the valour of
its citizens; in the times of the first Dionysius, two Phoenician
armies in the act of besieging the city had been in this way destroyed
under its very walls. Now fate turned the special defence of the city
into the means of its destruction; while the army of Marcellus
quartered in the suburbs suffered but little, fevers desolated the
Phoenician and Syracusan bivouacs. Hippocrates died; Himilco and
most of the Africans died also; the survivors of the two armies,
mostly native Siceli, dispersed into the neighbouring cities. The
Carthaginians made a further attempt to save the city from the sea
side; but the admiral Bomilcar withdrew, when the Roman fleet offered
him battle. Epicydes himself, who commanded in the city, now
abandoned it as lost, and made his escape to Agrigentum. Syracuse
would gladly have surrendered to the Romans; negotiations had already
begun. But for the second time they were thwarted by the deserters:
in another mutiny of the soldiers the chief magistrates and a number
of respectable citizens were slain, and the government and the defence
of the city were entrusted by the foreign troops to their captains.
Marcellus now entered into a negotiation with one of these, which gave
into his hands one of the two portions of the city that were still
free, the "island"; upon which the citizens voluntarily opened to
him the gates of Achradina also (in the autumn of 542). If mercy
was to be shown in any case, it might, even according to the far
from laudable principles of Roman public law as to the treatment
of perfidious communities, have been extended to this city, which
manifestly had not been at liberty to act for itself, and which had
repeatedly made the most earnest attempts to get rid of the tyranny
of the foreign soldiers. Nevertheless, not only did Marcellus stain
his military honour by permitting a general pillage of the wealthy
mercantile city, in the course of which Archimedes and many other
citizens were put to death, but the Roman senate lent a deaf ear to
the complaints which the Syracusans afterwards presented regarding the
celebrated general, and neither returned to individuals their pillaged
property nor restored to the city its freedom. Syracuse and the towns
that had been previously dependent on it were classed among the
communities tributary to Rome--Tauromenium and Neetum alone obtained
the same privileges as Messana, while the territory of Leontini became
Roman domai