during a festival in the city succeeded in scaling a portion of the
extensive outer walls that had been deserted by the guard, and in
penetrating into the suburbs which stretched from the "island" and
the city proper on the shore (Achradina) towards the interior. The
fortress of Euryalus, which, situated at the extreme western end of
the suburbs, protected these and the principal road leading from the
interior to Syracuse, was thus cut off and fell not long afterwards.
When the siege of the city thus began to assume a turn favourable
to the Romans, the two armies under Himilco and Hippocrates advanced
to its relief, and attempted a simultaneous attack on the Roman
positions, combined with an attempt at landing on the part of the
Carthaginian fleet and a sally of the Syracusan garrison; but the
attack was repulsed on all sides, and the two relieving armies were
obliged to content themselves with encamping before the city, in the
low marshy grounds along the Anapus, which in the height of summer and
autumn engender pestilences fatal to those that tarry in them. These
pestilences had often saved the city, oftener even than 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"; up