Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/248

 224 HISTORY OF GREECE. sacrifices in their religious worship : ^ but such an interference with foreign religious rites would be unexampled in that ago, and we know, moreover, that the practice was not permanently dis- continued at Carthage.2 Indeed, we may reasonably suspect that Diodorus, copying from writers like Ephorus, and Timgeus, long after the events, has exaggerated considerably the defeat, the humiliation, and the amercement, of the Carthaginians. For the words of the poet Pindar, a very few years after the battle of Himera, represent a fresh Carthaginian invasion as matter of present uneasiness and alarm : 3 and the Carthaginian fleet is found engaged in aggressive warfare on the coast of Italy, requir- ing to be coerced by the brother and successor of Gelo. The victory of Himera procured for the Sicilian cities immu- nity from foreign war together with a rich plunder. Splendid offerings of thanksgiving to the gods were dedicated in the tem- ples of Himera, Syracuse, and Delphi : and the epigram of Simonides,^ composed for the tripod offered in the latter temple, ■ described Gelo with his three brothers Hiero, Polyzelus,- and Thrasybulus, as the joint liberators of Greece from the Barba- rian, along with the victors of Salamis and Platsea. And the Sicilians alleged that he was on the point of actually sending reinforcements to the Greeks against Xerxes, in spite of the necessity of submitting to Spartan command, when the intelli- gence of the defeat and retreat of that prince reached him. But we find another statement decidedly more probable, — that he sent a confidential envoy named Kadmus, to Delphi, with orders to watch the turn of the Xerxeian invasion, and in case it should prove successful (as he thought that it probably would be) to tender presents and submission to the victorious invader on behalf of Syracuse.5 When we consider that until the very morning of the battle of Salamis, the cause of Grecian independence must have appeared to an impartial spectator almost desperate, ' Schol. ad Pindar. Pyth. ii, 3 ; Plutarch, De Sera Numinis Vindicta, p. 552, c. 6. ^ Diodor. xx, 14. ^ Pindar, Nem. ix, 67 (=28 b.) with the Scholia. ed. Didot.
 * Simonides, Epigr. 141, ed Bergk.
 * Herodot. vii, 163-165; compare Diodor. xi, 26 ; Ephorus, Fragrn. Ill,