When the return was made from Campania into the country of the Bruttii, Hanno, with the Bruttii for helpers and guides, made trial of the Greek cities, which kept the more willingly in the Roman alliance because they saw the Bruttii—whom they both hated and feared—made partisans of the Carthaginians. Rhegium was tried first, and several days were spent there in vain. Meanwhile the Locrians were hurrying grain and timber and the other necessaries of use out of the fields into the city—this too, that nothing should be left as plunder for the enemy—and day by day a greater multitude poured out of every gate; until at last there were left in the city only six hundred, who were forced to repair the walls and gates and to heap weapons upon the battlements. Against this mingled multitude of every age and rank, straggling in the fields and for the most part unarmed, Hamilcar let loose his Carthaginian horsemen, who, forbidden to do hurt to any, threw their squadrons across only to shut off from the city those scattered in flight. The leader himself, having seized a higher ground whence he might survey the fields and the city, bade the Bruttian cohort go up to the walls and call out the leading men of the Locrians to a parley, and, with promises of Hannibal’s friendship, urge them to surrender the city. To the Bruttii in the parley there was at first no credit given on any point; then, when the Carthaginian appeared on the hills, and the few who fled back brought word that all the rest of the multitude was in the enemy’s power, then, overcome by fear, they answered that they would consult the people; and, an assembly being at once called, since the lightest spirits all preferred a change and a new alliance, and those whose kinsmen had been cut off outside the city by the enemy held their minds pledged as by hostages given, while a few rather silently approved a steadfast faith than dared to defend it openly, the surrender to the Carthaginians was made, with a consent unquestioned to all appearance. Lucius Atilius, prefect of the garrison, and the Roman soldiers who were with him, having been secretly led down into the harbor and put aboard ship to be carried off to Rhegium, they received Hamilcar and the Carthaginians into the city on this condition, that a treaty be made forthwith on fair terms; the faith of which was well-nigh not kept toward the surrendered, the Carthaginian charging that the Roman had been let go by a trick, the Locrians pleading that he had fled of himself. Horsemen even followed after, in case by any chance the tide in the strait might delay the ships or drive them to land; and those whom they pursued they did not overtake, but they sighted other ships crossing the strait from Messana to Rhegium. They were Roman soldiers, sent by Claudius the praetor to hold the city with a garrison; and so from Rhegium there was at once a withdrawal. To the Locrians, by Hannibal’s command, peace was given on these terms: that they should be free and live by their own laws; that the city should lie open to the Carthaginians; that the harbor should be in the power of the Locrians; and that the alliance should stand on this right, that the Carthaginian should aid the Locrian and the Locrian the Carthaginian in peace and war.

So the Carthaginians were drawn back from the strait, the Bruttii murmuring that Rhegium and Locri, the cities they had marked out to plunder, had been left untouched. And so, of themselves, having enrolled and armed fifteen thousand of their own youth, they set out to march against Croton—itself too a Greek city, and a maritime one—believing that great increase would accrue to their power if they should hold on the sea-coast a city strong in harbor and walls. But this anxiety galled them, that they did not dare not to summon the Carthaginians to their aid, lest they should seem to have done anything but as allies, and yet, if the Carthaginian should again be rather the arbiter of peace than the helper of war, lest they should fight, as before over the freedom of Locri, so now over the freedom of Croton, in vain. And so it seemed best that envoys be sent to Hannibal, and a pledge had from him that Croton, once taken, should be the Bruttii’s. When Hannibal had answered that this was a matter for those on the spot to decide, and had referred them to Hanno, from Hanno nothing certain was carried off; for he neither wished a noble and wealthy city to be plundered, and hoped that, while the Bruttian besieged it and it was plain that the Carthaginians neither approved nor aided that siege, they would the sooner come over to him. At Croton there was neither one counsel among the people nor one will. One disease, as it were, had invaded all the states of Italy, that the commons were at variance with the leading men, the senate favoring the Romans, the commons dragging the cause toward the Carthaginians. This dissension a deserter announces to the Bruttii: that Aristomachus was the head of the commons and the mover of surrendering the city, and that, in a city wide-spread and with its walls flung far apart, the outposts and watches of the senators were thin; wherever the men of the commons kept guard, there the approach lay open. On the deserter’s word and guidance the Bruttii ringed the city about, and, received by the commons, at the first onset took all save the citadel. The citadel the leading men held, a refuge against just such a chance having been made ready beforehand. To the same place Aristomachus fled, as though it had been to the Carthaginians, not the Bruttii, that he had counseled the surrender of the city.

The city of Croton had a wall reaching twelve miles in circuit before the coming of Pyrrhus into Italy; after the desolation wrought in that war scarce half of it was inhabited; the river, which had once flowed through the middle of the town, flowed now past the quarters thronged with dwellings, and the citadel stood far from the inhabited parts. Six miles distant from the famous city was a temple, more famous than the city itself, the temple of Lacinian Juno, holy to all the peoples round about. There a grove, hedged with a thick wood and tall fir-trees, had rich pastures in its midst, where the sacred herds of the goddess, of every kind, grazed without any herdsman, and the flocks of each several kind returned apart by night to their stalls, never harmed by the lurking of wild beasts nor by the fraud of men. Great gains, therefore, were taken from that herd, and from them a column of solid gold was made and consecrated; and the temple was renowned for its riches too, not for its holiness alone. And some marvels are fastened upon it, as is mostly the way with places so notable: report is that there is an altar in the temple’s vestibule whose ashes are never stirred by any wind. But the citadel of Croton, on one side overhanging the sea, on the other sloping toward the country, had been fortified once by its natural position only, and afterward girt with a wall too on the side where, by the rocks that turn away from it, it had been taken by guile by Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily. In that citadel, secure enough as it seemed, the leading men of the Crotoniates held themselves, besieged even by their own commons along with the Bruttii. At last the Bruttii, when they saw the citadel impregnable to their own strength, were forced by necessity to implore the aid of Hanno. He tried to compel the Crotoniates to surrender on terms that they should suffer a colony of the Bruttii to be settled there and the city, laid waste and deserted by wars, to recover its ancient throng; but of them all he moved none save Aristomachus. They declared that they would die sooner than, mingled with the Bruttii, be changed into alien rites, customs, and laws, and soon into an alien tongue as well. Aristomachus alone, since neither by persuasion had he strength enough to bring about the surrender, nor, as he had betrayed the city, did he find a way of betraying the citadel, deserted to Hanno. The Locrians a little after, having entered the citadel by Hanno’s leave as envoys, persuade the Crotoniates to suffer themselves to be removed to Locri and not to choose to try the uttermost; and this leave they had already won by envoys sent to Hannibal himself for the very purpose. So Croton was abandoned, and the Crotoniates, led down to the sea, go aboard ship; the whole multitude departs to Locri. In Apulia not even the winter was quiet between the Romans and Hannibal. At Luceria the consul Sempronius wintered, Hannibal not far from Arpi. Between them light skirmishes arose, as occasion or advantage of this side or that offered; and the Roman came off the better in them, and day by day grew more cautious and the safer against ambush.

In Sicily the death of Hiero had changed everything for the Romans, and the kingdom had passed to his grandson Hieronymus, a boy scarcely able to bear his liberty with measure, far less his sovereignty. That age, that temper, his guardians and friends took up as means to fling him headlong into every vice. Hiero, foreseeing that things would so fall out, is said in his last old age to have wished to leave Syracuse free, lest under a boy’s despotism a kingdom won and made firm by good arts should perish in mockery. To this purpose of his his daughters opposed themselves with all their might, reckoning that the royal name would rest with the boy, but the rule of all affairs with themselves and their husbands, Adranodorus and Zoippus, who were left as the chief of the guardians. It was not easy for a man already entering on his ninetieth year, beset day and night by women’s blandishments, to free his mind and turn it from private cares to the public good. And so he leaves the boy fifteen guardians only, whom dying he besought that they should keep inviolate the faith toward the Roman people which he himself had cultivated for fifty years, and should wish the youth to walk above all in his own footsteps and in the discipline in which he had been bred. These were his charges. When he had breathed his last, the guardians, the will produced and the boy led forth into the assembly—he was then about fifteen years old—while a few, set throughout the assembly to raise the shouts, approved the will, the rest, as though a father had been lost, in an orphaned state feared all things. The funeral was held, royal, and thronged more by the love and dear regard of the citizens than by the care of his own kin. Soon after Adranodorus removes the rest of the guardians, declaring that Hieronymus was now a youth and master of the kingdom; and, laying down the guardianship which he had shared with several, he turns into his own single self the whole strength of them all.

Scarcely indeed, even for a good and moderate king, would favor have been easy among the Syracusans, succeeding to so great a love for Hiero; but Hieronymus, as though he would by his own vices make his grandfather longed for, showed at the very first sight how unlike all things were. For they who through so many years had seen Hiero and his son Gelo differing in no garb of dress nor in any other mark from the rest of the citizens, beheld purple and a diadem and armed guards, and the king coming forth at times from the palace in a four-horse chariot of white horses, after the manner of Dionysius the tyrant. This so haughty array and bearing was followed, as was fitting, by a contempt of all men, ears too proud to hear, insulting words, audiences rarely granted not to strangers only but even to his guardians, lusts of a new kind, an inhuman cruelty. So great a terror, therefore, had fallen upon all that some of the guardians forestalled the dread of punishment by a voluntary death or by flight. Three of them, to whom alone there was a more familiar access into the house—Adranodorus and Zoippus, sons-in-law of Hiero, and one Thraso—on other matters indeed were not greatly heeded; but, the two leaning toward the Carthaginians and Thraso toward the Roman alliance, by their rivalry and partisanship they sometimes drew the young man’s mind to themselves, when a conspiracy against the tyrant’s life is disclosed by a certain Callo, of Hieronymus’ own age and from boyhood used to every familiar privilege with him. The informer could name but one of the conspirators, Theodotus, by whom he himself had been approached. He, seized forthwith and handed over to Adranodorus for torture, confessed without hesitation as to himself, but hid his accomplices; at last, when he was being torn by every torment unbearable to human endurance, feigning himself overcome by his sufferings, he turned his information away from the guilty onto the innocent, lying that Thraso was the author of the design, and that they would not have dared so great a thing but trusting in so powerful a leader; he added as comrades men of the meanest sort from about the tyrant’s side, such as occurred to him in his pains and groans as he framed his lie. The naming of Thraso made the information most credible to the tyrant’s mind; and so he is at once handed over to punishment, and the rest, no less innocent, added to the penalty. Of the accomplices not one, though their partner in the design was long tortured, either lay hid or fled; so great was their trust in the valor and faith of Theodotus, and so great Theodotus’ own strength to keep the secret hidden.

So, the one bond of alliance with the Romans being now Thraso removed out of the way, the cause looked at once and beyond doubt toward defection, and envoys were sent to Hannibal and sent back by him, along with Hannibal—a young noble—Hippocrates and Epicydes, born at Carthage but sprung from Syracuse on an exiled grandfather’s side, Carthaginians themselves by their mother’s stock. Through these the alliance was joined between Hannibal and the Syracusan tyrant, and, with Hannibal not unwilling, they remained with the tyrant. Appius Claudius the praetor, whose province was Sicily, when he learned this, at once sent envoys to Hieronymus. When they said that they had come to renew the alliance that had been with his grandfather, they were heard and dismissed in mockery, Hieronymus asking in jest what fortune they had had in the fight at Cannae; for, he said, Hannibal’s envoys told things scarce to be believed; he wished to know what was the truth, that from it he might take counsel which hope to follow. The Romans, when he began to hear embassies in earnest, saying that they would return to him, set out, warned rather than asked not to change his faith rashly. Hieronymus sent envoys to Carthage to make a treaty in accordance with the alliance bargained with Hannibal. It was agreed that, when they should have driven the Romans out of Sicily—and that, they said, would be soon, if they sent ships and an army—the river Himera, which divides Sicily about the middle, should be the boundary of the Syracusan kingdom and the Punic empire. Then, puffed up by the flatteries of those who bade him remember not Hiero only but Pyrrhus too, his mother’s grandfather, he sent another embassy, by which he held it fair that all Sicily be yielded to him, and that the empire of Italy be sought for the Carthaginian people as its own. This levity and tossing of spirit they neither wondered at in a frantic youth nor reproved, provided only they might turn him away from the Romans.

