Timoleon

and not one of those who were established in fortresses and strongholds would hearken to any summons, or come down into the city, but fear and hatred kept all away from market place and civic life and public speaking, which had produced the most of their tyrants.

Therefore Timoleon and the Syracusans decided to write to the Corinthians urging them to send settlers to Syracuse from Greece.

For otherwise the land was likely to lie uncultivated, and they expected a great war from Africa, since they learned that the Carthaginians, after Mago’s suicide, had impaled his dead body, in their rage at his conduct of the expedition, and that they were assembling a great force with the intention of crossing into Sicily in the summer.

When these letters from Timoleon had been delivered and were accompanied by Syracusan envoys who begged them to take thought for their city and to become anew its founders, the Corinthians did not seize the opportunity for their own aggrandizement, nor did they appropriate the city for themselves,

but, in the first place, they visited the sacred games in Greece and the greatest festival assemblages, and proclaimed by heralds that the Corinthians had overthrown the tyranny in Syracuse, and driven out the tyrant, and now invited Syracusans, and any other Sicilian Greeks who wished, to people the city with free and independent citizens, allotting the land among them on equal and just terms.

In the second place, they sent messengers to Asia and the islands, where they learned that most of the scattered exiles were residing, and invited them all to come to Corinth, assuring them that the Corinthians, at their own expense, would furnish them with leaders and transports and a safe convoy to Syracuse.