1

INVASIONS OF SICILY.

49

his prisoners to ransom and spare at least the temples of the gods, Hannibal replied roughly that those who could not preserve their freedom must try their hands at slavery. And even as the Jews, when Jerusalem was about to fall before Titus, heard, or fancied that they heard, voices which were not of earth, saying, "Let us go "Let hence;" so, with terrible realism, did the Carthaginian general now tell the affrighted Greeks that the gods themselves had left their shrines, and so had abandoned their cities to destruction. Then, in an outburst of fanaticism, half family and half national, he slaughtered three thousand prisoners in cold blood on the spot on which his grandfather had fallen.2

Sated with plunder and bloodshed, Hannibal sailed back to Africa, but only to return three years later to complete his work of devastation. The splendid city of Agrigentum,. with its vast population, its prodigious temples, and its innumerable works of art, fell, after a siege of seven months. The towns of Gela and Camarina came next, and from. the whole southern coast of Sicily Greek culture and civilisation seemed to be blotted out. We turn away with disgust from the details of so savage and barbarous a warfare; but we must note, as we pass, one or two of its. more characteristic and suggestive incidents. Such are: the mutiny of Campanian mercenaries, quelled by the present of the rich gold and silver drinking-cups which the body guard of the Carthaginian general has brought with them; the wanton destruction of the Agrigentine sepulchres by the besieging army; the religious terrors which followed —the heaven-sent pestilence, the spectres of the outraged dead haunting the sentries at their posts, and the solemn sacrifice of a child to Baal by the general in command, the glorious works of art-the statue of Artemis at Egesta,3 of

1 μeтaßaivŵμev ěvтevlev. So too at the siege of Veii (Livy, v. 21 it was believed, "deos votis ex urbe sua evocatos hostium templa novasqu sedes spectare."

2 Diod. xiii. 59, ad init.

3 Cicero, Verres, iv. 33.

the poet Stesichorus at Himera,1 of Apollo at Gela, of the bull of Phalaris at Agrigentum3-carried off to Carthage or to Tyre. In vain (B.C. 405) did the Syracusans try to stave off the storm by sending troops half-way to meet it; in vain did they depose their incapable generals and bow their necks beneath the yoke of the one man who in point of courage and ability seemed to be marked out as the saviour of their state, the tyrant Dionysius. Syracuse itself, the acknowledged head of the Greek cities of Sicily, seemed about to fall; but the ravages of the pestilence, which carried off half the Carthaginian army, compelled Hannibal to leave his task unfinished, and he returned to Africa carrying with him the pestilential taint which was to spread havoc in Carthage and its neighbourhood.

It was now the turn of Dionysius to justify his assumption of arbitrary power by the use he made of it, and after a few years of strenuous preparation he set forth on his mission of "liberation." Every species of cruelty which had been visited by the barbarous mercenaries of Carthage on the unhappy Greeks was now atoned for by the equally unhappy Carthaginians who had settled in the southern parts of Sicily. Onward the tide of invasion flowed, swollen, as it advanced, by the Greeks who were now able to return to their devastated homes, till at length it reached the westernmost corner of the island, and found itself checked, for the moment, by the narrow arm of sea which separates the island fortress of Motye from the mainland.

The small garrison of Motye defended itself with all the resolution of the Phoenician race, and the incidents of the siege which followed-the mole thrown out by Dionysius to connect it with the mainland, the battering of its walls by new and unheard-of military engines, such as the catapult, just then invented, the huge moving towers, the diversions effected by the fleets, the final assault, the desperate house-to-house fighting in the narrow streets, the flight for refuge to the temples of the gods, the promiscuous 1 Cicero, l'erres, ii. 35. 3 Ibid. xiii. 90.

2 Diod. xiii. 108.

DIONYSIUS AND HIMILCO.

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pillage and massacre,—all these incidents are characteristic of the Phoenicians when driven to stand at bay, and remind us, in some measure, now of the heroic resistance made, in the following century, by the parent of Phoenician cities to Alexander the Great, and now, again, of that still more terrible resistance of despair to which this history leads us up, and in which it finds its most tragic conclusion.

