During this period, in the year of the battle of Cannæ, or in the following one, old Hiero died at the age of ninety. His son Gelon, who bore the same character for mildness as his father, but had been long dead, had two or three daughters, and a son, Hieronymus. Hiero’s authority was as well established as if his family had sat on the throne for centuries. Hieronymus, who succeeded his grandfather, was a contemptible, effeminate fellow; his father Gelon would have followed quite a different policy from his. That the Syracusans did not like to have the Romans as their real masters, was but natural; yet they were obliged to acknowledge either the Carthaginians or the Romans as such, and the latter, after all, had, on the whole, treated them well. But there was a general fatality, which made all the nations fall away from Rome. Hannibal had behaved in the same way towards Sicily, as he had done in Italy after the battle on the Trasimene lake: he had dismissed the Syracusan prisoners with presents, and after the battle of Cannæ, he sent envoys to Syracuse to entice the king into an alliance. Among these emissaries there were Hippocrates and Epicydes, two grandsons of a Syracusan, who, when banished from his native city, had settled in Carthage; a proof that such metics in Carthage did not cease to be Greeks, although they had even Carthaginian names, as we may see from monuments. These two were readily listened to by Hieronymus. Their first proposition was to divide Sicily between Carthage and Syracuse, with the Himera as a boundary, as in the days of Timoleon; but Hieronymus in his day-dreams was not yet content with this: he would not promise his alliance for anything less than the possession of the whole island. Hannibal, who was far from being much in earnest in this discussion, granted him his demand; for he hoped that afterwards indeed he would be able to put him down, if he could only get him for the present to declare himself against Rome. The Syracusans, who under Hiero’s rule had never thought of a revolution, were disgusted with his grandson’s ridiculous aping of eastern kings, and also with his outrages and those of his companions; so that a party was formed which wanted to restore the republic, and of course it was joined by all who were for the Romans, and likewise by all those men of sense who looked upon the rule of the Carthaginians as more ruinous than that of the Romans. The conspiracy was discovered, and one of the accomplices punished with death; yet those who had been found out would not betray the rest, and thus Hieronymus was off his guard when a great number of conspirators carried out their design, and he was murdered on the road from Syracuse to Leontini, one of the most considerable places of his petty kingdom. After his death, the republic was proclaimed, and a number of generals appointed, very likely, one for every tribe (φυλή). We find that a βουλά had always, even under the kings, a share in the