their guardianship, provided only they were in a position
to hold it--the Samnites had established their dominion in Capua
itself, and the Lucanians in a succession of Greek cities, after
a fashion not much more honourable.

Mammertines

Nowhere was the state of political relations more inviting for such
enterprises than in Sicily. Already the Campanian captains who came
to Sicily during the Peloponnesian war had insinuated themselves in
this way into Entella and Aetna. Somewhere about the year 470 a
Campanian band, which had previously served under Agathocles and after
his death (465) took up the trade of freebooters on their own account,
established themselves in Messana, the second city of Greek Sicily,
and the chief seat of the anti-Syracusan party in that portion of
the island which was still in the power of the Greeks. The citizens
were 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.