reduced to extremity and unable to hold the city longer against Hiero
on their own resources. It is evident that a surrender on stipulated
conditions was impossible, and that the axe of the executioner, which
had fallen upon the Campanians of Rhegium at Rome, as certainly
awaited those of Messana at Syracuse. Their only means of safety lay
in delivering up the city either to the Carthaginians or to the
Romans, both of whom could not but be so strongly set upon acquiring
that important place as to overlook all other scruples. Whether it
would be more advantageous to surrender it to the masters of Africa
or to the masters of Italy, was doubtful; after long hesitation the
majority of the Campanian burgesses at length resolved to offer
the possession of their sea-commanding fortress to the Romans.

The Mammertines Received into the Italian Confederacy

It was a moment of the deepest significance in the history of the
world, when the envoys of the Mamertines appeared in the Roman senate.
No one indeed could then anticipate all that was to depend on the
crossing of that narrow arm of the sea; but that the decision, however
it should go, would involve consequences far other and more important
than had attached to any decree hitherto passed by the senate, must
have been manifest to every one of the deliberating fathers of the
city. Strictly upright men might indeed ask how it was possible to
deliberate at all, and how any one could even think of suggesting
that the Romans should not only break their alliance with Hiero, but
should, just after the Campanians of Rhegium had been punished by them
with righteous severity, admit the no less guilty Sicilian accomplices
to the alliance and friendship of the state, and thereby rescue them
from the punishment which they deserved. Such an outrage on propriety
would not only afford their adversaries matter for declamation,