History of Rome

​After this speech, he placed the keys of the gates and the royal money before their feet. And indeed on that day, dismissed from the assembly, they rejoiced and offered prayers around all the shrines of the gods with their wives and children; on the following day, an assembly was held for electing praetors.

​Adranodorus was elected among the first, and the rest were for the most part the slayers of the tyrant; they also elected two who were absent, Sopatrus and Dinomenes.

​These men, having heard of what had been done at Syracuse, delivered the royal money which was in Leontini, after having it brought to Syracuse, to the quaestors elected for this very purpose.

​And that which was on the Island was transferred to Achradina; and that part of the wall which blocked off the Island from the rest of the city with too strong a fortification was demolished by the consensus of all. Other matters also followed this inclination of minds toward liberty. Hippocrates and Epicydes, having heard of the death of the tyrant, ​which Hippocrates had wished to conceal even by killing the messenger, having been deserted by the soldiers because that seemed the safest course under the present circumstances, returned to Syracuse.

​There, lest they should move about under suspicion as if seeking some opportunity for revolution, they went first to the praetors, and then through them to the senate.

​They declared that they had been sent by Hannibal to Hieronymus as a friend and ally, and that they had obeyed the command of him whose authority their own commander had wished them to obey.

​They said they wished to return to Hannibal; but since the journey was not safe while the Romans were wandering here and there throughout all Sicily, they requested that they give them some guard by which they might be conducted to Locri in Italy. They added that they would secure great gratitude with little trouble from Hannibal.

​The request was easily granted; for they wished the royal generals, who were both skilled in warfare and at the same time needy and daring, to depart.

​But what they wished, they did not execute with the speed that was necessary. Meanwhile, some military youths accustomed to the soldiers were sowing accusations against the senate and the nobles, now among the soldiers themselves, now among the deserters—the greatest part of whom were from the Roman naval allies—and now even among the lowest plebeians:

​that they were secretly plotting and planning to bring Syracuse under the dominion of the Romans under the guise of a restored alliance, and that then a faction and a few authors of the renewed treaty might hold dominion.