The "liberator" had all but done his work; but these were not the days when we know Carthage best—the days of her vacillation and of half-hearted counsels—they were the days of her strength and of her pride. In spite of the havoc wrought by the plague in Carthage and the surrounding country, another huge host of one hundred thousand men started (B.C. 397) under Himilco for Sicily. They recovered Eryx and Motye almost at a blow, and within the course of a single year took Messana at the other end of Sicily, and rolled back the tide of invasion on Syracuse itself. Seldom has the fortune of war veered round so rapidly and so completely. But the marshes of the Anapus were once more the best and the last ally of Syracuse. A new pestilence of unexampled fury broke out. Part of the Carthaginian navy was destroyed by fire, and Himilco purchased, we are told, the safety of the remaining Carthaginians in his army by the betrayal of all his mercenaries. It was an act of baseness of which Dionysius himself and even Hiero after him, were also guilty, and it is not without parallel in the history of the Punic wars; but it enables us, in some measure, to explain, what is otherwise so difficult to account for, the sudden collapse of the energies of Carthage when, once and again, she seemed to be in the full career of success.

1

It is useless to speculate, but it is hardly possible to resist the temptation to do so, as to what might have been the consequence to Carthage, to Sicily itself, to Kome, and to the world at large, had either party succeeded altogether in the attempt in which each had all but succeeded,

I Zonaras, viii. 10.

within the term of these last three years: had Carthage, for instance, been able to push forward her victorious career into Italy at the very time when the Gaul was at the gates of Rome, or had Syracuse been able to accomplish with ease in a single year, what could hardly be accomplished, a century and a half later, in a twenty-three years' war by all the power of Rome. It is impossible to say what might have been the result in such a case; but it is possible to point out much, at least, which could hardly have happened, and to realise to ourselves how entirely different the conditions would have been under which the struggle for universal empire, whoever might have been the combatants, must have been carried on.

The horrors perpetrated by the Carthaginians and the ferocity and treachery of some of their generals are brought out in full relief by Diodorus and by the earlier Sicilian historians, Philistus and Timæus, who form his chief authorities. It is all the more important therefore to notice that Diodorous himself inadvertently drops hints which show that if the merits of Greek and Carthaginian rule in Sicily must needs be compared, the advantage was not always, in the judgment of the Sicilians themselves, on the side of the Greeks: Many of the Sicilian Greeks, he tells us, migrated of their own free will, carrying their property with them, from the Greek to the Carthaginian portion of Sicily, for they found, or fancied, at least, that they would find, the rule of Carthage to be less oppressive than that of the tyrant Dionysius.1 On the other hand, many Sicanians and Sicilians whom Dionysius offered to transfer to Syracuse from the neighbourhood of the Carthaginians, declined his offer with thanks, preferring the Carthaginian rule to his; while those tribes or towns which he had compelled to join him went back again with alacrity to Carthage as soon as she reappeared on the scene. In like manner when, at a moment's notice, Dionysius plundered the property of all the Carthaginians resident in Syracuse, it is clear that the 2 Ibid. xiv. 55, 58.

1 Diod. xiv. 41.

GREEK AND CARTHAGINIAN RULE.

53

Carthaginians, in spite of the provocation they had received, did not make reprisals on the Greeks resident in Carthage.1 These indications may tend to strengthen the misgivings which are naturally suggested to us when we recollect the medium through which alone our information as to Carthaginian misgovernment comes.

There is another circumstance which is still more suggestive. Of what followed the fatal battle of Himera we have two versions; one of them by a lucky chance, which is almost without a parallel in the history of these wars, comes from the Carthaginians themselves. It has been preserved by Herodotus, and tells us that Hamilcar, when he found. that the battle of Himera had gone against him, flung himself headlong, as a whole burnt offering, into the fire which he had kindled, and that almost divine honours were paid to his memory by a grateful country, alike in Sicily and in the capital. The other version is that given us by the Greeks that the Carthaginians, unable to vent their anger, even on the lifeless corpse of the unfortunate Hamilcar by nailing it, as they sometimes did in similar cases, to a cross, vented it on his innocent son, Gisco, whom they banished for life to the Greek town of Selinus.3 Either of these stories, or neither of them, or both of them, inconsistent as they seem with each other, may, among a people so volatile as the Carthaginians, perhaps be true. But the discrepancy is at least suggestive, and it does not make us less sorry that in other cases where we hear of anything to the discredit of Carthage, we are unable to balance the Greek by the Carthaginian version of the story.

Other desultory attempts were made by the tyrant Dionysius in his long reign of thirty-eight years to drive the Carthaginians from Sicily, but without success; and the fitful struggle ended (B.c. 383) in a treaty which assigned to Carthage all the territory which lay to the west of the river Halycus. This river practically remained the boundary between the contending parties for the next hundred 2 Herod, vii. 167. 3 Diod. xiii. 43.

1 Diod, xiv. 76, 77.