The substance of these statements is that in the year 310 B.C. Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse, while conducting his fleet from Syracuse to the Coast of Africa, found himself enveloped in the shadow of an eclipse, which evidently, from the accounts, was total. His fleet had been chased by the Carthaginians on leaving Syracuse the preceding day, but got away under the cover of night. On the following morning about 8 or 9 a.m. a sudden darkness came on which greatly alarmed the sailors. So considerable was the darkness, that numerous stars appeared. It is not at the first easy to localise the position of the fleet, except that we may infer that it could hardly have got more than 80 or at the most 100 miles away from the harbour of Syracuse where it had been closely blockaded by a Carthaginian fleet. Agathocles would not have got away at all but for the fact that a relieving fleet was expected, and the Carthaginians were obliged to relax their blockade in order to go in search of the relieving fleet. Thus it came about not only that Agathocles set himself free, but was able to retaliate on his enemies by landing on the coast of Africa at a point near the modern Cape Bon, and devastating the Carthaginian territories. The voyage thither occupied six days, and the eclipse occurred on the second day. Though we are not informed of the route followed by Agathocles, that is to say whether he passed round the North or the South side of the island of Sicily, yet it has been made clear by astronomers that the southern side was that taken. Baily, who was the first modern astronomer to investigate the circumstances of this eclipse, found that there was an irreconcilable difference between the path of the shadow found by himself and the historical statement, a gap of about 180 geographical miles seeming to intervene between the most southerly position which could be assigned to the fleet of Agathocles, and the most northerly possible limit of the path of the eclipse shadow. This was the condition of the problem when Sir G. B. Airy took it up in 1853.[55] He, however, was able to throw an entirely new light upon the matter. The tables used by Baily were distinctly inferior to those now in use, and Sir G. B. Airy thought himself justified in saying that to obviate the discordance of 180 miles just referred to “it is only necessary to suppose an error of 3′ in the computed distances of the Sun and Moon at conjunction, a very inconsiderable correction for a date anterior to the epoch of the tables by more than twenty-one centuries.” It deserves to be mentioned, though the point cannot here be dwelt upon at much length, that these ancient eclipses all hang together in such a way that it is not sufficient for the man of Astronomy and the man of Chronology to agree on one eclipse, unless they can harmonise the facts of several.