k all other scruples. Whether it
would be more advantageous to surrender it to the masters of Africa
or to the masters of Italy, was doubtful; after long hesitation the
majority of the Campanian burgesses at length resolved to offer
the possession of their sea-commanding fortress to the Romans.

The Mammertines Received into the Italian Confederacy

It was a moment of the deepest significance in the history of the
world, when the envoys of the Mamertines appeared in the Roman senate.
No one indeed could then anticipate all that was to depend on the
crossing of that narrow arm of the sea; but that the decision, however
it should go, would involve consequences far other and more important
than had attached to any decree hitherto passed by the senate, must
have been manifest to every one of the deliberating fathers of the
city. Strictly upright men might indeed ask how it was possible to
deliberate at all, and how any one could even think of suggesting
that the Romans should not only break their alliance with Hiero, but
should, just after the Campanians of Rhegium had been punished by them
with righteous severity, admit the no less guilty Sicilian accomplices
to the alliance and friendship of the state, and thereby rescue them
from the punishment which they deserved. Such an outrage on propriety
would not only afford their adversaries matter for declamation,
but must seriously offend all men of moral feeling. But even the
statesman, with whom political morality was no mere phrase, might ask
in reply, how Roman burgesses, who had broken their military oath and
treacherously murdered the allies of Rome, could be placed on a level
with foreigners who had committed an outrage on foreigners, where
no one had constituted the Romans judges of the one or avengers of
the other? Had the question been only whether the Syracusans or
Mamertines should rule in Messana, Rome might certainly have
acquiesced in the rule of either. Rome was striving for the
possession of Italy, as Carthage for that of Sicily; the designs of
the two powers scarcely then went further. But that very circumstance
formed a reason why each desired to have and retain on its frontier an
intermediate power--the Carthaginians for instance reckoning in this
way on Tarentum, the Romans on Syracuse and Messana--and why, if that
course was impossible, each preferred to see these adjacent places
given over to itself rather than to the other great power.
As Cartha