But all things in him were headlong toward destruction. For when, Hippocrates and Epicydes sent ahead with two thousand armed men to make trial of the cities held by Roman garrisons, he himself too had set out for Leontini with the rest of the whole army—and they were about fifteen thousand foot and horse—the conspirators (and all of them by chance were serving) took a vacant house overhanging the narrow road by which the king was wont to come down to the forum. There, while the rest stood drawn up and armed, awaiting his passing, to one of them—Dinomenes was his name—because he was of the bodyguard, the part was given that, when the king should draw near the doorway, he should under some pretext hold back the column behind in the narrow way. So it was done as had been agreed. As though he were loosening his lifted foot from a tight knot, Dinomenes, by delaying the throng, made so much of an interval that, when the attack was made upon the king as he passed without his armed men about him, he was run through with several wounds before help could come. When the shout and uproar were heard, javelins are hurled at Dinomenes, now beyond doubt barring the way; yet among them, with two wounds taken, he got off. The flight of the guards was made when they saw the king lying; the murderers, part go to the forum to the multitude rejoicing in liberty, part to Syracuse to forestall the designs of Adranodorus and the other king’s men. Amid the unsettled state of things Appius Claudius, when he saw war arising close at hand, informed the senate by letter that Sicily was being won over to the Carthaginian people and Hannibal; and he himself, against the Syracusan designs, turned all his garrisons to the borders of his province and the kingdom. At the close of that year Quintus Fabius, by authority of the senate, fortified Puteoli—a trading-place that had begun to be frequented through the war—and set a garrison over it. Coming thence to Rome for the elections, on the first election-day that fell he proclaimed the assembly, and from his journey, passing by the city, went down into the Campus. There, when the lot of the prerogative had fallen to the juniors of the Aniensis tribe, and these named Titus Otacilius and Marcus Aemilius Regillus consuls, then Quintus Fabius, silence being made, used a speech of this kind:

"If we had either peace in Italy, or such a war and such an enemy that there were room for some slackness, whoever should offer any hindrance to your zeal—which you bring into the Campus to bestow office on whom you will—would seem to me to remember your liberty too little; but since in this war, against this enemy, there has never by any leader been a slip without our heavy disaster, it befits you to enter on your vote to create consuls with the same care with which you go down armed into the line, and for each to say to himself: ’I name a consul a match for Hannibal the commander.’ This year at Capua, against Vibellius Taurea, the foremost Campanian horseman, who gave the challenge, the foremost Roman horseman, Asellus Claudius, was set; and once, against a Gaul who challenged on the bridge of the Anio, our forefathers sent Titus Manlius, trusting in both his courage and his strength. For the same cause, I would not deny, not many years after, Marcus Valerius was not distrusted, when he took up arms against a Gaul who likewise challenged to combat. As we wish to have our foot and horse stronger than the enemy, or, failing that, equal, so let us seek a commander a match for the enemy’s leader. When we have chosen the man who is the highest leader in the state, yet, chosen on a sudden and created for a year, he will be pitted against a veteran and perpetual commander, shut within no bounds of time or of right to keep him from carrying on and managing all things as the seasons of war shall require; whereas with us the year wheels round in the very preparing and the mere beginning of things. Since enough has been said as to what manner of men it befits you to create consuls, it remains that I say a few words about those toward whom the prerogative’s favor has inclined. Marcus Aemilius Regillus is flamen of Quirinus, whom we can neither send from the sacred rites nor keep back without forsaking either the care of the god or of the war. Titus Otacilius has my sister’s daughter to wife, and children by her; but your services to me and to my forefathers are not such that I should hold private ties dearer than the commonwealth. Any one of the sailors or passengers can steer when the sea is calm; when a wild tempest has risen, and the ship is swept by the wind over a troubled sea, then there is need of a man and a helmsman. We are not sailing on a calm; nay, we have already well-nigh been sunk by several squalls; and so it must be foreseen and forecared by you with the utmost care who shall sit at the helm. In a lesser matter we have made trial of you, Titus Otacilius, and you have given no proof at all why we should trust you for the greater. A fleet, of which you had command this year, we fitted out for three purposes: that it might lay waste the coast of Africa, that the shores of Italy might be safe to us, and, before all, that no reinforcement with pay and supplies might be carried across from Carthage to Hannibal. Create Titus Otacilius consul—I do not say if he furnished all these things to the commonwealth, but if he furnished any one of them. But if, while you held the fleet, things came untouched and whole from home to Hannibal as over a sea at peace, things of which he had no need; if the coast of Italy this year was more beset than that of Africa—what can you say why men should set you, of all others, as leader against Hannibal the enemy? If you were consul, we should hold that a dictator must be named, after the example of our forefathers, nor could you take it ill that some man in the Roman state should be held better in war than you. It concerns no man more than you, Titus Otacilius, that a burden be not laid upon your neck under which you would fall. I greatly urge you, Quirites, that, with the same spirit as if, you standing armed in the line, two commanders had on a sudden to be chosen under whose leadership and auspices you should fight, so today too you create consuls to whom your sons shall swear the soldier’s oath, at whose edict they shall muster, under whose protection and care they shall serve. The lake of Trasimene and Cannae are examples sad to recall, but profitable as a warning to take heed against the like. Crier, call back the juniors of the Aniensis tribe to the vote."

When Titus Otacilius fiercely cried out and clamored that Fabius wished to continue his own consulship, the consul bade the lictors approach him, and—because he had not entered the city, but had set out from his journey straight into the Campus—reminded him that the fasces were borne before him with the axes. Meanwhile the prerogative entered on its vote, and there were created consuls in it Quintus Fabius Maximus for the fourth time, Marcus Marcellus for the third. The same consuls the rest of the centuries named without any variation; and one praetor was re-elected, Quintus Fulvius Flaccus; new ones created, Titus Otacilius Crassus for the second time, Quintus Fabius the consul’s son, who was then curule aedile, and Publius Cornelius Lentulus. The elections of praetors finished, a decree of the senate was passed that to Quintus Fulvius the city province should fall out of order, and that he above all should preside over the city when the consuls had set out to the war. Great floods came twice that year, and the Tiber overflowed the fields with a great ruin of buildings and destruction of cattle and men. In the fifth year of the Second Punic War, Quintus Fabius Maximus for the fourth time and Marcus Claudius Marcellus for the third, entering on the consulship, had turned upon themselves the minds of the citizens more than was wont; for in many years there had been no such pair of consuls. The old men recalled that thus Maximus Rullus with Publius Decius had been declared consuls for the Gallic war, thus afterward Papirius and Carvilius against the Samnites and Bruttii and the Lucanian with the Tarentine people. Marcellus was created consul in his absence, being with the army; to Fabius, present and himself holding the elections, the consulship was continued. The time and the necessity of the war and the crisis of the whole state made it that no one either sought out the precedent or held the consul suspected of greed for power; nay, rather they praised his greatness of spirit, that, knowing the commonwealth had need of the highest commander and that he himself beyond doubt was that man, he had counted the unpopularity that might arise from it of less weight than the good of the commonwealth.

On the day the consuls entered on their magistracy, the senate was held on the Capitol, and it was decreed first of all that the consuls should cast lots or agree between them which should hold the elections for choosing censors before he set out to the army. Then the command was prolonged to all who were with the armies, and they were bidden to remain in their provinces: Tiberius Gracchus at Luceria, where he was with the army of slave-volunteers; Gaius Terentius Varro in the Picene country; Marcus Pomponius in the Gallic; and of the previous year’s praetors, as propraetors, Quintus Mucius should hold Sardinia, and Marcus Valerius preside over the seacoast about Brundisium, watchful against all movements of Philip, king of the Macedonians. To Publius Cornelius Lentulus the praetor Sicily was decreed as his province, to Titus Otacilius the same fleet which he had held the year before against the Carthaginians. Many prodigies were reported that year, and the more the simple and religious men believed them, the more were reported: that at Lanuvium, within the temple of Juno Sospita, ravens had made a nest; that in Apulia a green palm had caught fire; that at Mantua a pool overflowed from the river Mincius was seen blood-red; that at Cales it had rained chalk, and at Rome in the cattle-market blood; that in the Insteian quarter a spring beneath the earth had flowed with such force of waters that it had rolled away the jars and casks that were in that place, as by the rush of a torrent; that the public hall on the Capitol had been struck from heaven, and the temple in the Campus of Vulcan, and the temple of Vacuna among the Sabines, and the public road, and the wall and gate at Gabii. Then other marvels were noised abroad: that the spear of Mars at Praeneste had moved of its own accord; that an ox had spoken in Sicily; that an infant in its mother’s womb among the Marrucini had cried "io triumphe"; that at Spoletium a woman had been turned into a man; that at Hadria an altar had been seen in the sky, and shapes of men in white robes around it. Nay, at Rome too, in the very city, after a swarm of bees was seen in the forum—which is a marvel, because it is rare—certain men, affirming that they saw armed legions on the Janiculum, roused the state to arms, though those who were on the Janiculum denied that any one had appeared there save the wonted tillers of that hill. These prodigies were expiated with full-grown victims by the response of the soothsayers, and a supplication was proclaimed to all the gods whose couches were at Rome.

When the things that pertained to the peace of the gods had been performed, the consuls laid before the senate the matter of the commonwealth and of the conduct of the war, and how great were the forces and where each was. It was resolved that the war be carried on with eighteen legions: that the consuls take two apiece; that with two each Gaul, Sicily, and Sardinia be held; that of two the praetor Quintus Fabius command in Apulia, of two of slave-volunteers Tiberius Gracchus about Luceria; that single legions be left to Gaius Terentius the proconsul about Picenum and to Marcus Valerius for the fleet about Brundisium, and that two be a garrison to the city. That this number of legions might be filled up, six new legions had to be enrolled. These the consuls were bidden to enroll at the first opportunity, and to make ready a fleet, so that, with the ships which were on station off the shores of Calabria, a fleet of a hundred and fifty warships might be made up that year. The levy held and a hundred new ships launched, Quintus Fabius held the elections for choosing censors; there were created Marcus Atilius Regulus and Publius Furius Philus. When the rumor grew that there was war in Sicily, Titus Otacilius was ordered to set out thither with the fleet. Since sailors were lacking, the consuls by decree of the senate proclaimed that whoever, in the censorship of Lucius Aemilius and Gaius Flaminius, had been rated—himself or his father—at fifty thousand asses up to a hundred thousand, or had since had a property made so great, should furnish one sailor with six months’ pay; whoever above a hundred thousand up to three hundred thousand, three sailors with a year’s pay; whoever above three hundred thousand up to a million asses, five sailors; whoever above a million, seven; and that senators should furnish eight sailors with a year’s pay. By this edict the sailors were furnished, armed and equipped by their masters, and went aboard the ships with thirty days’ cooked rations. Then for the first time it came about that the Roman fleet was manned with naval crews provided at private cost.

This preparation, greater than usual, chiefly terrified the Campanians, lest the Romans should begin the war of that year with the siege of Capua. And so they sent envoys to Hannibal to beg that he would move his army up to Capua: that new armies were being enrolled at Rome to besiege it, and that the minds of the Romans were more hostile to the defection of no city than to theirs. Because they announced this so anxiously, Hannibal, judging that he must make haste lest the Romans forestall him, set out from Arpi and sat down at Tifata, in his old camp above Capua. Thence, leaving the Numidians and Spaniards to guard both the camp and Capua at once, with the rest of the army he came down to Lake Avernus, under show of sacrificing, but in fact to make trial of Puteoli and the garrison that was there. Maximus, after it was brought word that Hannibal had set out from Arpi and was returning into Campania, breaking off his march neither by day nor by night, returns to the army, and bids Tiberius Gracchus move his forces from Luceria to Beneventum, and Quintus Fabius the praetor—he was the consul’s son—succeed Gracchus at Luceria. Into Sicily at the same time two praetors set out, Publius Cornelius to the army, Titus Otacilius to take charge of the seacoast and the naval affair; and the rest set out each into his own province, and those whose command had been prolonged held the same regions as the year before.

