Soon the Hellenic nation was forced to engage in a still more comprehensive and still more decisive conflict with the barbarians both of the west and of the east.  It was about the time of the Persian wars.  The relation in which the Tyrians stood to the great king led Carthage also to follow in the wake of Persian policy —­there exists a credible tradition even as to an alliance between the Carthaginians and Xerxes—­and, along with the Carthaginians, the Etruscans.  It was one of the grandest of political combinations which simultaneously directed the Asiatic hosts against Greece, and the Phoenician hosts against Sicily, to extirpate at a blow liberty and civilization from the face of the earth.  The victory remained with the Hellenes.  The battle of Salamis (274) saved and avenged Hellas proper; and on the same day—­so runs the story—­the rulers of Syracuse and Agrigentum, Gelon and Theron, vanquished the immense army of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar, son of Mago, at Himera so completely, that the war was thereby terminated, and the Phoenicians, who by no means cherished at that time the project of subduing the whole of Sicily on their own account, returned to their previous defensive policy.  Some of the large silver pieces are still preserved which were coined for this campaign from the ornaments of Damareta, the wife of Gelon, and other noble Syracusan dames:  and the latest times gratefully remembered the gentle and brave king of Syracuse and the glorious victory whose praises Simonides sang.

The immediate effect of the humiliation of Carthage was the fall of the maritime supremacy of her Etruscan allies.  Anaxilas, ruler of Rhegium and Zancle, had already closed the Sicilian straits against their privateers by means of a standing fleet (about 272); soon afterwards (280) the Cumaeans and Hiero of Syracuse achieved a decisive victory near Cumae over the Tyrrhene fleet, to which the Carthaginians vainly attempted to render aid.  This is the victory which Pindar celebrates in his first Pythian ode; and there is still extant an Etruscan helmet, which Hiero sent to Olympia, with the inscription:  “Hiaron son of Deinomenes and the Syrakosians to Zeus, Tyrrhane spoil from Kyma."(2)

Maritime Supremacy of the Tarentines and Syracusans—­
Dionysius of Syracuse

While these extraordinary successes against the Carthaginians and Etruscans placed Syracuse at the head of the Greek cities in Sicily, the Doric Tarentum rose to undisputed pre-eminence among the Italian Hellenes, after the Achaean Sybaris had fallen about the time of the expulsion of the kings from Rome (243).  The terrible defeat of the Tarentines by the Iapygians (280), the most severe disaster which a Greek army had hitherto sustained, served only, like the Persian invasion of Hellas, to unshackle the whole might of the national spirit in the development of an energetic democracy.  Thenceforth the Carthaginians and the Etruscans were no longer paramount in the Italian waters; the Tarentines