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Updated: June 13, 2025
The citizens were slain or expelled, their wives and children and houses were distributed among the soldiers, and the new masters of the city, the Mamertines or "men of Mars," as they called themselves, soon became the third power in the island, the north-eastern portion of which they reduced to subjection in the times of confusion that succeeded the death of Agathocles.
Hiero of Syracuse War between the Syracusans and the Mammertines It is not becoming in the historian either to excuse the perfidious crime by which the Mamertines seized their power, or to forget that the God of history does not necessarily punish the sins of the fathers to the fourth generation.
Pliny's dolphin is famous, and what is related of the American Manati: but the most stupendous instance, that of the xiphia or sword-fish, which the Mamertines can take up by no other strategem than a song of certain barbarous words, as the thing is related by Thom. Fazzello.
Messina, the place founded long ago by the brave exiles of Messene, when the Spartans had conquered their state, had been seized by a troop of Mamertines, fierce Italians from Mamertum; and these, on being threatened by Xiero, king of Syracuse, sent to offer to become subjects to the Romans, thus giving them the command of the port which secured the entrance of the island.
Had Carthage possessed the whole of Sicily, her fleets would have controlled the Mediterranean. Messina, the seat of the pirate republic of the Mamertines, was in close alliance with Rhegium, a city which had grown into importance during the war with Pyrrhus.
However, they gave way to these things as necessary, although they took them very ill from him; and especially when he began to show suspicion of Thoenon and Sosistratus, men of the first position in Syracuse, who invited him over into Sicily, and when he was come, put the cities into his power, and were most instrumental in all he had done there since his arrival, whom he now would neither suffer to be about his person, nor leave at home; and when Sosistratus out of fear withdrew himself, and then he charged Thoenon, as in a conspiracy with the other, and put him to death, with this all his prospects changed, not by little and little, nor in a single place only, but a mortal hatred being raised in the cities against him, some fell off to the Carthaginians, others called in the Mamertines.
In league with the Romans who just about this time were sending their legions against the Campanians in Rhegium, the allies, kinsmen, and confederates in crime of the Mamertines, Hiero turned his arms against Messana.
The Carthaginians were no unwilling spectators of these events, which established in the immediate vicinity of the Syracusans a new and powerful adversary instead of a cognate and ordinarily allied or dependent city. With Carthaginian aid the Mamertines maintained themselves against Pyrrhus, and the untimely departure of the king restored to them all their power.
Accordingly, leaving things at present as they were in the Carthaginian or western part of the island, he proceeded to attack the Mamertines in the eastern part. He was equally successful here. By means of the tact and skill which he exercised in his military arrangements and maneuvers, and by the desperate bravery and impetuosity which he displayed in battle, he conquered wherever he came.
The latter were then under the sway of Hiero, who, for fifty years, had reigned without despotism, and had quietly developed both the resources and the freedom of the city. He collected an army of citizens, devoted to him, who expelled the Mamertines from many of their towns, and gained a decisive victory over them, not far from Messina. One party looked to Carthage, and another to Rome.
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