To Hannibal, while he was at Lake Avernus, there came five noble youths from Tarentum, captured part at the Trasimene lake, part at Cannae, and sent home with the same courtesy that the Carthaginian had used toward all the allies of the Romans. They, mindful of his kindnesses, report that they had brought a great part of the Tarentine youth to prefer Hannibal’s friendship and alliance to that of the Roman people; and they ask, as envoys sent by their fellows, that Hannibal move his army nearer to Tarentum: if his standards, if his camp, should be seen from Tarentum, no delay would intervene but that the city would come into surrender; the commons were in the power of the younger men, and the Tarentine state in the hand of the commons. Hannibal, having greatly praised them and loaded them with vast promises, bids them go home to hasten what they had begun: he would be there in good season. With this hope the Tarentines were dismissed. Upon himself a vast longing had come to possess Tarentum. He saw that the city was at once wealthy and noble, and a maritime one, and conveniently turned toward Macedonia, and that King Philip, if he crossed into Italy, would make for this harbor, since the Romans held Brundisium. The sacrifice done for which he had come, and, while he tarried there, the Cumaean country laid waste as far as the promontory of Misenum, he suddenly turned his column to crush the Roman garrison at Puteoli. There were six thousand men, and the place was secure by fortification too, not by nature only. Three days the Carthaginian tarried there, having made trial of the garrison on every side; then, when nothing went forward, he advanced to ravage the Neapolitan country, more in anger than in hope of getting the city. At his coming into the near country the commons of Nola were stirred, long since estranged from the Romans and hostile to their own senate. And so envoys came to summon Hannibal, with an undoubted promise of surrendering the city. But Marcellus the consul, called in by the chief men, forestalled their attempt. In one day he had pressed on from Cales to Suessula, though the river Volturnus had delayed him in the crossing; and thence, the next night, he sent into Nola six thousand foot and three hundred horse to be a garrison to the senate. And as all things were done briskly by the consul to occupy Nola first, so Hannibal wasted the time, grown slower to believe the Nolans, the thing having now twice before been attempted in vain.

In those same days both Quintus Fabius the consul came to make trial of Casilinum, which was held by a Punic garrison, and—as though by concert—at Beneventum on the one side Hanno from the Bruttii with a great band of foot and horse, on the other Tiberius Gracchus from Luceria, drew near. Gracchus first entered the town; then, when he heard that Hanno had pitched his camp about three miles from the city by the river Calor and was ravaging the country from there, he too went out of the walls and placed his camp about a mile from the enemy. There he held an assembly of the soldiers. His legions were for the great part of slave-volunteers, who for a second year now had chosen rather to earn their liberty in silence than to demand it openly. Yet he had perceived, as he came out of winter quarters, that there was a murmur in the column of men asking whether they should ever serve as free men, and he had written to the senate not so much what they desired as what they had deserved: that he had used their good and brave service down to that day, and that, to make them the pattern of true soldiers, they lacked nothing but liberty. On this it had been left to him to do what he should judge to be for the commonwealth. And so, before he joined hands with the enemy, he proclaims that the time had come for them to gain the liberty they had so long hoped for: on the next day he would fight a pitched battle on a clear and open plain, where, with no fear of ambush, the thing could be done by true valor. Whoever should bring back the head of an enemy, him he would at once order to be free; whoever should give ground, on him he would visit a slave’s punishment: each man’s fortune was in his own hand. The author of their liberty would be not he alone, but the consul Marcus Marcellus, but all the fathers, whom, consulted by him concerning their liberty, had left the matter to him. Then he read out the consul’s letter and the decree of the senate, at which a shout was raised with great applause. They demanded battle, and fiercely pressed him to give the signal at once. Gracchus, the battle proclaimed for the next day, dismissed the assembly; the soldiers, glad—above all those for whom the wage of their day’s service done was to be liberty—spend the rest of the day in making their arms ready.

The next day, when the trumpets began to sound, the first of all, ready and equipped, gather at the headquarters. At sunrise Gracchus led the forces out into the line, nor did the enemy make any delay of battle. There were seventeen thousand foot, for the greatest part Bruttii and Lucanians, twelve hundred horse, among whom very few Italians, the rest almost all Numidians and Moors. The fight was both fierce and long: for four hours the battle inclined to neither side, nor did anything hinder the Roman more than that the heads of the enemy had been made the price of liberty. For as each man had briskly slain an enemy, first he wasted time in hardly cutting off the head amid the throng and tumult; then, his right hand taken up with holding the head, the bravest fighters ceased to fight, and the battle was handed over to the slack and the timid. When the tribunes of the soldiers reported this to Gracchus—that no enemy now standing was being wounded, but the fallen were being butchered, and that in the soldiers’ right hands were human heads instead of swords—he bade the signal be given speedily that they should throw away the heads and fall upon the enemy: their valor was bright and notable enough, and their liberty would not be in doubt for brave men. Then the fight was renewed, and the cavalry too were sent against the enemy; and when the Numidians had met them briskly, and the horse-fight was no slacker than the foot, the matter was brought a second time into doubt. When on either side the leaders disparaged the foe in words—the Roman the Bruttian and the Lucanian, so often conquered and subdued by his forefathers, the Carthaginian Roman slaves and soldiers out of the workhouse—at last Gracchus proclaims that there was nothing for which they should hope of liberty, unless that day the enemy were routed and put to flight.

That word at last so kindled their spirits that, with the shout renewed, as though made suddenly other men, they flung themselves with such force upon the enemy that they could no longer be withstood. First the front-rankers of the Carthaginians, then the standards were thrown into disorder, at last the whole line was driven back; thereupon beyond doubt they gave their backs, and the fleeing rush into the camp so panic-struck and trembling that not even at the gates or the rampart did any stand his ground, and the Romans, following in almost unbroken column, began a new battle afresh, the enemy shut within their own rampart. There, as the fight was the more hampered in the narrow space, so the slaughter was the more ghastly; and the captives helped, who, snatching up swords in the tumult and massing together, both cut down the Carthaginians from behind and hindered their flight. And so fewer than two thousand men out of so great an army, and those the greater part cavalry, escaped with the leader himself; all the rest were slain or taken; thirty-eight standards too were taken. Of the victors about two thousand fell. All the booty, save the captives taken, was granted to the soldiery; and the cattle were excepted which the owners should recognize within thirty days. When they had returned to the camp laden with booty, about four thousand of the slave-volunteer soldiers, who had fought too sluggishly and had not burst into the camp along with the rest, in fear of punishment seized a hill not far from the camp. The next day, brought down thence by the tribunes of the soldiers, they come upon the assembly of the soldiers called by Gracchus. There, when the proconsul had first honored the veteran soldiers with military gifts, each according to his valor and service in that battle, then, as touching the volunteers, he said that he would rather all of them, deserving and undeserving, were praised by him than that any one were that day chastised; and, that it might be good, lucky, and happy for the commonwealth and for themselves, he bade them all to be free. At which word, when a shout was raised with vast eagerness, and now embracing one another and giving thanks, now lifting their hands to heaven, they prayed all good things for the Roman people and for Gracchus himself, then Gracchus said: "Before I had made you all equal in the right of liberty, I would mark no man with the brand of a brave or a craven soldier; now, the public faith already discharged, lest all distinction of valor and cowardice should perish, I will order the names to be reported to me of those who, remembering their shirking of the fight, made the secession a little while ago, and, calling them up one by one, I will bind them by oath—unless sickness be the cause—to take their food and drink in no other way than standing, so long as they serve. This fine you will bear with the more even temper if you reflect that you could have been marked with no lighter brand of cowardice." Then he gave the signal to gather the baggage; and the soldiers, carrying and driving their booty in sport and jest, came back to Beneventum so playfully that they seemed to be returning not from a battle-line but from a banquet on some thronged and festal day. The Beneventans, all pouring out in a crowd to meet them at the gates, embrace the soldiers, congratulate them, invite them to their hospitality. Banquets had been made ready for all in the open courts of the houses; to these they invited them, and begged Gracchus to let the soldiers feast; and Gracchus so permitted, that all should feast in public, each before his own doors. Everything was brought out. Capped, or with white wool veiling their heads, the volunteers feasted, some reclining, some standing, who at once served and ate. The thing seemed worthy that Gracchus, after he returned to Rome, should have a picture of that day’s celebration painted in the temple of Liberty, which his father had built on the Aventine out of fine-money and dedicated.

While these things were doing at Beneventum, Hannibal, having laid waste the Neapolitan country, moves his camp to Nola. When the consul perceived him drawing near, having summoned Pomponius the propraetor with the army that was in the camp above Suessula, he prepares to go to meet the enemy and to make no delay of fighting. Gaius Claudius Nero, with the flower of the cavalry, he sends out in the silence of night by the gate most turned away from the enemy, and bids him, having ridden round secretly, follow the enemy’s column slowly, and, when he should see the battle joined, throw himself upon their rear. Whether by an error of the roads or by shortness of time Nero could not carry this out is uncertain. The battle being joined in his absence, the Roman was indeed beyond doubt the superior; but because the cavalry were not present in time, the plan of the ordered operation was thrown into confusion. Marcellus, not daring to pursue the yielding foe, gave his victorious men the signal for retreat. Yet more than two thousand of the enemy are said to have been slain that day, of the Romans fewer than four hundred. About sunset Nero, having to no purpose wearied horses and men day and night, returning without even having seen the enemy, was so heavily upbraided by the consul that it was said it had stood through him that the disaster suffered at Cannae was not repaid to the enemy. The next day the Roman went down into the line; the Carthaginian, beaten even by his silent confession, kept himself in camp. On the third day, in the silence of night, abandoning the hope of getting Nola—a thing never prosperously attempted—he sets out for Tarentum to a surer hope of betrayal.

With no less spirit was the Roman cause carried on at home than in the field. The censors, free from the care of letting out works because of the emptiness of the treasury, turned their minds to regulating the morals of men and to chastising the vices which, as sick bodies breed out of themselves in long diseases, had sprung up from that war. First they cited those who, after the disaster of Cannae, were said to have planned to forsake the commonwealth. The chief of them, Marcus Caecilius Metellus, was then by chance quaestor. Then, he and the rest guilty of the same fault being bidden to plead their cause, when they could not clear themselves, it was pronounced that they had uttered words and speech against the commonwealth, to the end that a conspiracy might be made to desert Italy. After them were cited the over-cunning interpreters of how to be quit of an oath, who, having turned back on the road from the captives, secretly went into Hannibal’s camp, and reckoned that they had thereby discharged the oath they had sworn, to return. From these and from the former their horses were taken away who had a public horse, and they were all moved from their tribe and made aerarii. Nor did the censors’ care hold itself to the ordering of the senate or the equestrian order alone. They culled from the rolls of the juniors the names of all who had not served for four years, for whom there was neither a lawful exemption from service nor sickness as a cause; and these, above two thousand names, were entered among the aerarii and all moved from their tribe; and to this grim brand of the censor was added a stern decree of the senate, that all whom the censors had marked should serve on foot and be sent into Sicily to the remnants of the army of Cannae—a kind of soldiery for whom the term of service was not ended before the enemy was driven from Italy. When the censors, because of the emptiness of the treasury, were now abstaining from the contracts for the upkeep of the sacred buildings and the furnishing of the curule horses and the like, those who were used to such auctions gathered to them in throngs and urged the censors to manage and let out everything just as if there were money in the treasury: no man, they said, would seek money from the treasury before the war was finished. Then gathered the owners of those whom Tiberius Sempronius had set free at Beneventum, and said that they had been summoned by the commissioners of the bank to receive the prices of their slaves; but that they would not receive them before the war was finished. While this inclination of the commons toward sustaining the emptiness of the treasury was being shown, the moneys of wards first, then of widows, began to be paid in, those who brought them believing that nowhere could they be deposited more safely or more sacredly than in the public faith; thereafter, if anything were bought or provided for the wards and widows, it was entered to their account by the quaestor. This generosity of private men spread from the city even into the camp, so that no knight, no centurion would take his pay, and they reproached as a hireling whoever took it.

