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Updated: June 13, 2025
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.
Owing to this want of united purpose it came about that both cities were appealed to, and it very naturally happened that the fortress of the Mamertines was occupied by a garrison from Carthage before Rome was able to send its army.
They were rejoiced to find themselves, as in former days, marching all together in the open country, and some of the Greeks sang the old song of the Mamertines: "With my lance and sword I plough and reap; I am master of the house! The disarmed man falls at my feet and calls me Lord and Great King." They shouted, they leaped, the merriest began to tell stories; the time of their miseries was past.
Thus they remained isolated, in close league with their kinsmen and comrades in crime, the Mamertines, that is, the Campanian mercenaries of Agathocles, who had by similar means gained possession of Messana on the opposite side of the straits; and they pillaged and laid waste for their own behoof the adjacent Greek towns, such as Croton, where they put to death the Roman garrison, and Caulonia, which they destroyed.
He fought a battle at sea with the Carthaginian fleet during his passage to Italy, in which he lost many ships, while the Mamertines, ten thousand strong, had crossed into Italy before he could reach it, and although they did not dare to fight a pitched battle, yet harassed him by attacking him when entangled in some rough ground, and threw his entire army into confusion.
In respect to the Carthaginians and the Mamertines, nothing, of course, could be attempted until the fleets and armies should arrive. At length the preparations for the sailing of the expedition from Tarentum were completed. The fleet consisted of two hundred sail.
Arrived on the Italian coast, the king began by an attempt to get possession of Rhegium; but the Campanians repulsed the attack with the aid of the Mamertines, and in the heat of the conflict before the town the king himself was wounded in the act of striking down an officer of the enemy.
The Tarentines remonstrate. Their arguments. Pyrrhus sends Cineas in advance to Sicily. Form of Sicily. Situation of Messana. Conduct of the Mamertines in Sicily. The Mamertines take complete possession of Messana. Three objects to be accomplished in Sicily. The grand expedition sails to Sicily. He determines to take Eryx by storm. Pyrrhus at the head of the column. Combat on the walls.
Pyrrhus soon collected from the ships that reached the land a force so formidable that the Mamertines did not dare to attack him in a body, but they blocked up the passes through which the way to Tarentum lay, and endeavored in every way to intercept and harass him in his march.
The Carthaginian party prevailed on the Mamertines to receive a Punic garrison. But the strait which afforded a passage to Sicily was barred by a Carthaginian fleet. The Romans, unaccustomed to the sea, were defeated.
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