The miscellaneous body of immigrants recently domiciliated at Syracuse, employed in the cares inseparable from new settlement, had not come prepared to face so terrible a foe. Though Timoleon used every effort to stimulate their courage, and though his exhortations met with full apparent response, yet such was the panic prevailing, that comparatively few would follow him to the field. He could assemble no greater total than twelve thousand men; including about three thousand Syracusan citizens—the paid force which he had round him at Syracuse—that other paid force under Deinarchus, who had been just compelled by the invaders to evacuate the Carthaginian province—and finally such allies as would join.[365] His cavalry was about one thousand in number. Nevertheless, in spite of so great an inferiority, Timoleon determined to advance and meet the enemy in their own province, before they should have carried ravage over the territory of Syracuse and her allies. But when he approached near to the border, within the territory of Agrigentum, the alarm and mistrust of his army threatened to arrest his farther progress. An officer among his mercenaries, named Thrasius, took advantage of the prevailing feeling to raise a mutiny against him, persuading the soldiers that Timoleon was madly hurrying them on to certain ruin, against an enemy six times superior in number, and in a hostile country eight days’ march from Syracuse; so that there would be neither salvation for them in case of reverse, nor interment if they were slain. Their pay being considerably in arrear Thrasius urged them to return to Syracuse for the purpose of extorting the money, instead of following a commander, who could not or would not requite them, upon such desperate service. Such was the success and plausibility of these recommendations, under the actual discouragement, that they could hardly be counterworked by all the efforts of Timoleon. Nor was there ever any conjuncture in which his influence, derived as well from unbounded personal esteem as from belief in his favor with the gods, was so near failing. As it was, though he succeeded in heartening up and retaining the large body of his army, yet Thrasius, with one thousand of the mercenaries, insisted upon returning, and actually did return, to Syracuse. Moreover Timoleon was obliged to send an order along with them to the authorities at home, that these men must immediately, and at all cost, receive their arrears of pay. The wonder is, that he succeeded in his efforts to retain the rest, after insuring to the mutineers a lot which seemed so much safer and more enviable. Thrasius, a brave man, having engaged in the service of the Phokians Philomêlus and Onomarchus, had been concerned in the pillage of the Delphian temple, which drew upon him the aversion of the Grecian world.[366] How many of the one thousand seceding soldiers, who now followed him to Syracuse, had been partners in the same sacrilegious act, we cannot tell.