out, and he was completely beaten.  Muttines was not induced to deviate from his course; he maintained himself in the interior of the country, occupied several small towns, and was enabled by the not inconsiderable reinforcements which joined him from Carthage gradually to extend his operations.  His successes were so brilliant, that at length the commander-in-chief, who could not otherwise prevent the cavalry officer from eclipsing him, deprived him summarily of the command of the light cavalry, and entrusted it to his own son.  The Numidian, who had now for two years preserved the island for his Phoenician masters, had the measure of his patience exhausted by this treatment.  He and his horsemen who refused to follow the younger Hanno entered into negotiations with the Roman general Marcus Valerius Laevinus and delivered to him Agrigentum.  Hanno escaped in a boat, and went to Carthage to report to his superiors the disgraceful high treason of Hannibal’s officer; the Phoenician garrison in the town was put to death by the Romans, and the citizens were sold into slavery (544).  To secure the island from such surprises as the landing of 540, the city received a new body of inhabitants selected from Sicilians well disposed towards Rome; the old glorious Akragas was no more.  After the whole of Sicily was thus subdued, the Romans exerted themselves to restore some sort of tranquillity and order to the distracted island.  The pack of banditti that haunted the interior were driven together en masse and conveyed to Italy, that from their head-quarters at Rhegium they might burn and destroy in the territories of Hannibal’s allies.  The government did its utmost to promote the restoration of agriculture which had been totally neglected in the island.  The Carthaginian council more than once talked of sending a fleet to Sicily and renewing the war there; but the project went no further.

Philip of Macedonia and His Delay

Macedonia might have exercised an influence over the course of events more decisive than that of Syracuse.  From the Eastern powers neither furtherance nor hindrance was for the moment to be expected.  Antiochus the Great, the natural ally of Philip, had, after the decisive victory of the Egyptians at Raphia in 537, to deem himself fortunate in obtaining peace from the indolent Philopator on the basis of the -status quo ante-.  The rivalry of the Lagidae and the constant apprehension of a renewed outbreak of the war on the one hand, and insurrections of pretenders in the interior and enterprises of all sorts in Asia Minor, Bactria, and the eastern satrapies on the other, prevented him from joining that great anti-Roman alliance which Hannibal had in view.  The Egyptian court was decidedly on the side of Rome, with which it renewed alliance in 544; but it was not to be expected of Ptolemy Philopator, that he would support otherwise than by corn-ships.  Accordingly there was nothing to prevent Greece and Macedonia from throwing a decisive