and made his escape to Agrigentum.  Syracuse would gladly have surrendered to the Romans; negotiations had already begun.  But for the second time they were thwarted by the deserters:  in another mutiny of the soldiers the chief magistrates and a number of respectable citizens were slain, and the government and the defence of the city were entrusted by the foreign troops to their captains.  Marcellus now entered into a negotiation with one of these, which gave into his hands one of the two portions of the city that were still free, the “island”; upon which the citizens voluntarily opened to him the gates of Achradina also (in the autumn of 542).  If mercy was to be shown in any case, it might, even according to the far from laudable principles of Roman public law as to the treatment of perfidious communities, have been extended to this city, which manifestly had not been at liberty to act for itself, and which had repeatedly made the most earnest attempts to get rid of the tyranny of the foreign soldiers.  Nevertheless, not only did Marcellus stain his military honour by permitting a general pillage of the wealthy mercantile city, in the course of which Archimedes and many other citizens were put to death, but the Roman senate lent a deaf ear to the complaints which the Syracusans afterwards presented regarding the celebrated general, and neither returned to individuals their pillaged property nor restored to the city its freedom.  Syracuse and the towns that had been previously dependent on it were classed among the communities tributary to Rome—­Tauromenium and Neetum alone obtained the same privileges as Messana, while the territory of Leontini became Roman domain and its former proprietors Roman lessees—­and no Syracusan citizen was henceforth allowed to reside in the “island,” the portion of the city that commanded the harbour.

Guerilla War in Sicily
Agrigentum Occupied by the Romans
Sicily Tranquillized

Sicily thus appeared lost to the Carthaginians; but the genius of Hannibal exercised even from a distance its influence there.  He despatched to the Carthaginian army, which remained at.  Agrigentum in perplexity and inaction under Hanno and Epicydes, a Libyan cavalry officer Muttines, who took the command of the Numidian cavalry, and with his flying squadrons, fanning into an open flame the bitter hatred which the despotic rule of the Romans had excited over all the island, commenced a guerilla warfare on the most extensive scale and with the happiest results; so that he even, when the Carthaginian and Roman armies met on the river Himera, sustained some conflicts with Marcellus himself successfully.  The relations, however, which prevailed between Hannibal and the Carthaginian council, were here repeated on a small scale.  The general appointed by the council pursued with jealous envy the officer sent by Hannibal, and insisted upon giving battle to the proconsul without Muttines and the Numidians.  The wish of Hanno was carried