powerful adversary instead of a cognate and
ordinarily allied or dependent city. With Carthaginian aid the
Mamertines maintained themselves against Pyrrhus, and the untimely
departure of the king restored to them all their power.

Hiero of Syracuse
War between the Syracusans and the Mammertines

It is not becoming in the historian either to excuse the perfidious
crime by which the Mamertines seized their power, or to forget that
the God of history does not necessarily punish the sins of the fathers
to the fourth generation. He who feels it his vocation to judge the
sins of others may condemn the human agents; for Sicily it might be a
blessing that a warlike power, and one belonging to the island, thus
began to be formed in it--a power which was already able to bring
eight thousand men into the field, and which was gradually putting
itself in a position to take up at the proper time and on its own
resources that struggle against the foreigners, to the maintenance
of which the Hellenes, becoming more and more unaccustomed to arms
notwithstanding their perpetual wars, were no longer equal.

In the first instance, however, things took another turn. A young
Syracusan officer, who by his descent from the family of Gelo and
his intimate relations of kindred with king Pyrrhus as well as by the
distinction with which he had fought in the campaigns of the latter,
had attracted the notice of his fellow-citizens as well as of the
Syracusan soldiery--Hiero, son of Hierocles--was called by military
election to command the army, which was at variance with the citizens
(479-480). By his prudent administration, the nobility of his
character, and the moderation of his views, he rapidly gained the
hearts of the citizens of Syracuse--who had been accustomed to the
most scandalous lawlessness in their despots--and of the Sicilian
Greeks in general. He rid himself--in a perfidious manner, it is
true--of the insubordinate army of mercenaries, revived the citizen-
militia, and endeavoured, at first with the title of general,
afterwards with that of king, to re-establish the deeply sunken
Hellenic power by means of his civic troops and of fresh and more
manageable recruits. With the Carthaginians, who in concert with the
Greeks had driven king Pyrrhus from the island, there was at that time
peace. The immediate foes of the Syracusans were the Mamertines.
They were the kinsmen of those hated mercenaries whom the Syracusans
had recentl