Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
Death of king Pyrrhus. Some young men, who had ill-treated the ambassadors from the Apollonians to the senate of Rome, are delivered up to them. The number of quaestors increased to eight. After much debate, the senate resolves to succour the Mammertines against the Carthaginians, and against Hiero, king of Syracuse. An exchange of prisoners with the Carthaginians.
Hiero, after gaining the royal power in Syracuse, resolved, as a consequence of his successful exploits, to place in a certain temple a golden crown which he had vowed to the immortal gods. He contracted for its making at a fixed price, and weighed out a precise amount of gold to the contractor.
But the Greek cities of the coast were held by Roman garrisons, as well as the fortresses in Apulia, Campania, and Samnium. The news of the battle of Cannæ, B.C. 216, induced the Macedonian king to promise aid to Hannibal. The death of Hiero at Syracuse made Sicily an enemy to Rome, while Carthage, now elated, sent considerable re-enforcements.
Master Hiero, for his part, calls the Egyptian "Manetho"; from which we might infer his descent from the celebrated historian of that name, but will not insist upon this genealogy. As for the studies, from certain signs we fancy them tending towards theology; the descendant of Egyptian priests is to become a Christian clergyman! Nevertheless, he still wears his talismanic ring.
Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose arrow has just flown, these words reached him: "Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees." Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah, swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water.
were compared, as to its subject, with that of the Theban bard, on the illness of Hiero, which opens with a wish that Chiron were yet living, in order that the poet might consult him on the case of the Syracusan monarch; and in its form, with that in which he asks of his native city, in whom of all her heroes she most delighted.
His guardians and friends gladly observed in him a disposition which might be easily plunged into every kind of vice; which Hiero foreseeing, is said to have formed an intention, in the latter part of his long life, of leaving Syracuse free, lest the sovereignty which had been acquired and established by honourable means, should be made a sport of and fall into ruin, under the administration of a boy.
Hiero being struck with amazement at this, and entreating him to make good this problem by actual experiment, and show some great weight moved by a small engine, he fixed accordingly upon a ship of burden out of the king's arsenal, which could not be drawn out of the dock without great labor and many men; and, loading her with many passengers and a full freight, sitting himself the while far off, with no great endeavor, but only holding the head of the pulley in his hand and drawing the cord by degrees, he drew the ship in a straight line, as smoothly and evenly as if she had been in the sea.
The jealousy between Rome and Carthage had slumbered so long as they were threatened by the invasion of Pyrrhus, which was dangerous to both. Sicily, from its situation, could hardly fail to furnish the occasion of a conflict. The Mamertines, a set of Campanian pirates, had captured Messana. They were attacked by Hiero II., king of Syracuse.
Strictly upright men might indeed ask how it was possible to deliberate at all, and how any one could even think of suggesting that the Romans should not only break their alliance with Hiero, but should, just after the Campanians of Rhegium had been punished by them with righteous severity, admit the no less guilty Sicilian accomplices to the alliance and friendship of the state, and thereby rescue them from the punishment which they deserved.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking