS, a Greek historian and rhetorician of the age of Augustus; came to Italy in 29 B.C., and spent 27 years in Rome, where he died; devoted himself to the study of the Roman republic, its history and its people, and recorded the result in his "Archaeologia,"

written in Greek, which brings down the narrative to 264 B.C.; it consisted of 20 books, of which only 9 have come down to us entire; he is the author of works in criticism of the orators, poets, and historians of Greece.

DIONYSIUS PERIEGETES, a Greek geographer who lived about the 4th century, and wrote a description of the whole earth in hexameters and in a terse and elegant style.

DIONYSUS, the G.o.d of the vine or wine; the son of ZEUS AND SEMELE (q. v.), the "twice born," as plucked first from the womb of his dead mother and afterwards brought forth from the thigh of Zeus, which served to him as his "incubator." See BACCHUS.

DIOPHANTUS, a Greek mathematician, born in Alexandria; lived presumably about the 4th century; left works in which algebraic methods are employed, and is therefore credited with being the inventor of algebra.

DIOSCOR'IDES, a Greek physician, born in Cilicia, lived in the 1st century; left a treatise in 5 books on materia medica, a work of great research, and long the standard authority on the subject.

DIOSCURI, twin sons of Zeus, Castor and Pollux, a stalwart pair of youths, of the Doric stock, great the former as a horse-breaker and the latter as a boxer; were wors.h.i.+pped at Sparta as guardians of the State, and pre-eminently as patrons of gymnastics; protected the hearth, led the army in war, and were the convoy of the traveller by land and the voyager by sea, which as constellations they are still held to be.

DIPHILUS, a Greek comic poet, born at Sinope; contemporary of Menander; was the forerunner of Terence and Plautus, the Roman poets.

DIPHTHERIA, a contagious disease characterised by the formation of a false membrane on the back of the throat.

DIPPEL, JOHANN KONRAD, a celebrated German alchemist; professed to have discovered the philosopher's stone; did discover Prussian blue, and an animal oil that bears his name (1672-1734).

DIPPEL'S OIL, an oil obtained from the distinctive distillation of horn bones.

DIRCaeAN SWAN, Pindar, so called from the fountain Dirce, near Thebes, his birthplace.

DIRCE, the wife of Lycus, king of Thebes, who for her cruelty to Antiope, her divorced predecessor, was, by Antiope's two sons, Zethos and Amphion, tied to a wild bull and dragged to death, after which her carca.s.s was flung by them into a well; the subject is represented in a famous antique group by Apollonius and Tauriscus.

DIRECTORY, THE, the name given to the government of France, consisting of a legislative body of two chambers, the Council of the Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred, which succeeded the fall of the Convention, and ruled France from October 27, 1795, till its overthrow by Bonaparte on the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799). The Directors proper were five in number, and were elected by the latter council from a list presented by the former, and the chief members of it were Barras and Carnot.

DIRSCHAU (11), a Prussian town on the Vistula, 21 m. SE. of Danzig, with iron-works and a timber trade.

DIS, a name given to Pluto and the nether world over which he rules.

DISCIPLINE, THE TWO BOOKS OF, books of dates 1561 and 1581, regulative of ecclesiastical order in the Presbyterian churches of Scotland, of which the ground-plan was drawn up by Knox on the Geneva model.

DISCOBOLUS, THE, an antique statue representing the thrower of the discus, in the Louvre, and executed by the sculptor Myron.

DISCORD, APPLE OF. See _infra_.

DISCORD, THE G.o.dDESS OF, a mischief-making divinity, daughter of Night and sister of Mars, who on the occasion of the wedding of Thetis with Peleus, threw into the hall where all the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses were a.s.sembled a golden apple inscribed "To the most Beautiful," and which gave rise to dissensions that both disturbed the peace of Olympus and the impartial administration of justice on earth. See PARIS.

DISMAL SCIENCE, Carlyle's name for the political economy that with self-complacency leaves everything to settle itself by the law of supply and demand, as if that were all the law and the prophets. The name is applied to every science that affects to dispense with the spiritual as a ruling factor in human affairs.

DISMAS, ST., the good thief to whom Christ promised Paradise as he hung on the cross beside Him.

DISRAELI, BENJAMIN. See BEACONSFIELD.

D'ISRAELI, ISAAC, a man of letters, born at Enfield, Middles.e.x; only son of a Spanish Jew settled in England, who left him a fortune, which enabled him to cultivate his taste for literature; was the author of several works, but is best known by his "Curiosities of Literature," a work published in six vols., full of anecdotes on the quarrels and calamities of authors; was never a strict Jew; finally cut the connection, and had his children baptized as Christians (1766-1848).

DITHYRAMB, a hymn in a lofty and vehement style, originally in honour of Bacchus, in celebration of his sorrows and joys, and accompanied with flute music.

DITMARSH (77), a low-lying fertile district in West Holstein, between the estuaries of the Elbe and the Eider; defended by d.y.k.es; it had a legal code of its own known as the "Ditmarisches Landbuch."

DITTON, HUMPHRY, author of a book on fluxions (1675-1715).

DIU (12), a small Portuguese island, with a port of the same name, in the Gulf of Cambay, S. of the peninsula of Gujarat, India; was a flouris.h.i.+ng place once, and contained a famous Hindu temple; inhabited now chiefly by fishermen.