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Updated: May 28, 2025
Salammbo sprang quickly back, so much afraid was she of this unclean being, who was as hideous as a larva and nearly as terrible as a phantom. "I am nearly one hundred years old," he said. "I have seen Agathocles; I have seen Regulus and the eagles of the Romans passing over the harvests of the Punic fields!
Agathocles, in his doubt, did nothing; he sat down to supper with his friends, perhaps hoping that the storm might blow over of itself, perhaps trusting to chance and to the strong walls of the palace.
As late as 310 B.C., when Agathocles was besieging Carthage, and had reduced the city to the direst straits, we are told that the people laid two hundred boys of their noblest families upon the arms of the brazen image of the god, whence they were allowed to fall into the fire beneath. On similar occasions, even the head of the state sometimes offered himself as a sacrifice.
For some time Agathocles little as he cared for such a life played his convivial part with the rest, Dinias making no distinction between him and the parasites.
Thus was spent a reign of seventeen years, during which the king had never but once, when he met Antiochus in battle, roused himself from his life of sloth. The misconduct and vices of Agathocles raised such an outcry against him, that Philopator, without giving up the pleasure of his favourite's company, was forced to take away from him the charge of receiving the taxes.
He had subsequently spent some considerable time at the court of Lysimachus, and had taken some active part in public affairs. When Agathocles was poisoned, he fled with Lysandra to Seleucus; and when the preparations were made by Seleucus for war with Lysimachus, he probably regarded himself as in some sense the leader of the expedition.
This may have been true. Whether it was true or false, however, can now never be known. At all events, Lysimachus was induced to believe it. He ordered Agathocles to be seized and put into prison, and then, a short time afterward, he caused him to be poisoned. Lysandra was overwhelmed with consternation and sorrow at this event.
But this was sternly refused, and a shout was raised to kill the messenger; and Aristomenes, the best of the ministers, whose only fault was the being a friend of Agathocles, and the having named his little daughter Agathoclea, would certainly have been killed upon the spot if somebody had not reminded them that they wanted to send back an answer.
The Carthaginians, reduced to extreme necessity, were compelled to come to terms with Agathocles, and, leaving Sicily to him, had to be content with the possession of Africa.
Just at that time the circumstances of Italy were such, that the project which had been meditated forty years before by Pyrrhus's kinsman, his father's cousin, Alexander of Epirus, and quite recently by his father-in-law Agathocles, once more seemed feasible; and so Pyrrhus resolved to abandon his Macedonian schemes and to found for himself and for the Hellenic nation a new empire in the west.
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