The flight of Imilkon with his Carthaginians from Syracuse left Dionysius and the Syracusans in the full swing of triumph. The conquests made by Imilkon were altogether lost, and the Carthaginian dominion in Sicily was now cut down to that restricted space in the western corner of the island, which it had occupied prior to the invasion of Hannibal in 409 B. C. So prodigious a success probably enabled Dionysius to put down the opposition recently manifested among the Syracusans to the continuance of his rule. We are told that he was greatly embarrassed by his mercenaries; who, having been for some time without pay, manifested such angry discontent as to threaten his downfall. Dionysius seized the person of their commander, the Spartan Aristoteles: upon which the soldiers mutined and flocked in arms around his residence, demanding in fierce terms both the liberty of their commander and the payment of their arrears. Of these demands, Dionysius eluded the first by saying that he would send away Aristoteles to Sparta, to be tried and dealt with among his own countrymen: as to the second, he pacified the soldiers by assigning to them, in exchange for their pay, the town and territory of Leontini. Willingly accepting this rich bribe, the most fertile soil of the island, the mercenaries quitted Syracuse to the number of ten thousand, to take up their residence in the newly assigned town; while Dionysius hired new mercenaries in their place. To these (including perhaps the Iberians or Spaniards who had recently passed from the Carthaginian service into his) and to the slaves whom he had liberated, he intrusted the maintenance of his dominion.[2] [2] Diodor. xiv. 78. These few facts, which are all that we hear, enable us to see that the relations between Dionysius and the mercenaries by whose means he ruled Syracuse, were troubled and difficult to manage. But they do not explain to us the full cause of such discord. We know that a short time before, Dionysius had rid himself of one thousand obnoxious mercenaries by treacherously betraying them to death in a battle with the Carthaginians. Moreover, he would hardly have seized the person of Aristoteles, and sent him away for trial, if the latter had done nothing more than demand pay really due to his soldiers. It seems probable that the discontent of the mercenaries rested upon deeper causes, perhaps connected with that movement in the Syracusan mind against Dionysius, manifested openly in the invective of Theodorus. We should have been glad also to know how Dionysius proposed to pay the new mercenaries, if he had no means of paying the old. The cost of maintaining his standing army, upon whomsoever it fell, must have been burdensome in the extreme. What became of the previous residents and proprietors at Leontini, who must have been dispossessed when this much-coveted site was transferred to the mercenaries? On all these points we are unfortunately left in ignorance.