On one such occasion, he abandoned an army in Africa, which he had taken there on one of his predatory enterprises, and, flying secretly from the camp, he made his escape with a small number of attendants, leaving the army to its fate. His flight was so sudden on this occasion that he left his two sons behind him in the hands and at the mercy of the soldiers. The soldiers, as soon as they found that Agathocles had gone and left them, were so enraged against him that they put his sons to death on the spot, and then surrendered in a body to the enemy. Agathocles, when the tidings of this transaction came to him in Sicily, was enraged against the soldiers in his turn, and, in order to revenge himself upon them, he immediately sought out from among the population of the country their wives and children, their brothers and sisters, and all who were in any way related to them. These innocent representatives of the absent offenders he ordered to be seized and slain, and their bodies to be cast into the sea toward Africa as an expression of revengeful triumph and defiance. So great was the slaughter on this occasion, that the waters of the sea were dyed with blood to a great distance from the shore. Of course, such cruelty as this could not be practiced without awakening, on the part of those who suffered from it, a spirit of hatred and revenge. Plots and conspiracies without number were formed against the tyrant's life, and in his later years he lived in continual apprehension and distress. His fate, however, was still more striking as an illustration of the manner in which the old age of ambitious and unprincipled men is often embittered by the ingratitude and wickedness of their children. Agathocles had a grandson named Archagathus, who, if all the accounts are true, brought the old king's gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. The story is too shocking to be fully believed, but it is said that this grandson first murdered Agathocles's son and heir, his own uncle, in order that he might himself succeed to the throne--his own father, who would have been the next heir, being dead. Then, not being willing to wait until the old king himself should die, he began to form plots against his life, and against the lives of the remaining members of the family. Although several of Agathocles's sons were dead, having been destroyed by violence, or having fallen in war, he had a wife, named Texina, and two children still remaining alive. The king was so anxious in respect to these children, on account of Archagathus, that he determined to send them with their mother to Egypt, in order to place them beyond the reach of their merciless nephew. Texina was very unwilling to consent to such a measure. For herself and her sons the proposed retiring into Egypt was little better than going into exile, and she was, moreover, extremely reluctant to leave her husband alone in Syracuse, exposed to the machinations and plots which his unnatural grandson might form against him.