“All the captains and officers with Marcellus congratulated him upon this extraordinary success. For himself, when he had considered from an eminence the loftiness, beauty, and extent of that city, he is said to have shed tears, and to have deplored the unhappy condition it was upon the point of experiencing. “As it was then autumn, there happened a plague, which killed great numbers in the city, and still more in the Roman and Carthaginian camps. The distemper was not excessive at first, and proceeded only from the bad air and season; but afterwards the communication with the infected, and even the care taken of them, dispersed the contagion; from whence it happened that some, neglected and absolutely abandoned, died of the violence of the malady, and others received help, which became fatal to those who brought it. Nothing was heard night and day but groans and lamentations. At length, the being accustomed to the evil had hardened their hearts to such a degree, and so far extinguished all sense of compassion in them, that they not only ceased to grieve for the dead, but left them without interment. Nothing was to be seen every where but dead bodies, exposed to the view of those who expected the same fate. The Carthaginians suffered much more from it than the others. As they had no place to retire to, they almost all perished, with their generals Hippocrates and Himilcon. Marcellus, from the breaking out of the disease, had brought his soldiers into the city, where the roofs and shade was of great relief to them; he lost, however, no inconsiderable number of men. “Amongst those, who commanded in Syracuse, there was a Spaniard named Mericus: him a means was found to corrupt. He gave up the gate near the fountain Arethusa to soldiers sent by Marcellus in the night to take possession of it. At day-break the next morning, Marcellus made a false attack at Achradina, to draw all the forces of the citadel and the isle adjoining to it, to that side, and to facilitate the throwing some troops into the isle, which would be unguarded, by some vessels he had prepared. Every thing succeeded according to his plan. The soldiers, whom those vessels had landed in the isle, finding almost all the posts abandoned, and the gates by which the garrison of the citadel had marched out against Marcellus still open, they took possession of them after a slight encounter.