Quintus Fabius the consul kept his camp at Casilinum, which was held by a garrison of two thousand Campanians and seven hundred of Hannibal’s soldiers. Over them was Statius Metius, sent by Gnaeus Magius the Atellan, who that year was medix tuticus and had armed slaves and commons indiscriminately to assault the Roman camp while the consul was intent on besieging Casilinum. None of this escaped Fabius. And so he sends to his colleague at Nola: there was need, while Casilinum was besieged, of a second army to be set against the Campanians; either let him come himself, leaving a modest garrison at Nola, or, if Nola held him and matters were not yet safe from Hannibal, he would summon Tiberius Gracchus the proconsul from Beneventum. At this message Marcellus, two thousand soldiers being left in garrison at Nola, came with the rest of the army to Casilinum; and at his coming the Campanians, already bestirring themselves, kept quiet. So Casilinum began to be besieged by the two consuls. There, when the Roman soldiers, rashly coming up to the walls, were taking many wounds, and the undertaking went forward little enough, Fabius judged that the small matter, as hard as great ones, must be let go, and that they should withdraw from it, since greater matters pressed; but Marcellus, by saying that to great leaders, as there were many things not to be attempted, so were there things, once attempted, not to be let go, because great weights of fame fell to either side, prevailed that they should not depart with the undertaking unaccomplished. Then, when sheds and all the other kinds of works and engines were being brought up, and the Campanians begged Fabius that they might be allowed to withdraw safely to Capua, a few having gone out, Marcellus seized the gate by which they were going out, and a slaughter began to be made, first of all indiscriminately about the gate, then, a breaking-in having been made, in the city too. About fifty of the Campanians who had first gone out, having fled to Fabius, came under his protection to Capua: Casilinum, amid the parleys and the hesitation of those who sought a pledge, was taken as occasion offered; and the captives, both Campanians and those who were of Hannibal’s soldiers, were sent to Rome and there shut up in prison; the throng of the townsfolk was distributed for keeping among the neighboring peoples.

In the days in which the withdrawal from Casilinum was made, the affair well managed, Gracchus in Lucania sent some cohorts levied in that region, with a prefect of the allies, into the enemy’s fields to plunder. These, scattered at large, Hanno fell upon and dealt the enemy a disaster not much less than he had himself received at Beneventum, and withdrew in haste into Bruttium, lest Gracchus overtake him. Of the consuls, Marcellus returned to Nola, whence he had come; Fabius advanced into the Samnites to lay waste their fields and recover by arms the cities that had revolted. The Caudine Samnite was the more heavily devastated: the fields were burned far and wide, plunder of cattle and men was driven off; the towns Compulteria, Telesia, and then Compsa were taken by storm, and Fugifulae and Orbitanium of the Lucanians, and Blanda, and Aecae of the Apulians, assaulted. In these cities twenty-five thousand of the enemy were taken or slain, and three hundred and seventy deserters recovered; whom, when the consul had sent them to Rome, they were all beaten with rods in the comitium and cast down from the rock. These things were done by Quintus Fabius within a few days; Marcellus ill health kept at Nola from action. And by the praetor Quintus Fabius, whose province was about Luceria, the town of Acuca was taken by storm in those days, and a standing camp fortified at Ardoneae. While these things were done by the Romans in other places, Hannibal had by now reached Tarentum, with the utmost ruin wherever he had gone; in the Tarentine territory at last his column began to march at peace. Nothing there was harmed, nor was the road anywhere departed from, and it was plain that this was done not from the moderation of the soldiers or the leader, save to win the goodwill of the Tarentines. But when he had drawn near almost to the walls, no movement being made at the first sight of the column, as he had reckoned, he placed his camp about a mile from the city. At Tarentum, three days before Hannibal drew near the walls, Marcus Livius, sent by Marcus Valerius the propraetor, who commanded the fleet at Brundisium, having briskly enrolled the youth and posted guards at all the gates and round the walls where the case demanded, intent day and night alike, gave neither to the enemy nor to the wavering allies any opening for an attempt. When some days had been spent there in vain, Hannibal, since none of those who had come to him at Lake Avernus either came themselves or sent message or letter, perceiving that he had rashly followed empty promises, moved his camp thence, then too leaving the Tarentine country untouched—although his feigned mildness had as yet profited him nothing, he did not desist from the hope of shaking their faith. When he came to Salapia, he gathers grain from the fields of Metapontum and Heraclea—for now the summer was spent, and the place pleased him for winter quarters. Thence the Numidians and Moors were sent out to plunder through the Sallentine country and the nearest glades of Apulia; whence of other booty there was not much, but droves of horses chiefly were driven off, of which about four thousand were divided among the horsemen to be broken.

The Romans, since a war by no means to be despised was arising in Sicily, and the death of the tyrant had given the Syracusans more energetic leaders rather than changed their cause or their temper, decree that province to Marcus Marcellus, one of the consuls. Just after the slaying of Hieronymus there had at first been a tumult among the soldiers at Leontini, and a fierce outcry that the king’s spirit must be appeased with the blood of the conspirators. Then the name of liberty restored, sweet to hear, often repeated, with hope held out of largess from the royal money and of serving under better leaders; and the recital of the tyrant’s foul crimes and his fouler lusts so changed their minds that they suffered the body of the king, a little before so regretted, to lie unburied. While the rest of the conspirators remained to hold the army, Theodotus and Sosis, on the royal horses, at the utmost speed they could, that they might overwhelm the king’s party unaware of all, hasten to Syracuse. But report had outrun them—than which in such matters nothing is swifter—and a messenger too from among the royal slaves. And so Adranodorus had made strong with garrisons the Island and the citadel and the other places he could and that were of advantage. Theodotus and Sosis, borne in through the Hexapylon after sunset in the now dim light, showing the king’s bloodstained robe and the badge of his head, having ridden across through Tycha, calling men at once to liberty and to arms, bid them gather in Achradina. The multitude, part ran out into the streets, part stood in the porches, part looked forth from roofs and windows and kept asking what the matter was. All things blaze with lights and are filled with various uproar. The armed gather in the open places; the unarmed pluck down from the temple of Olympian Jupiter the spoils of the Gauls and Illyrians, given as a gift to Hiero by the Roman people and fixed up by him, praying Jupiter that he would willingly and graciously grant them sacred arms for their country, for the shrines of the gods, for liberty, as they armed themselves. This multitude too is joined to the guards posted throughout the quarters of the city by the leading men. In the Island, among other things, Adranodorus had made strong with garrisons the public granaries. The place, hedged with squared stone and fortified in the manner of a citadel, is seized by the youth that had been assigned to its garrison, and they send messengers into Achradina that the granaries and the grain were in the power of the senate.

At first light all the people, armed and unarmed, gathered in Achradina at the senate-house. There, before the altar of Concord, which stood in that place, one of the leading men, Polyaenus by name, made a speech both free and moderate: that men who had felt the burden and the indignities of slavery were stirred up against a known evil; what disasters civil discord brings, the Syracusans had heard from their fathers rather than themselves seen. That they had taken up arms briskly he praised; he would praise it the more if they did not use them save when forced by the last necessity. For the present it was his counsel that envoys be sent to Adranodorus to bid him be in the power of the senate and people, open the gates of the Island, and give up the garrison. If he should wish to make the guardianship of another’s kingdom his own kingdom, he was of opinion that liberty should be demanded of Adranodorus far more sharply than from Hieronymus. From this assembly envoys were sent. Then the senate began to be held, which, as it had remained a public council under Hiero’s reign, so after his death down to that day had on no matter been either convened or consulted. When it was come to Adranodorus, he was indeed moved both by the citizens’ consent and by the fact that, while the other parts of the city were occupied, that part of the Island which was the most strongly fortified had been betrayed and alienated; but Damarata his wife, daughter of Hiero, puffed up still with a queen’s spirit and a woman’s pride, called him aside from the envoys and reminds him of the saying of Dionysius the tyrant often repeated, that a man ought to leave his tyranny dragged out by the feet, not seated on a horse: it was easy in a moment, when one wished, to yield possession of a great fortune; to make and prepare it was hard and toilsome. Let him take time from the envoys for deliberating; let him use it to summon the soldiers from Leontini, to whom, if he should promise the royal money, all things would be in his power. These womanish counsels Adranodorus neither wholly spurned nor at once accepted, judging the safer way to grasping at power to be that he should for the present yield to the time. And so he bade the envoys carry back word that he would be in the power of the senate and people. The next day at first light, the gates of the Island thrown open, he came into the forum of Achradina. There he mounted the altar of Concord, from which the day before Polyaenus had spoken, and began that speech in which first he begged pardon for his hesitation: for he had kept the gates shut, not parting his own interest from the public, but fearing, the swords once drawn, what end there would be to the killings—whether, content with the death of the tyrant, which would be enough for liberty, they should rest, or whether all who by kinship or marriage or any services had touched the palace should be butchered, guilty of another’s fault. After he had perceived that those who had freed their country wished also to keep it freed, and that on all sides counsel was being taken for the common good, he had not doubted to restore both his own person and all else that was in his faith and keeping to his country, since his own madness had carried off him who had entrusted them. Then, turning to the slayers of the tyrant and calling Theodotus and Sosis by name, "You have done," he said, "a memorable deed; but, believe me, your glory is begun, not yet finished, and a vast peril remains, unless you take thought for peace and concord, lest the commonwealth be carried free to its grave."

After this speech he laid the keys of the gates and of the royal treasury before their feet. And on that day at least they were dismissed from the assembly glad, and made supplication round all the shrines of the gods with their wives and children; on the next day the elections were held for choosing praetors. Adranodorus was created among the first, the rest for the most part slayers of the tyrant. Two also they made in their absence, Sopater and Dinomenes; who, on hearing what had been done at Syracuse, had the royal money that was at Leontini carried down to Syracuse and handed over to the quaestors created for that very purpose. And that which was in the Island was transferred to Achradina; and that part of the wall which fenced off the Island from the rest of the city with too strong a fortification was, by the consent of all, thrown down. The other matters too followed this inclination of men’s minds toward liberty. Hippocrates and Epicydes, on hearing of the tyrant’s death—which Hippocrates had even wished to hide by killing the messenger—being deserted by the soldiers, because this seemed the safest course in the present case, returned to Syracuse; where, lest they should move about under suspicion as men seeking some occasion of revolution, they approach first the praetors, then through them the senate. They declare that they had been sent by Hannibal to Hieronymus as a friend and ally, and had obeyed the command of him whom their own commander had wished; that they wished to return to Hannibal; but, since the road was not safe with the Romans roving everywhere over all Sicily, they ask that some escort be given them by which they may be brought to Locri in Italy: they would win great favor with Hannibal by a small service. The thing was easily granted; for men were eager that the king’s leaders should depart, both skilled in war and at the same time needy and bold; but what they wished they did not briskly carry out with the speed that was needed. Meanwhile the young men, soldierly and used to the soldiers, now among the soldiers themselves, now among the deserters—of whom the greatest part was from the naval allies of the Romans—now even among the men of the lowest commons, sowed charges against the senate and the aristocrats: that those men were secretly plotting and contriving that Syracuse, under show of a renewed alliance, should be in the dominion of the Romans, and then that a faction and the few authors of the renewed treaty should lord it.

For the hearing and believing of these things a multitude, flowing into Syracuse greater day by day, offered an opportunity, and held out hope of revolution not to Epicydes alone but to Adranodorus too. He, wearied at last by the words of his wife, who warned him that now was the time for seizing power, while all things were disordered by a new and unformed liberty, while the soldier, fed on the king’s pay, was still at hand, and while the leaders sent by Hannibal, used to the soldiers, could help his designs, having joined the matter with Themistus, to whom Gelo’s daughter was wed, a few days after incautiously discloses it to one Aristo, a tragic actor, to whom he had been wont to commit other secrets as well. To this man both birth and fortune were honorable, nor did his art disfigure them, because among the Greeks nothing of that kind is a shame; and so, holding the faith he owed his country the stronger, he carries the information to the praetors. When they had learned by sure proofs that the matter was not idle, the elder men being consulted, and on their authority a guard set at the doors, they killed Themistus and Adranodorus as they entered the senate-house; and when a tumult, from the thing more dreadful in show, had arisen, the cause being unknown to the rest, at last, silence being made, they brought the informer into the senate-house. When he had set forth all in order—that the beginning of the conspiracy had been made at the marriage of Harmonia, Gelo’s daughter, by which she had been joined to Themistus; that the African and Spanish auxiliaries had been made ready for the slaughter of the praetors and the other leading men, and that it had been proclaimed that their goods should be plunder for the slayers; that already a band of the mercenaries, used to the commands of Adranodorus, had been ready to seize the Island again—then, point by point, he set before their eyes what was being done by each man and the whole conspiracy equipped with men and arms. And to the senate at least they seemed as justly slain as Hieronymus: before the senate-house was the clamor of the various and uncertain multitude. But the bodies of the conspirators, fiercely threatening, in the vestibule of the senate-house so checked them with fear that they followed in silence the unharmed commons into the assembly. To Sopater it was entrusted by the senate and by his colleagues to make the speech.

