Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/448

 426 HISTORY OF GREECE, when their progress was arrested by a thunderbolt falling upon it This event was ft llowed by religious terrors, suddenly overspread- ing the camp. The prophets declared that the violation of the tombs was an act of criminal sacrilege. Every night the spec- tres of those whose tombs had been profaned manifested them selves, to the affright of the soldiers on guard ; while the judg- ment of the gods was manifested in a violent pestilential distem- per. Numbers of the army perished, Hannibal himself among them ; and even of those who escaped death, many were disabled from active duty by distress and suffering. Imilkon was compel- led to appease the gods, and to calm the agony of the troops, by a solemn supplication according to the Carthaginian rites. He sacrificed a child, considered as the most propitiatory of all offer ings, to Kronus ; and cast into the sea a number of animal vic tims as offerings to Poseidon. 1 These religious rites calmed the terrors of the army, and miti- gated, or were supposed to have mitigated, the distemper ; so that Imilkon, while desisting from all farther meddling with the tombs, was enabled to resume his batteries and assaults against the walls, though without any considerable success. He also dammed up the western river Hypsas, so as to turn the stream against the wall ; but this manoeuvre produced no effect. His operations were presently interrupted by the arrival of a powerful army which marched from Syracuse, under Daphnaeus, to the relief of Agrigentum. Reinforced in its road by the military strength of Kamarina and Gela, it amounted to thirty thousand foot and five thousand horse, on reaching the river Himera, the eastern frontier of the Agrigentine territory; while a fleet of thirty Syracusau triremes sailed along the coast to second its efforts. As these troops neared the town, Imilkon despatched against them a body of Iberians and Campanians ; 2 who however, after a strenuous 1 Diodor. xiii, 86. 3 Diodor. xiii, 87. It appears that an eminence a little way eastward from Agrigentum still bears the name of 11 Campo Cartaginese, raising some presumption that it was once occupied by the Carthaginians. Evidently, the troops sent out by Imilkon to meet and repel Daphnaeus, must have taken post to the east- ward of Agrigentum, from which side the Syracusan army of relief was pproiv.hing. Seyfert (Akragas, p. 41 ) contests this point, and supposes