More than ten thousand disarmed Greeks descended from the hill and defiled before Dionysius, who numbered the companies as they passed with a stick. As his savage temper was well known, they expected nothing short of the harshest sentence. So much the greater was their astonishment and delight, when they found themselves treated not merely with lenity, but with generosity.[32] Dionysius released them all without even exacting a ransom; and concluded a treaty with most of the cities to which they belonged, leaving their autonomy undisturbed. He received the warmest thanks, accompanied by votes of golden wreaths, from the prisoners as well as from the cities; while among the general public of Greece, the act was hailed as forming the prominent glory of his political life.[33] Such admiration was well deserved, looking to the laws of war then prevalent.
With the Krotoniates and other Italiot Greeks (except Rhegium and Lokri) Dionysius had had no marked previous relations and therefore had not contracted any strong personal sentiment either of antipathy or favor. With Rhegium and Lokri, the case was different. To the Lokrians he was strongly attached: against the Rhegines his animosity was bitter and implacable, manifesting itself in a more conspicuous manner by contrast with his recent dismissal of the Krotoniate prisoners; a proceeding which had been probably dictated, in great part, by his anxiety to have his hands free for the attack of isolated Rhegium. After having finished the arrangements consequent upon his victory, he marched against that city, and prepared to besiege it. The citizens, feeling themselves without hope of succor, and intimidated by the disaster of their Italiot allies, sent out heralds to beg for moderate terms, and imploring him to abstain from extreme or unmeasured rigor.[34] For a moment, Dionysius seemed to comply with their request. He granted them peace, on condition that they should surrender all their ships of war, seventy in number—that they should pay to him three hundred talents in money—and that they should place in his hands one hundred hostages. All these demands were strictly complied with; upon which Dionysius withdrew his army, and agreed to spare the city.[35]
His next proceeding was, to attack Kaulonia and Hipponium; two cities which seem between them to have occupied the whole breadth of the Calabrian peninsula, immediately north of Rhegium and Lokri; Kaulonia on the eastern coast, Hipponium on or near the western. Both these cities he besieged, took, and destroyed: probably neither of them, in the hopeless circumstances of the case, made any strenuous resistance. He then caused the inhabitants of both of them, such at least as did not make their escape, to be transported to Syracuse, where he domiciliated them as citizens, allowing them five years of exemption from taxes.[36] To be a citizen of Syracuse meant at this moment, to be a subject of his despotism, and nothing more: how he made room for these new citizens, or furnished them with lands and houses, we are unfortunately not informed. But the territory of both these towns, evacuated by its free inhabitants (though probably not by its slaves, or serfs), was handed over to the Lokrians and annexed to their city. That favored city, which had accepted his offer of marriage, was thus immensely enriched both in lands and in collective property. Here again it would have been interesting to hear what measures were taken to appropriate or distribute the new lands; but our informant is silent.
Dionysius had thus accumulated into Syracuse, not only all Sicily[37] (to use the language of Plato), but even no inconsiderable portion of Italy. Such wholesale changes of domicile and property must probably have occupied some months; during which time the army of Dionysius seems never to have quitted the Calabrian peninsula, though he himself may probably have gone for a time in person to Syracuse. It was soon seen that the depopulation of Hipponium and Kaulonia was intended only as a prelude to the ruin of Rhegium. Upon this Dionysius had resolved. The recent covenant into which he had entered with the Rhegines, was only a fraudulent device for the purpose of entrapping them into a surrender of their navy, in order that he might afterwards attack them at greater advantage. Marching his army to the Italian shore of the strait, near Rhegium, he affected to busy himself in preparations for crossing to Sicily. In the mean time, he sent a friendly message to the Rhegines, requesting them to supply him for a short time with provisions, under assurance that what they furnished should speedily be replaced from Syracuse. It was his purpose, if they refused, to resent it as an insult, and attack them; if they consented, to consume their provisions, without performing his engagement to replace the quantity consumed; and then to make his attack after all, when their means of holding out had been diminished. At first the Rhegines complied willingly, furnishing abundant supplies. But the consumption continued, and the departure of the army was deferred—first on pretence of the illness of Dionysius, next on other grounds—so that they at length detected the trick, and declined to furnish any more. Dionysius now threw off the mask, gave back to them their hundred hostages, and laid siege to the town in form.[38]
Regretting too late that they had suffered themselves to be defrauded of their means of defence, the Rhegines nevertheless prepared to hold out with all the energy of despair. Phyton was chosen commander, the whole population was armed, and all the line of wall carefully watched. Dionysius made vigorous assaults, employing all the resources of his battering machinery to effect a breach. But he was repelled at all points obstinately, and with much loss on both sides: several of his machines were also burnt or destroyed by opportune sallies of the besieged. In one of the assaults, Dionysius himself was seriously wounded by a spear thrust in the groin, from which he was long in recovering. He was at length obliged to convert the siege into a blockade, and to rely upon famine alone for subduing these valiant citizens. For eleven months did the Rhegines hold out, against the pressure of want gradually increasing, and at last terminating in the agony and destruction of famine. We are told that a medimnus of wheat came to be sold for the enormous price of five minæ; at the rate of about £14 sterling per bushel: every horse and every beast of burthen was consumed: at length hides were boiled and eaten, and even the grass on parts of the wall. Many perished from absolute hunger, while the survivors lost all strength and energy. In this intolerable condition, they were constrained, at the end of near eleven months, to surrender at discretion.
