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.  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.

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.  He who feels it his vocation to judge the sins of others may condemn the human agents; for Sicily it might be a blessing that a warlike power, and one belonging to the island, thus began to be formed in it—­a power which was already able to bring eight thousand men into the field, and which was gradually putting itself in a position to take up at the proper time and on its own resources that struggle against the foreigners, to the maintenance of which the Hellenes, becoming more and more unaccustomed to arms notwithstanding their perpetual wars, were no longer equal.

In the first instance, however, things took another turn.  A young Syracusan officer, who by his descent from the family of Gelo and his intimate relations of kindred with king Pyrrhus as well as by the distinction with which he had fought in the campaigns of the latter, had attracted the notice of his fellow-citizens as well as of the Syracusan soldiery—­Hiero, son of Hierocles—­was called by military election to command the army, which was at variance with the citizens (479-480).  By his prudent administration, the nobility of his character, and the moderation of his views, he rapidly gained the hearts of the citizens of Syracuse—­who had been accustomed to the most scandalous lawlessness in their despots—­and of the Sicilian Greeks in general.  He rid himself—­in a perfidious manner, it is true—­of the insubordinate army of mercenaries, revived the citizen-militia, and endeavoured, at first with the title of general, afterwards with that of king, to re-establish the deeply sunken Hellenic power by means of his civic troops and of fresh and more manageable recruits.  With the Carthaginians, who in concert with the Greeks had driven king Pyrrhus from the island, there was at that time peace.  The immediate foes of the Syracusans were the Mamertines.  They were the kinsmen of those hated mercenaries whom the Syracusans had recently extirpated; they had murdered their own