The humanity of Marcellus after the conquest of the town, is by the ancients generally set forth as quite exemplary; but the Ἐκλογαὶ περὶ γνωμῶν now show us what a sort of forbearance it was. The town was not burned, but completely sacked; and the inhabitants were driven out, and had to tear up the grass from the earth, to appease their hunger. The slaves were sold, a fate, which was so much envied by those who were free, that many gave themselves out to be slaves, and let themselves be sold, only to keep soul and body together. All that was in the town, became the prize of the soldiers or of the state; Marcellus carried away the highest works of Grecian art in a mass to Rome. Livy’s remark is a true one, that this melancholy gain was avenged upon him, inasmuch as the temple of _Virtus_ and _Honor_, which he thus bedecked, was already thoroughly stripped by others in his (Livy’s) times. After the fall of Syracuse, the war in Sicily lasted yet two years, and it ended with the taking of Agrigentum, which was still more terribly dealt with, as the Romans sold all the freemen as slaves. Thus Agrigentum was thrice laid waste:--once under Dionysius; then, a hundred and fifty years later, in the first Punic war; and now once more, after another fifty years. It was the most splendid town in the island next to Syracuse, and it became at that time the insignificant place which it is still to this day. M. Valerius Lævinus, a Roman of humane disposition, afterwards gathered together a new community therein (549). This victory over the Carthaginian army was also brought about by treachery; for a Numidian captain named Mutines went over with his soldiers to the Romans, and, like Mericus, was liberally rewarded by them. Thus, in the sixth year after the defection of Hieronymus, Sicily was again quite under the rule of the Romans. The taking of Syracuse is of the same date as that of Capua (541), and both of these events may show us, how little the wars of the ancients are to be deemed like those of our own days. Since the end of the seventeenth century especially, quite a different notion of waging war has come into vogue. The last war of horrors, was the devastation of the Palatinate under Louis XIV.