XXI. CHAP. ravaged their lands, destroyed their fruit trees, and attacked their towns; they remained unmoved in their fidelity: and even after the fall of Motya, when the Greek power seemed so irresistible that the people of Halicyæ then at last submitted to it, yet the other four still held out; and when Dionysius again ventured to besiege Egesta, the inhabitants sallied by night and set fire to his camp, and obliged him to abandon his enterprise with loss. Great Carthaginian to Sicily. Here ended the circle of Dionysius' glory. The expedition Carthaginians 55, provoked by the suddenness of his attack, by his having taken advantage of their distressed condition, and by the inveteracy with which the Greeks were pursuing all of their name and race, were roused to extraordinary exertion. An immense army was raised of Africans and Spaniards; but the Gauls, so constantly employed in the Punic wars, had not yet crossed the Alps, or become known to the civilized nations of the south; so that there were none of them in the armament now collected for the invasion of Sicily. As it was, however, the Carthaginian force was estimated by Timæus at 100,000 men, and it was commanded by Imilcon, the supreme military chief of the Commonwealth. The expedition landed at Panormus, and every thing gave way before it. Motya was instantly recovered; the Sicanians left Dionysius to join their old friends the Carthaginians; Dionysius himself retreated upon Syracuse; and the seat of war was removed almost 55 Diodorus, XIV. 54, 55. instantaneously from the western to the eastern extremity of the island, from Motya and Egesta to Syracuse. CHAP. XXI. thaginians Syracuse. Imilcon advanced 56 along the northern coast to- The Carwards Messina, being anxious to possess that im- besiege portant place, and so intercept any succours which might be sent to the aid of Dionysius, either from the Greek states of Italy, or from Greece itself. He took Messina, defeated the Syracusans in a sea-fight off Catana, and then, being completely master of the field, he proceeded to lay siege to Syracuse by sea and land; his ships occupied the great harbour, while with his army he held all the most important points on shore: the headland of Plemyrium, which forms the southern side of the great harbour, the temple of Olympian Jupiter on the right bank of the Anapus, and the suburb of Neapolis, just without the walls of Acradina, and under the cliffs of Epipola. The position of Epipolæ itself, which the Athenians had at first occupied with so much effect, and which they afterwards neglected to their ruin, was now secured against an enemy by the walls lately carried round its whole extent by Dionysius. of the Greek Sicily. Thus the Greek power in Sicily was reduced as Critical state it were to one little spark, which the first breath power in seemed likely to extinguish; but on its preservation depended the existence of Rome and the fate of the world. Had Carthage become the sovereign of all Sicily, her power, in its full and undecayed vigour, XXI. CHAP. must have immediately come into contact with the nations of Italy; and the Samnite wars of Rome might have ended in the destruction of both the contending nations, when their exhausted strength had left them at the mercy of a powerful neighbour. But this was not to be, and Dionysius was inspired with resolution to abide the storm, that so he might fulfil that purpose of God's providence which designed the Greek power in Sicily to stand as a breakwater against the advances of Carthage, and to afford a shelter to the yet unripened strength of Rome. Dionysius proposes to Sicily. The condition of Dionysius seemed desperate. escape from Blockaded by sea and land, with a people impatient of his despotism, with a force of mercenaries, who, the moment that he became unable to pay them, might betray him, either to the enemy without the walls or to his political adversaries within; he held a council with his friends in the citadel, and expressed his purpose of leaving Syracuse to its fate, and attempting to effect his own escape by sea. One of them boldly answered 57, "A king's robe is a noble winding-sheet." At these words the spirit of Dionysius rose within him, and he resolved to live or die a king. The Carthaginian armament But his deliverance was effected by another power than his own. The spots where the small Sicilian an epidemic rivers make their way into the sea, are during the crippled by sickness. summer notoriously unhealthy: a malaria fever is almost the certain consequence of passing a single 57 Kaλóv éotiv Évrápiov ý tupavvís. Isocrates, Archidamus, § 49. p. 125. XXI. night in any village so situated. The shore near the CHAP. mouth of the Anapus, and the marshy plain immediately behind it, would be absolutely pestilential to an army quartered there during the heats of summer; and the Athenians, when besieging Syracuse seventeen years before, had severely suffered from its influence 58. But now the season was unusually hot, and from the prevalence of epidemic disease in Africa about this period, it is likely that the constitutions of many of the Carthaginian soldiers would be more than usually susceptible of infection. Accordingly 59, the disorder which broke out in the besieging army more resembled the most malignant pestilence than any ordinary form of marsh or malaria fever. The patients were commonly carried off in five or six days; and the disease was either really so contagious, or was imagined to be so, that no one dared to visit the sick, or to pay them the most necessary attentions: and thus all who were taken ill were left to die without relief. destroys This visitation broke both the power and the Dionysius spirit of the Carthaginians. Dionysius 60 now made their fleet. a sally, and attacked them both by sea and land. He carried their post at the temple of the Olympian Jupiter, and that at Dascon, at the very bottom of the harbour, on the right of the Anapus, where the Athenians first effected their landing. Here he found their ships drawn up on the beach, and he instantly set fire to them. Meanwhile the Syracusan 58 Thucydides, VII. 47. 60 Diodorus, XIV. 72–75. XXI. CHAP. fleet advanced right across the harbour, and surprised the enemy's ships before they could be manned and worked out from the shore to offer battle. Thus taking them at a disadvantage, the Greeks sunk or shattered them without resistance, or surrounded them and carried them by boarding. And now the flames began to spread from the ships on the beach to those which lay afloat moored close to the shore. These were mostly merchant ships, worked by sails like ours, and consequently, even while at anchor, they had their masts up and their standing rigging. As the flames caught these and blazed up into the air, the spectacle afforded to the Syracusans on their walls was most magnificent. The crews of the burning ships leaped overboard, and left them to their fate; their cables were burnt, and the blazing masses began to drift about the harbour, and to run foul of one another; while the crackling of the flames, and the crashing of the falling masts and of the sides of the ships in their mutual shocks, heard amidst volumes of smoke and sheets of fire, reminded the Syracusans of the destruction of the giants by the thunder of Jove, when they had assayed in their pride to storm Olympus 61. Rejoicings of the Syra cusans. Thus called, as they thought, by the manifest interposition of Heaven to finish the work, the very old 61 Diodorus, XIV. 73. This whole description seems to have been taken from the history of Philistus, who was probably an eye-witness of the scene: so that the comparison is not to be regarded as the mere flourish of a writer, far removed in time and space from the action which suggested it, but as one which really arose in the minds of the Syracusans, amidst the excitement and enthusiasm of the actual spectacle. |