So numerous were these victims of famine, that Dionysius, on entering Rhegium, found heaps of unburied corpses, besides six thousand citizens in the last stage of emaciation. All these captives were sent to Syracuse, where those who could provide a mina (about £3 17s.) were allowed to ransom themselves, while the rest were sold as slaves. After such a period of suffering, the number of those who retained the means of ransom was probably very small. But the Rhegine general, Phyton, was detained with all his kindred, and reserved for a different fate. First, his son was drowned, by order of Dionysius: next, Phyton himself was chained to one of the loftiest siege-machines, as a spectacle to the whole army. While he was thus exhibited to scorn, a messenger was sent to apprise him, that Dionysius had just caused his son to be drowned. “He is more fortunate than his father by one day,” was the reply of Phyton. After a certain time, the sufferer was taken down from his pillory, and led round the city, with attendants scourging and insulting him at every step; while a herald proclaimed aloud, “Behold the man who persuaded the Rhegines to war, thus signally punished by Dionysius!” Phyton, enduring all these torments with heroic courage and dignified silence, was provoked to exclaim in reply to the herald, that the punishment was inflicted because he had refused to betray the city to Dionysius, who would himself soon be overtaken by the divine vengeance. At length the prolonged outrages, combined with the noble demeanor and high reputation of the victim, excited compassion even among the soldiers of Dionysius himself. Their murmurs became so pronounced, that he began to apprehend an open mutiny for the purpose of rescuing Phyton. Under this fear he gave orders that the torments should be discontinued, and that Phyton with his entire kindred should be drowned.[39]
The prophetic persuasion under which this unhappy man perished, that divine vengeance would soon overtake his destroyer, was noway borne out by the subsequent reality. The power and prosperity of Dionysius underwent abatement by his war with the Carthaginians in 383 B. C., yet remained very considerable even to his dying day. And the misfortunes which fell thickly upon his son the younger Dionysius, more than thirty years afterwards, though they doubtless received a religious interpretation from contemporary critics, were probably ascribed to acts more recent than the barbarities inflicted on Phyton. But these barbarities, if not avenged, were at least laid to heart with profound sympathy by the contemporary world, and even commemorated with tenderness and pathos by poets. While Dionysius was composing tragedies (of which more presently) in hopes of applause in Greece, he was himself furnishing real matter of history, not less tragical than the sufferings of those legendary heroes and heroines to which he (in common with other poets) resorted for a subject. Among the many acts of cruelty, more or less aggravated, which it is the melancholy duty of an historian of Greece to recount, there are few so revolting as the death of the Rhegine general; who was not a subject, nor a conspirator, nor a rebel, but an enemy in open warfare—of whom the worst that even Dionysius himself could say, was, that he had persuaded his countrymen into the war. And even this could not be said truly; since the antipathy of the Rhegines towards Dionysius was of old standing, traceable to his enslavement of Naxos and Katana, if not to causes yet earlier—though the statement of Phyton may very probably be true, that Dionysius had tried to bribe him to betray Rhegium (as the generals of Naxos and Katana had been bribed to betray their respective cities), and was incensed beyond measure at finding the proposition repelled. The Hellenic war-practice was in itself sufficiently cruel. Both Athenians and Lacedæmonians put to death prisoners of war by wholesale, after the capture of Melos, after the battle of Ægospotami, and elsewhere. But to make death worse than death by a deliberate and protracted tissue of tortures and indignities, is not Hellenic; it is Carthaginian and Asiatic. Dionysius had shown himself better than a Greek when he released without ransom the Krotoniate prisoners captured at the battle of Kaulonia; but he became far worse than a Greek, and worse even than his own mercenaries, when he heaped aggravated suffering, beyond the simple death-warrant, on the heads of Phyton and his kindred.
Dionysius caused the city of Rhegium to be destroyed[40] or dismantled. Probably he made over the lands to Lokri, like those of Kaulonia and Hipponium. The free Rhegine citizens had all been transported to Syracuse for sale; and those who were fortunate enough to save their liberty by providing the stipulated ransom, would not be allowed to come back to their native soil. If Dionysius was so zealous in enriching the Lokrians, as to transfer to them two other neighboring town-domains, against the inhabitants of which he had no peculiar hatred—much more would he be disposed to make the like transfer of the Rhegine territory, whereby he would gratify at once his antipathy to the one state and his partiality to the other. It is true that Rhegium did not permanently continue incorporated with Lokri; but neither did Kaulonia nor Hipponium. The maintenance of all the three transfers depended on the ascendency of Dionysius and his dynasty; but for the time immediately succeeding the capture of Rhegium, the Lokrians became masters of the Rhegine territory as well as of the two other townships, and thus possessed all the Calabrian peninsula south of the Gulf of Squillace. To the Italiot Greeks generally, these victories of Dionysius were fatally ruinous, because the political union formed among them, for the purpose of resisting the pressure of the Lucanians from the interior, was overthrown, leaving each city to its own weakness and isolation.[41]
The year 387, in which Rhegium surrendered, was also distinguished for two other memorable events; the general peace in Central Greece under the dictation of Persia and Sparta, commonly called the peace of Antalkidas; and the capture of Rome by the Gauls.[42]
The two great ascendant powers in the Grecian world were now, Sparta in Peloponnesus, and Dionysius in Sicily; each respectively fortified by alliance with the other. I have already in a former chapter[43] described the position of Sparta after the peace of Antalkidas; how greatly she gained by making herself the champion of that Persian rescript—and how she purchased, by surrendering the Asiatic Greeks to Artaxerxes, an empire on land equal to that which she had enjoyed before the defeat of Knidus, though without recovering the maritime empire fortified by that defeat.