years to come, and we need to understand them.'
Marcus stared at him for another moment, his face hot. Then he said. 'I would like that very much, lord. Only I don't know that I will be alive tomorrow.'
Hieron sighed. 'That, of course, is the problem. I wish you had been a bit less forthright with the consul. I wish I dared keep you here- but I worked quite hard to expose Claudius, and too much depends on it to allow him a chance to cover himself. But listen- keep what I have said in mind, and if you can, lie. I do not mind in the least if you say I threatened you or maltreated you to make you speak as you did. If cursing Syracuse will keep you alive, curse her. The gods laugh at forced oaths. It would not be treachery.'
'I will try,' whispered Marcus, 'but…'
From the courtyard came a sound of trumpets, and then the sweet notes of an aulos and the beat of marching feet. The other prisoners were arriving, and it would soon be time to go.
Hieron sighed again, then added, in a very low voice, 'Try. And if you fail- I have a gift for you.'
He reached into a fold of his cloak and brought out a small, fat flask of black-glazed pottery. It was about the size of a child's fist, and it had been stoppered with a piece of wood shoved into a fragment of rag. He offered it to Marcus in silence, and Marcus took it slowly, with hands that were suddenly cold.
'It takes about half an hour to work,' said the king. 'A third of the contents will dull pain, if it's merely a question of flogging or beating. If it's death, drink it all.'
'Lord,' said Marcus, 'you have twice showed me mercy, and I am grateful.'
Hieron shook his head angrily. 'I spared you because I wished to make use of you, and this mercy is one I pray to the gods you will not need. Do you have somewhere to hide it? Good. Then I wish you joy, Marcus Valerius, and I hope that we will meet again.'
Marcus swallowed and nodded, then said, 'Tell Archimedes and his household that I pray for the safety of Syracuse. And thank you.'
Hieron touched his shoulder lightly, then rose resolutely and strode from the room.
Marcus set the flask carefully in the flute case, in the space normally occupied by the reeds. He was down to his last reed, and he wondered if he would need a new one. He closed the case and thrust it through his belt.
When he went down into the courtyard, he found that the guards from the quarry had brought along his little bundle of luggage. He slung it over his shoulder and took his place in the line with the other prisoners, who were laughing joyfully over their release. The gates of the Euryalus were opened, the flute struck up the march, and he descended from Syracuse to the Roman camp below.
15
The Romans did not assault Syracuse again that summer. After the exchange of prisoners, they returned to Messana, where the troops spent the winter while Appius Claudius went home to Rome.
He was not reelected. Reports of the army's many causes of dissatisfaction with him had been circulating widely throughout Rome by the time he returned, and he was received coldly, without honors and without thanks. Neither of the new consuls elected in January belonged to the Claudian faction.
The two legions in Sicily, however, were considered to be insufficient for the gravity of the situation there, and another six specially strengthened legions were enrolled. In the spring both consuls set out for Sicily with their huge armies, and when they landed at Messana, they proclaimed favorable terms for any Sicilian city that would abandon Syracuse. At this all of the dependencies of Syracuse, all her friends and allies on the island, fell away.
In early summer the forty-thousand-strong Roman army arrived at Syracuse itself and laid siege to the city, ringing it about by land with a bank, ditch, and wall of earth and timber. Greek engineers from the subject cities of Tarentum and Croton constructed siege machineswheeled towers with ladders, grapples, and catapults mounted in them, and the thick-roofed, open-floored wheeled carts called tortoises, which protected massive battering rams. In the middle of the summer the besiegers tried to take Syracuse by storm.
They failed utterly. Over the previous summer, Hieron had been calling upon Syracusan allies for supplies- grain to feed the citizens during a siege, wood and iron and hair to shape weapons for her defenses- and Egypt and Rhodes, Corinth and Cyrene had responded. The new season had found the city more impregnable than ever. Extra ditches had been dug about the walls, inside the range of the defending catapults, so that the attackers had to wheel their cumbersome siege machines down steep slopes, then up, then down again, all the while suffering the bombardment of the Syracusan catapults. And that bombardment was of a strength such as the Romans' Italiot engineers had never imagined. Immense stones smashed the tortoises and toppled the siege towers. Men who tried to right them fell under a rain of bolts, and incendiaries smashed into the damaged machines and set them ablaze. The rams never got anywhere near the walls, but were crushed like beetles on the slopes of the Epipolae, and abandoned when the attackers fled. Hundreds of Romans injured or trapped in the wreck of the machines were taken prisoner by the Syracusans; hundreds more were killed.
Manius Valerius Maximus, the senior Roman consul, conferring with his colleague and his senior advisers after the assault, had one of the Syracusan catapult stones rolled into his tent for their consideration. It weighed over two hundred pounds. The Romans regarded it with horrified wonder.
'I'd heard,' said the Tarentine chief engineer in awe, 'that Archimedes of Syracuse, King Hieron's engineer, could build three-talenters. I thought the stories were exaggerating.'
'It seems they fell short of the mark,' said Valerius Maximus. 'Like our own assault.'
The Tarentine had no ideas for countering Syracusan artillery, and was, in fact, fearful that a man who could build three-talenters might have worse things in store for any siege engine that did succeed in getting close to the walls. The Romans considered the possibility of blockading the city and concluded that it was pointless even to try: they had no fleet apart from the few Italiot vessels and the transports which had brought them across the straits, while the Syracusans possessed eighty decked warships to defend their shipping. The number was certain: the Syracusans had proudly displayed the fleet to their Roman prisoners the summer before.
Even more worrying, from the Roman point of view, was the news that General Hanno, the Carthaginian commander in Sicily, had been recalled to Africa, tried by the Carthaginian Senate, and sentenced to death by crucifixion for his inaction. There were rumors that Carthage was now recruiting mercenaries and intended to press the war in earnest.
'We must have peace with Hieron of Syracuse,' concluded Maximus. 'Carthage is the main enemy, but we cannot fight the Carthaginians with Syracuse hostile at our backs. And it seems that we can't subdue Syracuse by force. Carthage has given Syracuse no support since the war began. Perhaps Hieron will be willing to abandon his alliance.'
No one had any objection to this change of policy. The rumors of Syracusan atrocities no longer found wide acceptance: the Roman prisoners released the previous year had had nothing but praise for King Hieron.
The following morning, Maximus sent a herald to Syracuse to ask King Hieron for a parley. The king at once agreed, and Roman consul and Greek monarch met on the plain below the fort of the Euryalus. Maximus was surprised to find Hieron so pleasant and reasonable a man; Appius Claudius had led him to expect a cunning and belligerent monster.
The negotiations went on for three days. Once she had entered a struggle, Rome was not in the habit of accepting anything short of her enemy's total surrender, and however generous she might otherwise be to the defeated, she always required that her new 'ally' supply troops to fight for Rome. This was precisely the condition Hieron rejected most emphatically. If Syracusans were to fight and die, they would do it on behalf of their own city, not for foreigners. Syracuse would remain sovereign and independent, or she would remain at war. She could not hope to win, but, on the other hand, the Romans couldn't hope to reduce her and couldn't afford to ignore her. Rome at last, reluctantly, yielded and concluded a treaty such as she had never made before.
Rome not only recognized the independence of Syracuse but also granted the city the right to govern eastern Sicily from Tauromenium, just south of Messana, as far as Helorus on the southern point of the island- in fact, to keep all the territory she had held before the war began, including all the cities which had recently yielded to Rome. All this land was guaranteed exempt from war- which included immunity from attacks by Rome's deplorable allies, the Mamertini. Syracuse, for her part, agreed to provide the Romans with supplies for a campaign against the
