Timoleon

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.

By these proclamations the city of Corinth earned the justest praise and the fairest glory; she was freeing the land from its tyrants, saving it from the Barbarians, and restoring it to its rightful citizens.

When these had assembled at Corinth, being too few in number, they begged that they might receive fellow colonists from Corinth and the rest of Greece; and after their numbers had risen to as many as ten thousand, they sailed to Syracuse.

But by this time many also from Italy and Sicily had flocked to Timoleon; and when their numbers had risen to sixty thousand, as Athanis states, Timoleon divided the land among them, and sold the houses of the city for a thousand talents,

thus at once reserving for the original Syracusans the power to purchase their own houses, and devising an abundance of money for the community; this had so little, both for other purposes, and especially for the war, that it actually sold its public statues at auction, a regular vote of condemnation being passed against each, as though they were men submitting their accounts.