Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/49

 CAPTURE OF KROTON 23 flier with his fleet to attack Thurii ; which city owed its perstrva- tion solely to the violence of the north winds. He plundered the temple of Here near Cape Lakinium, in the domain of Kroton Among the ornaments of this temple was one of pre-eminent beauty and celebrity, which at the periodical festivals was exhib- ited to admiring spectators : a robe wrought with the greatest skill, and decorated in the most costly manner, the votive offering of a Sybarite named Alkimenes. Dionysius sold this robe to the Car- thaginians. It long remained as one of the permanent religious ornaments of their city, being probably dedicated to the honor of those Hellenic Deities recently introduced for worship ; whom (as I have before stated) the Carthaginians were about this time pe- culiarly anxious to propitiate, in hopes of averting or alleviating the frightful pestilences wherewith they had been so often smitten. They purchased the robe from Dionysius at the prodigious price of one hundred and twenty talents, or about 27,600 sterling. 1 Incredible as this sum may appear, we must recollect that the honor done to the new gods would be mainly estimated according to the magnitude of the sum laid out. As the Carthaginians would probably think no price too great to transfer an unrivalled vestment from the wardrobe of the Lakinian Here to the newly-established temple and worship of Demeter and Persephone in their city so we may be sure that the loss of such an ornament, and the spoliation of the holy place, would deeply humiliate the Krotoniates, and with them the crowd of Italiot Greeks who frequented the Lakin- ian festivals. Thus master of the important city of Kroton, with a citadel near the sea capable of being held by a separate garrison, Diony- sius divested the inhabitants of their southern possession of Skyl- Ictium, which he made over to aggrandize yet farther the town of Lokri.- Whether he pushed his conquests farther along the Tarentine Gulf so as to acquire the like hold on Thurii or Meia- pontum, we cannot say. But both of them must have been over- awed by the rapid extension and near approach of his power ; 77. Pobnura specified this costly tobe, in his work Hspl ruv h HfTT^uv
 * Aristotel. Auscult. Mirab. s. 96 ; Athenaeus, xii. p. 541 ; Diodor. xiv.
 * Strabc, vl p. 261.