He, as though prosecuting accused men, beginning from their former life, charged that whatever had been done wickedly and impiously since Hiero’s death had been done by Adranodorus and Themistus: for what could Hieronymus, a boy and scarce yet of age, have done of his own accord? His guardians and tutors had reigned under another’s hatred. And so they ought to have perished either before Hieronymus or at least with Hieronymus. But those men, already owed and destined to death, had contrived other new crimes after the tyrant’s death: at first openly, when Adranodorus, the gates of the Island shut, had entered upon the inheritance of the kingdom and held as master what he had held as steward; then, betrayed by those who were in the Island, besieged by the whole state that held Achradina, having in vain sought the kingdom openly and plainly, had tried to grasp at it secretly and by guile, and could not be overcome even by kindness and honor, when, among the liberators of their country, the very plotter against liberty had been made praetor. But it was royal wives that had given them royal spirits, the daughters of Hiero and of Gelo wedded to the one and the other. At this word a shout rises from all parts of the assembly that none of those women ought to live, nor any of the tyrants’ stock survive. Such is the nature of the multitude: either it serves humbly or lords it haughtily; liberty, which is the mean, they know neither to set up with moderation nor to keep; and there are not commonly wanting ministers indulgent to their angers, who goad on to blood and slaughter spirits greedy and immoderate of punishments. So then at once the praetors promulgated a bill—and it was passed almost before it was promulgated—that all of the royal stock should be slain; and men sent by the praetors killed Damarata, Hiero’s daughter, and Harmonia, Gelo’s daughter, wives of Adranodorus and Themistus.

Heraclia was Hiero’s daughter, wife of Zoippus, who, sent by Hieronymus as envoy to King Ptolemy, had taken upon himself a voluntary exile. She, when she had learned beforehand that men were coming to her too, fled into the shrine to the household gods with her two maiden daughters, her hair unbound and in other piteous guise, and to these added prayers, now by the gods, now by the memory of her father Hiero and her brother Gelo, that they would not suffer her, guiltless, to be consumed in the hatred of Hieronymus: from his reign she had nothing but her husband’s exile; neither had her fortune, while Hieronymus lived, been the same as her sister’s, nor, now he was slain, was her case the same. What of this, that, if Adranodorus’ designs had gone forward, her sister would have reigned with her husband, while she must serve with the rest? If anyone should announce to Zoippus that Hieronymus was slain and Syracuse freed, who could doubt that he would at once go aboard ship and return to his country? How far the hopes of men are deceived! In the freed country his wife and children were struggling for their lives—and how were they standing in the way of liberty or the laws? What peril was there to anyone from her, a lone and well-nigh widowed woman, and from girls living in orphanhood? But indeed, though nothing of peril was feared from them, yet the royal stock was hateful. Let them, then, send them far from Syracuse and Sicily, and bid them be carried to Alexandria—the wife to her husband, the daughters to their father. With ears and minds turned away, and lest they waste time, she saw certain of them making ready the steel; then, ceasing her prayers for herself, she began to beg that they would at least spare the girls, from which age even angry enemies hold their hands; that, in avenging tyrants, they should not themselves imitate the crimes they had hated. Amid these words she is dragged from the inner shrine and her throat cut. Then they make an onset upon the maidens, sprinkled with their mother’s blood, who, their minds estranged at once by grief and fear, as though seized by frenzy, rushed out of the shrine with such a course that, had there been an opening of escape into the public street, they would have filled the city with uproar. Then too, in no great space of the house, among so many armed men they several times got through with bodies untouched, and tore themselves from those that held them, when there were so many and so strong hands to be struggled against. At last, worn out with wounds, when they had filled all things with blood, they fell down lifeless. The slaughter, piteous in itself, was made the more piteous by chance, because a little after came a messenger, men’s minds being suddenly changed to mercy, that they should not be slain. Then anger arose out of mercy, that men had hastened so to the punishment, and that no room for repenting or for drawing back from anger had been left. And so the multitude murmured, and demanded elections in the place of Adranodorus and Themistus—for both had been praetors—which would by no means be according to the praetors’ mind.

A day was fixed for the elections; on which, while all least expected it, one out of the farthest of the crowd named Epicydes, then another from there Hippocrates. These voices then grew more frequent, and with the undoubted assent of the multitude; and the assembly was confused, with a crowd not of citizens only but of soldiers too, mingled in great part with deserters as well, who longed to overturn everything. The praetors at first dissembled, drawing the matter out; but at last, overcome by the consent and fearing sedition, they proclaim those men praetors. Nor did they, at first straightway on their election, lay bare what they wished, although they took it ill both that envoys had gone about a ten days’ truce to Appius Claudius, and that, this being obtained, others had been sent to treat of renewing the old treaty. At Murgantia the Roman then had a fleet of a hundred ships, watching to what issue the disturbances arisen at Syracuse from the slaughters of the tyrants would come out, or whither the new and unwonted liberty would drive them. In those same days, when envoys of the Syracusans, sent by Appius, had come to Marcellus on his arrival in Sicily, Marcellus, the terms of peace heard, reckoning that the matter could be agreed, both himself sent envoys to Syracuse to treat face to face with the praetors of renewing the treaty. And now there was there by no means the same quiet and calm. After it was brought word that a Punic fleet had come to Pachynus, fear being removed, Hippocrates and Epicydes, now among the mercenary soldiers, now among the deserters, charged that Syracuse was being betrayed to the Roman. But when Appius began to keep his ships on station at the mouth of the harbor, that courage might be added to the men of the other party, great credit in show had accrued to the empty charges; and at first the multitude had even run down in a tumult to prevent them, if they should come out upon the land.

In this disorder of things it seemed best to call an assembly; where, when men leaned different ways and the matter was not far from sedition, Apollonides, one of the leading men, made a speech wholesome for such a time: that neither the hope of safety nor of ruin had ever been nearer to any state. For if all with one mind should incline either to the Romans or to the Carthaginians, no state’s condition would be more fortunate and blessed; if some should drag the matter one way, some another, there would be no war more savage between the Carthaginians and the Romans than between the Syracusans themselves, when within the same walls each party would have its own armies, its own arms, its own leaders. And so it must be striven with the utmost force that all be of one mind. Which alliance was the more useful was a far smaller question and of lighter weight; but yet, in choosing allies, Hiero’s authority was to be followed rather than Hieronymus’, and a friendship happily tried for fifty years was to be preferred to one now untested, once faithless. There was even some weight toward the decision in this, that peace could be so refused to the Carthaginians that war need not at all be waged with them at present; whereas with the Romans either peace or war must be had at once. The less of passion and partisanship the speech seemed to have, the more authority it had. To the praetors and the chosen senators a council of war too was added; the leaders of the companies and the prefects of the auxiliaries were bidden to take counsel at the same time. When the matter had been often debated with great contention, at last, because no plan appeared for waging war with the Romans, it seemed best that peace be made and envoys be sent to confirm the matter with them.

Not so many days had passed when envoys came from Leontini begging a garrison for their borders; which embassy seemed most opportune for unburdening the city of its unruly and tumultuous multitude and for sending away its leaders. Hippocrates the praetor was bidden to lead the deserters thither; many of the mercenary auxiliaries followed, and they made up four thousand armed men. Both to those who sent and to those who were sent that expedition was a joy; for to the former an occasion was given of revolution, which they had long desired, and the latter rejoiced as though a certain bilge of the city had been drained off. But they only lightened for the present, as it were, a sick body, that it might soon relapse into a graver disease. For Hippocrates began at first by stealthy raids to lay waste the parts bordering on the Roman province; then, when a garrison had been sent by Appius to protect the allies’ fields, he made an onset with all his forces upon the outpost set against him, with the slaughter of many. When this was reported to Marcellus, he at once sent envoys to Syracuse to say that the faith of the peace had been broken, and that there would never be wanting a cause for war, unless Hippocrates and Epicydes were sent away not from Syracuse only but far from all Sicily. Epicydes, lest, present, he should be the defendant for his absent brother’s crime, or should fail to play his own part in stirring up war, having set out himself too into Leontini, because he saw them sufficiently roused against the Roman people, began to turn them away from the Syracusans as well: for the Syracusans, he said, had so bargained their peace with the Romans that whatever peoples had been under the kings should be of their dominion, and were now not content with liberty unless they also reigned and lorded it. Word, therefore, must be sent back to them that the Leontines too held it fair that they be free—either because on the soil of their city the tyrant had fallen, or because there first the shout had been raised for liberty, and, the royal leaders forsaken, there had been a flocking to the Syracusans. And so either that clause must be struck out of the treaty, or that law of the treaty not be accepted. The multitude was easily persuaded; and to the envoys of the Syracusans, both complaining of the slaughter of the Roman outpost and bidding Hippocrates and Epicydes depart, whether to Locri or whither else they would, provided only they quit Sicily, it was fiercely answered: that they had not charged the Syracusans to make peace for them with the Romans, nor were they bound by another’s treaties. These things the Syracusans reported to the Romans, disclaiming that the Leontines were in their power: so that, with the treaty between them whole, the Romans might wage war with the Leontines, and they themselves would not fail that war, on this condition, that, once reduced, they should again be of their own dominion, as the peace had been agreed.

Marcellus, having set out with the whole army into the Leontine country, Appius too being summoned to attack from the other side, used so great an ardor of the soldiers—from their anger at the outpost slain amid the terms of peace—that they stormed the city at the first onset. Hippocrates and Epicydes, after they saw the walls being taken and the gates broken open, withdrew with a few into the citadel; thence secretly by night they flee to Herbesus. To the Syracusans, who had set out from home in a column of eight thousand armed men, a messenger met them at the river Myla bearing word that the city was taken, with the rest false mingled with the true: that an indiscriminate slaughter of soldiers and townsmen had been made, and that he supposed none of the grown men survived; that the city had been plundered, and the goods of the wealthy given away. At so dreadful a message the column halted, and, all being stirred, the leaders—they were Sosis and Dinomenes—debated what they should do. A show of terror, not idle, the lie had given by the beating and beheading of the deserters, about two thousand men; but for the rest, none of the Leontines or of the other soldiers had been harmed after the city’s capture, and all their own goods were being restored to them, save what the first tumult of the captured city had consumed. Neither could they be brought to go to Leontini, complaining that their comrades had been betrayed to slaughter, nor to await in the same place a surer message. When the praetors perceived their minds inclined to defection, but that the movement would not be lasting if the leaders of the madness were removed, they lead the army to Megara, and themselves set out with a few horsemen for Herbesus, in hope of getting the city by betrayal while all were terrified. When this undertaking proved vain for them, judging that they must act by force, the next day they move their camp from Megara to assault Herbesus with all their forces. Hippocrates and Epicydes, reckoning that the plan not so safe at first sight as it was their only one, all hope being cut off on every side—to commit themselves to the soldiers, for the great part used to them and then kindled by the report of their comrades’ slaughter—advance to meet the column. The first standards by chance were of six hundred Cretans, who had served under them in Hieronymus’ day and had Hannibal’s kindness, having been captured at Trasimene among the Roman auxiliaries and set free. When Hippocrates and Epicydes recognized these by their standards and the fashion of their arms, holding out olive-branches and the other veilings of suppliants, they begged them to receive them, and, received, to protect them and not betray them to the Syracusans, by whom they themselves would soon be given over to the Roman people to be butchered.

