Timoleon

there he ordered out of Sicily the thousand mercenaries by whom he had been deserted before the battle, and compelled them to depart from Syracuse before the sun went down.

These, then, after crossing into Italy, were perfidiously slain by the Bruttians, thus receiving from the divine power a penalty for their treachery.

Mamercus, however, the tyrant of Catana, and Hicetas, whether through envy of the successes won by Timoleon, or because they feared him as one who distrusted tyrants and would make no peace with them, formed an alliance with the Carthaginians and urged them to send a general with an army if they did not wish to be cast out of Sicily altogether.

Accordingly, Gisco set sail[*](In the spring of 338 B.C.) with a fleet of seventy ships, and added Greek mercenaries to his forces, although the Carthaginians had never before employed Greek soldiers; they did so at this time, however, because they had come to admire them as the best and most irresistible fighters in the world.

After they had all united their forces in the territory of Messana, they slew four hundred of Timoleon’s mercenaries who had been sent thither as auxiliaries, and in that part of the island belonging to the Carthaginians, near the place called Ietae, they set an ambush for the mercenaries under Euthymus the Leucadian and cut them to pieces.

Herein even most of all did the good fortune of Timoleon become famous. For these were some of the men who, with Philomelus the Phocian and Onomarchus, had seized Delphi and shared in their spoliation of the sanctuary.[*](This was at the beginning of the second so-called Sacred War, 356 B.C.)

Then, since all mankind hated them and shunned them as men who had put themselves under a curse, they wandered about Peloponnesus, where they were enlisted in his service by Timoleon, in the dearth of other soldiers.