And indeed they cry out that they should be of good cheer; that they would undergo all fortune with them. During this parley the standards had halted and the column was held back, nor had the cause of the delay yet reached the leaders. After the rumor spread that it was Hippocrates and Epicydes, and there was a murmur through the whole column of men beyond doubt approving their coming, at once the praetors with spurred horses pressed on to the front standards. Asking what fashion was this, what license of the Cretans, to weave parleys with the enemy and to mingle them, without the praetors’ command, with their own column, they bade Hippocrates be seized and chains thrown upon him. At which word so great a clamor arose at once, first from the Cretans, then taken up by the rest, that it was plain enough they had cause to fear, if they pressed further. Anxious and uncertain of their affairs, they bid the standards be carried back to Megara, whence they had set out, and send messengers to Syracuse about the present state of things. Hippocrates adds a fraud too, men’s minds being inclined to every suspicion, and, certain of the Cretans being sent to beset the roads, reads out, as if intercepted, a letter which he himself had framed: "The Syracusan praetors to the consul Marcellus." After the greeting, as is the custom, it was written that he had done rightly and in order in sparing none in Leontini; but that the case of all the mercenary soldiers was the same, and that Syracuse would never be quiet so long as there was any of the foreign auxiliaries either in the city or in its army. Let him therefore take pains to bring into his power those who, with their own praetors, had their camp at Megara, and by their punishment set Syracuse free at last. When these things had been read out, with so great a clamor was there a running to arms that the praetors, in the panic, rode off amid the tumult to Syracuse. And not even by their flight was the sedition checked, and onsets were being made upon the Syracusan soldiers, nor would any have been spared, had not Epicydes and Hippocrates gone to meet the multitude’s anger—not from mercy or human counsel, but lest they should cut off for themselves the hope of return, and that they might have the soldiers at once faithful to them and as hostages, and then might win over their kinsmen and friends too, first by so great a service, then by the pledge. Having found by experience how by what empty or light breath the fickle crowd is moved, they suborn a soldier out of that number who had been besieged in Leontini, to carry to Syracuse a message agreeing with what had been falsely reported at the Myla, and, by showing himself as a witness and by narrating as seen the things that were doubtful, to kindle the angers of men.

This man had credit not among the common crowd only, but, brought into the senate-house, moved the senate too. Certain men, of no light weight, openly declared that it had been very well that the greed and cruelty of the Romans had been laid bare at Leontini; that the same, or even fouler things, they would have done had they entered Syracuse, where the reward of greed was greater. And so all were of opinion that the gates must be shut and the city guarded; but not all feared the same men, nor hated the same. To the whole soldierly sort, and to a great part of the commons, the Roman name was hateful; the praetors and a few of the aristocrats, though they were puffed up by the empty message, were yet the more cautious toward the nearer and more present evil. And now Hippocrates and Epicydes were at the Hexapylon, and parleys were being woven through the kinsmen of those of the commons who were in the army, that they should open the gates and suffer their common country to be defended against the onset of the Romans. Already, one leaf of the Hexapylon being opened, they had begun to be admitted, when the praetors intervened. And at first with command and threats, then by deterring them with their authority, at last, when all was in vain, forgetting their majesty, they pleaded with prayers that they should not betray their country, once the tyrant’s bodyguard and now the corrupters of the army. But the ears of the roused multitude were deaf to all things, and the gates were being broken open with no less force within than without, and, all being broken, the column was admitted through the whole Hexapylon. The praetors flee into Achradina with the youth of the commons. The mercenary soldiers and the deserters and whatever of the king’s soldiers were at Syracuse swell the enemy’s column. So Achradina too is taken at the first onset, and of the praetors all are slain save those who escaped amid the tumult. Night made an end of the killing. The next day the slaves were called to the cap of liberty and those bound in prison let loose; and all this confused multitude make Hippocrates and Epicydes praetors; and Syracuse, when liberty had shone upon it for a brief time, had relapsed into its ancient servitude.

When these things had been reported to the Romans, the camp was at once moved from Leontini to Syracuse. And envoys had by chance been sent by Appius through the harbor in a quinquereme. A quadrireme sent ahead, when it had entered the jaws of the harbor, is taken; the envoys hardly escaped; and now not only the rights of peace but not even those of war were left, when the Roman army pitched its camp at the Olympium—that is the temple of Jupiter—fifteen hundred paces from the city. Thence too it seemed best to send envoys ahead; whom, that they might not enter the city, Hippocrates and Epicydes came out to meet outside the gate with their men. The Roman spokesman said that he brought to the Syracusans not war but help and aid—both to those who, escaped from the midst of the slaughter, had fled to them, and to those who, overborne by fear, were suffering a servitude fouler than not exile only but even death; nor would the Romans suffer the unspeakable slaughter of their allies to go unavenged. And so, if to those who had fled to them a safe return to their country lay open, and the authors of the slaughter were given up, and liberty and their own laws were restored to the Syracusans, there was no need of arms; if these things were not done, whoever was the cause of delay they would pursue with war. To this Epicydes said that, if they had any charge to him, they would have given them an answer; when the Syracusan cause was in the hand of those to whom they had come, then let them return. If they should provoke them with war, they would understand by the very fact that it was by no means the same thing to assault Syracuse and Leontini. So, leaving the envoys, he shut the gates. Thereupon Syracuse began to be assailed at once by land and sea—by land from the Hexapylon, by sea from Achradina, whose wall the wave washes; and because, as they had taken Leontini by terror and the first onset, they did not doubt that they would break in at some part into a city wide-spread and scattered over its space, they brought up to the walls all the apparatus for storming cities.

And the enterprise, begun with so great a rush, would have had its fortune, had there not been one man at Syracuse in that season. He was Archimedes, a peerless observer of the heavens and the stars, but more to be marveled at as the inventor and contriver of engines of war and of works by which, whatever the enemy attempted with vast effort, he himself with the very lightest pains would baffle. The wall, carried over uneven hills—most of it high and hard of approach, some of it low, and to be reached over level valleys—he furnished, as seemed apt to each place, with every kind of engine. The wall of Achradina, which, as was said before, is washed by the sea, Marcellus assailed with sixty quinqueremes. From the rest of the ships archers and slingers, and the light-armed too, whose dart is hard for the unskilled to throw back, suffered scarce any man to stand on the wall without a wound; these, because for missiles there is need of space, kept their ships far from the wall; other quinqueremes, joined two and two, the inner oars removed so that side lay against side, while they were driven as one ship by the outer bank of oars, carried decked towers and other engines for shaking the walls. Against this naval apparatus Archimedes set engines of various size upon the walls. Against the ships that were far off he sent stones of vast weight; the nearer he assailed with lighter and therefore more frequent darts; at last, that his own men might hurl their weapons at the enemy untouched by wound, he opened the wall from bottom to top with frequent loopholes about a cubit wide, through which some with arrows, some with moderate scorpions, struck at the enemy from concealment. Certain ships came nearer, that they might be within the strokes of the engines; against these, by a beam swung out over the wall, an iron hand bound to a strong chain, when it had been cast upon the prow, and a heavy weight of lead recoiled to the ground, set the ship on its stern, prow in air; then, suddenly let go, it dashed the ship, as though falling from the wall, upon the waves, with such great alarm of the sailors that, even if it fell upright, it took in a good deal of water. So the assault from the sea was baffled, and all hope turned to attacking with the whole force by land. But that part too was furnished with all the same apparatus of engines, at Hiero’s cost and care through many years, by the matchless art of Archimedes. The nature of the place helped too, because the rock on which the foundations of the wall are laid is in great part so steep that not only the things sent from an engine but even those that rolled down of their own weight fell heavily upon the enemy. The same cause made the approach hard to climb and the footing unsteady. So, a council being held, since every attempt was made a mockery, it seemed best to desist from the assault, and only by blockading to keep the enemy from supplies by land and sea.

Meanwhile Marcellus, having set out with about a third part of the army to recover the cities which in the unrest had revolted to the Carthaginians, recovers Helorus and Herbesus, themselves surrendering, and, Megara being taken by force, razed and plundered it for the terror of the rest and above all of the Syracusans. About the same time Himilco too, who had long held his fleet off the promontory of Pachynus, landed at Heraclea, which they call Minoa, twenty-five thousand foot, three thousand horse, and twelve elephants—by no means with so great forces as those with which he had before held the fleet off Pachynus; but, after Syracuse had been seized by Hippocrates, having gone to Carthage and being aided there both by Hippocrates’ envoys and by a letter of Hannibal, who said that the time had come for recovering Sicily with the highest glory, and being himself, present, no idle counselor, he had easily prevailed that as great forces of foot and horse as could be should be carried across into Sicily. Arriving at Heraclea, within a few days from there he recovered Agrigentum; and the hopes of the other states that were of the Carthaginian party were so kindled to drive the Romans out of Sicily that at last even those who were besieged in Syracuse lifted up their spirits; and, reckoning that with part of their forces the city could be well enough defended, they so divided the offices of war between them that Epicydes should preside over the guard of the city, and Hippocrates, joined to Himilco, should wage war against the Roman consul. With ten thousand foot and five hundred horse, having set out by night through the places left unguarded, he was pitching his camp about the city of Acrillae. Marcellus came upon them as they fortified, returning from Agrigentum, now already seized—when, hastening in vain to forestall the enemy there, he had marched thither—supposing nothing less than that at that time and place a Syracusan army would meet him; but yet, in fear of Himilco and the Carthaginians, as being by no means a match with the forces he had, he went as intent as he could and with his column ordered for all chances.

By chance that care, prepared against the Carthaginians, was of use against the Sicilians. He came upon them disordered and scattered in pitching their camp, and most of them unarmed; what there was of foot he surrounded; the cavalry, a light engagement begun, fled with Hippocrates to Acrae. By that battle, when he had checked the Sicilians from revolting from the Romans, Marcellus returned to Syracuse; and a few days after Himilco, joined by Hippocrates, pitched his camp by the river Anapus about eight miles from there. About the same time, both fifty-five warships of the Carthaginians under Bomilcar ran down from the deep into the great harbor of Syracuse, and the Roman fleet likewise, thirty quinqueremes, landed the first legion at Panormus; and the war could seem to have been turned away from Italy—so intent was each people upon Sicily. The Roman legion which had been landed at Panormus, as it came toward Syracuse, Himilco, reckoning that it would beyond doubt be booty for him, was deceived in the road; for the Carthaginian led by an inland route, while the legion, the fleet escorting it along the coastal places, reached Appius Claudius, who had advanced to Pachynus with part of his forces to meet it. Nor did the Carthaginians tarry longer at Syracuse: both Bomilcar, at once trusting his own ships too little, the Romans easily having a fleet of double the number, and seeing that by his useless delay nothing else was done than that the want of his allies was made heavier, spread his sails to the deep and crossed into Africa; and Himilco, having followed Marcellus to Syracuse to no purpose—in case some occasion of fighting might offer before he was joined to larger forces—after none such had fallen to him, and he saw the enemy safe at Syracuse both by fortification and by strength, lest by sitting idle and watching the siege of his allies he should waste time, moved his camp thence, to bring his army wherever the hope of revolt from the Roman should call it and, present, to add courage to those who favored his cause. Murgantia first, the Roman garrison being betrayed by the people themselves, he recovers, where a great store of grain and supplies of every kind had been gathered for the Romans.

At this defection the spirits of the other states too were lifted up, and the Roman garrisons were either driven from the citadels or, betrayed by fraud, overwhelmed. Henna, set on a lofty place and sheer on every side, was both impregnable by its position and had a strong garrison in the citadel and a prefect of the garrison by no means convenient for plotters. He was Lucius Pinarius, a keen man, and one who set more store on his own care that he might not be deceived than on the faith of the Sicilians; and then so many betrayals and defections of cities and disasters of garrisons heard of had bent him to the care of guarding against everything. And so by night and day alike all things were ready and set in order with watches and sentries, nor did the soldier go from his arms or his post. When the leading men of Henna, having already bargained with Himilco about the betrayal of the garrison, perceived that the Roman lay open to no occasion of fraud, the thing had to be done openly: they say that the city and the citadel ought to be in their power, if they had been handed over to the Romans as free men into alliance, not as slaves into custody. And so they hold it fair that the keys of the gates be given back to them: that to good allies their own faith was the strongest bond, and that the Roman people and senate would so be grateful to them, if they had remained in friendship willingly and not by compulsion. To this the Roman said that he had been set in the garrison by his commander, and had received from him the keys of the gates and the guard of the citadel, which he held neither at his own discretion nor at the Hennensians’, but at his who had committed them; that to leave a garrison was, among the Romans, a capital offense, and that parents had sanctioned that fault even by the death of their own children. The consul Marcellus was not far off; let them send envoys to him, of whose right and discretion it was. But they said they would not send to him, and protested that, if they did nothing by words, they would seek some means of avenging their liberty. Then Pinarius: but if they were loath to send to the consul, let them at least give him an assembly of the people, that it might be known whether that announcement was of a few or of the whole state. An assembly was agreed on for the next day.

After he had withdrawn from that parley into the citadel, the soldiers being called together, "I believe," he said, "you have heard, soldiers, in what fashion the Roman garrisons have been surrounded and overwhelmed by the Sicilians in these days. That fraud you have escaped, first by the kindness of the gods, then by your own valor, by standing and keeping watch in arms day and night. Would that the time to come could be passed neither by suffering unspeakable things nor by doing them. This is the secret guarding against fraud that we have used hitherto; and since it succeeds too little, they openly and in the face of all demand back the keys of the gates; which the moment we hand over, Henna will at once be the Carthaginians’, and we shall be butchered here more foully than the garrison of Murgantia was slain. One night, with difficulty, I have taken for taking counsel, that I might make you aware of the instant peril. At daybreak they mean to hold an assembly to accuse me and to rouse the people against you. And so tomorrow Henna will be flooded either with your blood or the Hennensians’. If forestalled, you will have no hope; if forestalling, no peril; whoever shall first draw the steel, his will be the victory. Intent, therefore, and armed, you will all await the signal. I will be in the assembly, and by speaking and disputing will draw out the time until everything is in order. When I shall have given the signal with my toga, then, a shout being raised on every side, fall upon the throng and lay all low with the steel; and take heed that none survive whose force or fraud may be feared. You, Mother Ceres and Proserpina, I beseech, and the rest of the gods above and below who dwell in this city, in these hallowed lakes and groves, that you be so present to us, willing and gracious, as we take this counsel for the avoiding, not the doing, of fraud. With more words would I exhort you, soldiers, if the struggle were to be with armed men; the unarmed and unwary you will butcher to satiety; and the consul’s camp is near, that nothing may be feared from Himilco and the Carthaginians."

Dismissed from this exhortation, they refresh their bodies. The next day men were set in different places to beset the roads and close the outlets; the greatest part take their stand above the theater and round about, used even before to the spectacle of assemblies. The Roman prefect, brought before the people by the magistrates, when he had said that the right and power over that matter was the consul’s, not his own, and for the most part the same things that he had said the day before, and at first by degrees, then now with one voice, all bade him give back the keys, and, as he hesitated and put it off, fiercely threatened him and seemed about to delay no longer than the last violence, then the prefect gave the signal with his toga, as had been agreed, and the soldiers, this long while intent and ready, some from above rush down with a shout upon the assembly turned away from them, others stand massed against the outlets of the theater. The Hennensians are cut down, shut up in the hollow, and are heaped together not by slaughter only but by flight too, while some fell over the heads of others, and the unhurt with the wounded, the living falling upon the dead, were piled up. Then there is a running this way and that, and, as in a captured city, flight and slaughter hold everything, the soldiers’ anger no whit the slacker because they were cutting down an unarmed throng than if equal peril and the heat of battle goaded them. So Henna was kept by a deed either evil or necessary. Marcellus neither disapproved the act and granted the plunder of the Hennensians to the soldiers, reckoning that the Sicilians would be deterred by fear from betraying garrisons. And that disaster, as of a city set in the middle of Sicily and famed either for its place notable for its natural fortification or for all things hallowed by the traces of Proserpina once carried off, ran through well-nigh all Sicily in a single day; and, because they thought that by an unspeakable slaughter the seat not of men only but of the gods too had been violated, then indeed those who even before had been doubtful defected to the Carthaginians. Hippocrates thereupon withdrew to Murgantia, Himilco to Agrigentum, having brought their army to Henna in vain at the summons of the betrayers. Marcellus returned back into Leontini, and, grain and other supplies being gathered into the camp, a modest garrison being left there, he came to besiege Syracuse. Thence, Appius Claudius being sent to Rome to seek the consulship, he sets Titus Quinctius Crispinus over the fleet and the old camp in his place; he himself fortified and built winter quarters five miles from the Hexapylon—they call the place Leon. These things were done in Sicily down to the beginning of winter.

That same summer war was stirred up with King Philip too, which had been suspected even before. Envoys came from Oricum to Marcus Valerius the praetor, who presided over the fleet at Brundisium and the shores of Calabria round about, announcing that Philip had first made trial of Apollonia, carried up against the stream of the river with a hundred and twenty two-banked galleys; then, when that matter was slower than his hope, had secretly by night moved his army up to Oricum, and that this city, set on a plain and strong neither in walls nor in men and arms, had been overwhelmed at the first onset. Announcing this, they begged that he would bring help and keep an enemy beyond doubt of the Romans away by sea and land from the maritime cities, which for no other cause than that they hung over Italy were assailed. Marcus Valerius, a garrison of two thousand being left and Publius Valerius the legate set over them, with his fleet equipped and ready, and what the warships could not hold of soldiers put aboard transports, reached Oricum on the second day; and that city, held by the light garrison which the king, withdrawing thence, had left, he recovered with no great struggle. Envoys came thither from Apollonia, announcing that they were under siege because they would not revolt from the Romans, and could not hold out longer against the force of the Macedonians, unless a Roman garrison were sent. Having promised that he would do what they wished, he sends two thousand picked soldiers in warships to the mouth of the river, with the prefect of the allies Quintus Naevius Crista, a man energetic and skilled in war. He, the soldiers being landed and the ships sent back to Oricum, whence he had come, to the rest of the fleet, led the soldiers far from the river by a way least beset by the king’s men, and entered the city by night so that none of the enemy perceived it. The next day they kept quiet, while the prefect inspected the youth of the Apolloniates and their arms and the strength of the city. When these things, seen and inspected, gave him spirit enough, and at the same time he learned from scouts what slackness and negligence there was among the enemy, in the silence of night he went out from the city without any uproar, and entered the enemy’s camp, so neglected and open that it was agreed well enough that a thousand men had got within the rampart before any perceived it, and that, had they refrained from slaughter, they could have come to the king’s tent. The slaughter of those nearest the gate roused the enemy. Thereupon so great a terror and panic seized them all that not only did no other take up arms or try to drive the enemy from the camp, but the king himself, just as he had been roused from sleep, fleeing well-nigh half-naked, in a guise scarce seemly even for a soldier, far less a king, escaped to the river and the ships. Thither too the other throng poured out. A little less than three thousand soldiers were in the camp either taken or slain; yet somewhat more men were taken than killed. The camp plundered, the Apolloniates carried off to Apollonia the catapults, ballistae, and other engines that had been made ready for assaulting their city, to defend their walls, should a like fortune ever come; all the rest of the camp’s booty was granted to the Romans. When these things had been announced at Oricum, Marcus Valerius at once led his fleet to the river’s mouth, lest the king should be able to take to flight by ship. And so Philip, trusting himself a sufficient match neither for a land nor a naval contest, his ships beached and burned, made for Macedonia by land, with his army in great part unarmed and despoiled. The Roman fleet wintered with Marcus Valerius at Oricum.

That same year in Spain matters were done with varying fortune. For before the Romans crossed the river Ebro, Mago and Hasdrubal routed huge forces of the Spaniards; and the farther Spain would have revolted from the Romans, had not Publius Cornelius, his army swiftly led across the Ebro, come in good time, the allies’ minds wavering. At first the Romans had their camp at the White Fort—a place notable for the slaughter of the great Hamilcar. The citadel was fortified, and they had gathered grain beforehand; yet, because all the country round was full of the enemy, and the Roman column had been charged with impunity by the enemy’s horse, and about two thousand of the loiterers or stragglers through the fields had been slain, the Romans withdrew thence nearer to the more peaceful places and fortified a camp at the Hill of Victory. Thither came Gnaeus Scipio with all his forces, and Hasdrubal son of Gisgo, a third Carthaginian leader, with a regular army, and over against the Roman camp, across the river, they all sat down. Publius Scipio, having set out secretly with light troops to view the places round about, did not escape the enemy, and they would have overwhelmed him in the open plains, had he not seized a hillock close by. There too, besieged, he is delivered from the blockade by his brother’s coming. Castulo, a strong and noble city of Spain, and so joined in alliance to the Carthaginians that from it Hannibal had a wife, revolted to the Romans. The Carthaginians set about assaulting Iliturgi, because there was a Roman garrison there; and they seemed likely to take that place above all by famine. Gnaeus Scipio, to bring help to his allies and the garrison, having set out with a legion in light order, entered the city between the two camps with great slaughter of the enemy, and the next day fought a sally as fortunate. Above twelve thousand men were slain in the two battles, more than a thousand taken, with six-and-thirty military standards. So the withdrawal from Iliturgi was made. Then the city of Bigerra—this too was an ally of the Romans—began to be assaulted by the Carthaginians. That siege Gnaeus Scipio, coming up, raised without a struggle.

Thence the Punic camp was moved to Munda, and the Romans followed thither at once. There, the standards joined, the fight went on for about four hours, and, the Romans winning excellently, the signal for retreat was given, because Gnaeus Scipio’s thigh had been pierced by a javelin, and a panic had seized the soldiers about him lest the wound were mortal. But there was no doubt that, had not that delay intervened, the Punic camp could have been taken that day; for not the soldiers only but the elephants too had been driven up to the rampart, and over the very trenches nine-and-thirty elephants were pierced with javelins. In this battle too about twelve thousand men are said to have been slain, near three thousand taken, with fifty-seven military standards. Thence the Carthaginians withdrew to the city of Aurinx, and the Roman followed, to press them in their terror. There again Scipio, carried into the line on a litter, fought, nor was the victory in doubt; yet less than half as many of the enemy as before were slain, because fewer had survived to fight. But a nation born to renew and repair wars, Mago being sent by his brother to levy soldiers, soon filled up the army and gave it spirit to attempt the struggle afresh. The soldiers were mostly Gauls, and they, on their part so often conquered within a few days, fought with the same spirit as the former and the same issue. Above eight thousand men were slain, not much fewer than a thousand taken, and fifty-eight military standards. And there was very much Gallic spoil, golden torques and armlets, a great number; two notable chieftains of the Gauls too—their names were Moeniacaptus and Vismarus—fell in that battle. Eight elephants were taken, three killed. While affairs were so prosperous in Spain, shame seized the Romans at last that the town of Saguntum, which was the cause of the war, was now for the eighth year under the enemy’s power. And so they recovered that town, the Punic garrison driven out by force, and restored it to the ancient dwellers whom the violence of war had left of them; and the Turdetani, who had drawn upon them the war with the Carthaginians, being reduced into their power, they sold under the crown and destroyed their city.

These things were done in Spain in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Marcus Claudius. At Rome, when the new tribunes of the plebs had entered on their magistracy, at once a day was named before the people for the censors Publius Furius and Marcus Atilius by Marcus Metellus, tribune of the plebs—him, as quaestor the year before, they had moved from his tribe, his horse taken away, and made an aerarius, on account of the conspiracy to desert Italy made at Cannae—but, forbidden by the help of nine tribunes to plead their cause while in office, they were dismissed. From completing the lustrum the death of Publius Furius hindered them; Marcus Atilius abdicated his magistracy. The consular elections were held by Quintus Fabius Maximus the consul. There were created consuls, both in their absence, Quintus Fabius Maximus, the consul’s son, and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus for the second time. Two praetors are made who were then curule aediles, Publius Sempronius Tuditanus and Gnaeus Fulvius Centumalus, and with them Marcus Atilius and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. It is handed down to memory that scenic games were that year for the first time held over four days by the curule aediles. This will be that aedile Tuditanus who at Cannae, while others were numbed with panic in so great a disaster, led through the midst of the enemy. These elections finished, on the motion of Quintus Fabius the consul, the consuls-elect were summoned to Rome and entered on their magistracy, and consulted the senate about the war and their own provinces and the praetors’, and about the armies which each should command.

And so the provinces and armies were divided: the war with Hannibal was entrusted to the consuls, and of the armies one which Sempronius himself had held, the other which Fabius the consul; these were of two legions each. Marcus Aemilius the praetor, whose lot was the foreign jurisdiction, his jurisdiction being entrusted to his colleague Marcus Atilius, the city praetor, should hold Luceria as his province, and the two legions over which Quintus Fabius, who was then consul, had presided as praetor. To Publius Sempronius the province of Ariminum, to Gnaeus Fulvius Suessula fell, with two legions each likewise, so that Fulvius should lead the city legions, and Tuditanus receive his from Marcus Pomponius. Commands and provinces were prolonged: to Marcus Claudius Sicily within the bounds which had been Hiero’s kingdom, to Publius Lentulus the propraetor his old province, to Titus Otacilius the fleet—no new armies were added to any—; to Marcus Valerius Greece and Macedonia with the legion and the fleet he had; to Quintus Mucius, with his old army—and they were two legions—Sardinia; to Gaius Terentius, with the one legion he already commanded, Picenum. Besides, two city legions were ordered to be enrolled and twenty thousand of the allies. With these leaders, these forces, against many wars at once either stirred up or suspected, they fortified the Roman empire. The consuls, two city legions being enrolled and a reinforcement levied for the others, before they moved from the city, expiated the prodigies that had been announced. The wall and gate at Caieta and at Aricia, and even the temple of Jupiter, had been struck from heaven. And other mockeries of the eyes and ears were believed for true: shapes of warships in the river at Tarracina that were none were seen, and in the temple of Jupiter Vicilinus, which is in the Compsan country, arms had clashed, and the river at Amiternum had flowed bloody. These expiated by decree of the pontiffs, the consuls set out, Sempronius into the Lucani, Fabius into Apulia. The father came as legate to his son at the camp before Suessula. When the son went forward to meet him, and the lictors, in reverence for his majesty, went silently before, the old man rode past eleven of the fasces on his horse; and when the consul bade the nearest lictor mark it, and that man cried out to him to get down from his horse, then at last, leaping down, "I wished," he said, "my son, to make trial whether you knew well enough that you are consul."

Into that camp Dasius Altinius of Arpi came secretly by night with three slaves, promising that, if it were made worth his while, he would betray Arpi. When Fabius had brought the matter before his council, to some he seemed one who, as a deserter, ought to be beaten and put to death—a common enemy of double mind, who after the disaster of Cannae, as though faith ought to stand with fortune, had gone over to Hannibal and had dragged Arpi into revolt; and now, because the Roman cause, against his hope and his prayers, seemed as it were to spring up again from the roots, promised a new betrayal to the betrayed, standing always on one side and minded toward another, a faithless ally, an idle enemy; let him be, after the betrayer of Falerii and of Pyrrhus, the third example to deserters. Against this the consul’s father Fabius said that men, forgetful of the times, in the very heat of war were passing judgment on each man as though in a free peace; that, whereas this rather ought to be done and thought on—how, if by any means it could be brought about, no allies should revolt from the Roman people—they did not think of it, but said that an example ought to be set up if any should come to his senses and look back to the old alliance. But if it were allowed to go away from the Romans, and not allowed to return to them, who could doubt that the Roman state, soon deserted by its allies, would see all things in Italy joined by Punic treaties? Yet he was not the man to advise that any faith should be put in Altinius; but he would follow a middle way of counsel. That for the present he be held neither for enemy nor for ally; that it please them that, in free custody not far from the camp, he be kept in some faithful state through the time of the war; when the war was finished, then it must be debated whether the former defection deserved the more punishment or this return pardon. Fabius’ counsel was agreed to, and Altinius himself and his companions were handed over to the envoys of Cales; and a good large weight of gold which he had then brought with him was ordered to be kept for him. At Cales the guards followed him loosed by day, and kept him shut up by night. At Arpi he first began to be missed and sought at home; then the report, spread through the whole city, made a tumult, as at the loss of a leading man, and, in fear of revolution, messengers were at once sent. With these the Carthaginian was by no means displeased, because he both held the man himself, as one of doubtful faith, suspected this long while, and had got a cause for possessing and selling the goods of so rich a man; but, that men might believe it given to anger rather than to greed, he added cruelty too to his greed, and, the man’s wife and children being summoned to the camp, inquiry being first made about the flight of Altinius, then how much gold and silver had been left at home, all things being learned well enough, he burned them alive.

Fabius, having set out from Suessula, first set about assaulting Arpi. When he had pitched his camp about five hundred paces from it, and, viewing from near at hand the site of the city and the walls, saw that the part which was safest in its walls was, because most neglected in its guard, the very one he resolved to attack. Having made ready all things that are of use for assaulting cities, he chose out the pick of the centurions from the whole army, and set over them as tribunes brave men, and assigned six hundred soldiers, as many as seemed enough, and bade them, when the signal of the fourth watch should sound, carry ladders to that place. There was a gate there, low and narrow, on a little-frequented road through a deserted part of the city. He bids them, having first crossed the wall by the ladders, open the gate from the inner side or break its bars, and, holding part of the city, give the signal with a horn that the rest of the forces be brought up: he would have all ready and in order. These things were briskly done; and what seemed likely to be a hindrance to those doing them helped most of all to the deceiving. A rain risen from midnight forced the watchmen and sentries, slipping away from their posts, to take cover under roofs; and the sound, at first, of a fuller squall kept the noise of those working at the gate from being heard, then, falling on the ear more gently and evenly, lulled the greater part of the men to sleep. After they held the gate, they bid the horn-blowers, posted at equal intervals along the road, sound, to rouse the consul. When this was done as agreed, the consul bids the standards be carried out, and a little before light enters the city through the broken gate.

Then at last the enemy were roused, the rain now ceasing and the light near. There was in the city a garrison of Hannibal’s, about five thousand armed men, and the Arpini themselves had armed three thousand men. These the Carthaginians set first against the enemy, lest there should be any fraud at their back. The fight was at first in the dark and in the narrow streets. When the Romans had seized not the streets only but the roofs too nearest the gate, lest they could be assailed and wounded from above, certain of the Arpini and the Romans were recognized between themselves, and thence parleys began to be held, the Romans asking what the Arpini meant, for what wrong of the Romans or what desert of the Carthaginians the men of Italy were waging war on behalf of foreigners and barbarians against the Romans their old allies, and making Italy tributary and stipendiary to Africa; the Arpini excusing themselves that, ignorant of all, they had been sold to the Carthaginian by their leading men, and had been caught and overborne by a few. The beginning made, more talked with more; at last the praetor of Arpi was led by his own people to the consul, and, faith being given, between the standards and the lines the Arpini suddenly turned their arms for the Romans against the Carthaginian. The Spaniards too, a little less than a thousand men, having bargained nothing further with the consul than that the Punic garrison be let go without treachery, carried their standards over to the consul. To the Carthaginians the gates were thrown open, and, sent off in good faith, they came unharmed to Hannibal at Salapia: Arpi was restored to the Romans without the harm of any save one old traitor and new deserter. To the Spaniards double rations were ordered to be given, and the commonwealth very often used their brave and faithful service. While one consul was in Apulia, the other in Lucania, a hundred and twelve noble Campanian horsemen, having set out from Capua under show of plundering from the enemy’s land by leave of the magistrates, came to the Roman camp which was above Suessula; they told the soldiers’ outpost who they were: that they wished to parley with the praetor. Gnaeus Fulvius was in command of the camp; to whom, when it was announced, ten of that number being ordered to be led to him unarmed, when he heard what they demanded—and they asked nothing else than that, Capua being recovered, their goods be restored to them—they were all received into faith. And by the other praetor, Sempronius Tuditanus, the town of Atrinum was stormed; above seven thousand men were taken, and some quantity of stamped bronze and silver. At Rome a foul fire held on for two nights and one day. All was leveled to the ground between the Salt-works and the Carmental gate, together with the Aequimaelium and the Jugarian quarter and the temples of Fortune and of Mother Matuta; and outside the gate the fire, ranging widely, consumed many things sacred and profane.

That same year Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius, since affairs in Spain were prosperous and they were both recovering many old allies and adding new ones, extended their hope into Africa too. Syphax was a king of the Numidians, on a sudden made an enemy of the Carthaginians; to him they sent three centurions as envoys, to make friendship and alliance with him, and to promise that, if he persevered in pressing the Carthaginians with war, the thing would be welcome to the senate and people of Rome, and that they would strive to repay the favor in good time and well heaped up. That embassy was welcome to the barbarian; and, having talked with the envoys about the manner of waging war, when he heard the words of the veteran soldiers, he perceived by the comparison of so ordered a discipline of how many things he himself was ignorant. Then first, that they might act as for good and faithful allies, he begged that two should carry the embassy back to their commanders, and one remain with him as a master of the soldier’s art: that the Numidian nation was raw for foot-battles, fit only for the horse; that thus, from the very beginnings of the nation, their forefathers had waged wars, thus he himself from boyhood had been used; but that he had an enemy trusting in the foot-soldier’s war, whom, if he wished to be matched in strength of force, he too must provide himself with infantry. And to that his kingdom abounded in multitude of men, but he was ignorant of the art of arming, equipping, and marshaling them. All was like a throng gathered at random, vast and reckless. The envoys answer that for the present they would do what he wished, faith being taken that he should at once send the man back, if their commanders did not approve the act. Quintus Statorius was his name, who remained with the king. With the two Romans the king sent three envoys of the Numidians into Spain, to receive the pledge from the Roman commanders. He charged the same to entice over at once to desertion the Numidians who were auxiliaries within the Carthaginian garrisons. And Statorius enrolled foot-soldiers for the king out of the great youth, and, ordering them very nearly after the Roman fashion, taught them by marshaling and maneuvering to follow the standards and keep their ranks, and so accustomed them to fieldwork and the other proper soldierly duties that in a short time the king trusted no more to his horse than to his foot, and, the standards joined on a level plain in a pitched battle, overcame the Carthaginian enemy. To the Romans too in Spain the coming of the king’s envoys was of great profit; for at the report of them frequent desertions began to be made by the Numidians. So with Syphax friendship was begun by the Romans. When the Carthaginians learned this, they at once send envoys to Gala, reigning in the other part of Numidia—that nation is called the Maesuli.

Gala had a son, Masinissa, seventeen years old, but a youth of such promise that even then it appeared he would make the kingdom greater and richer than the one he had received. The envoys point out that, since Syphax had joined himself to the Romans, that he might be the more powerful by their alliance against the kings and peoples of Africa, it would be better for Gala too to join the Carthaginians as soon as possible, before Syphax crossed into Spain or the Romans into Africa; that Syphax, who as yet had nothing from the Roman treaty but the name, could be overwhelmed. Gala was easily persuaded, his son demanding for himself that war, to send an army; which, joined to the Carthaginian legions, utterly defeated Syphax in a great battle. Thirty thousand men are said to have been slain in that battle. Syphax with a few horsemen fled from the line to the Maurusian Numidians—they dwell at the far edge, near the Ocean, over against Gades—and, the barbarians flowing to his name from every side, in a short time armed huge forces, with which to cross into Spain, parted from him by a narrow strait. Thither Masinissa came with his victorious army; and there he waged war with Syphax with vast glory by himself, without any resources of the Carthaginians. In Spain nothing memorable was done, save that the Roman commanders drew over to themselves the Celtiberian youth for the same pay for which it had been bargained with the Carthaginians, and sent above three hundred of the noblest Spaniards into Italy to solicit their countrymen who were among Hannibal’s auxiliaries. This only of that year in Spain is notable for memory, that the Romans had no mercenary soldier in their camp before they then had the Celtiberians.