previous next

When news of the reinforcements which Hannibal was bringing was noised throughout Sicily, everyone expected that his armaments would also be brought over at once. And the cities, as they heard of the great scale of the preparations and came to the conclusion that the struggle was to be for their very existence, were distressed without measure. [2] Accordingly the Syracusans set about negotiating alliances both with the Greeks of Italy and with the Lacedaemonians; and they also continued to dispatch emissaries to the cities of Sicily to arouse the masses to fight for the common freedom. [3] The Acragantini, because they were the nearest to the empire of the Carthaginians, assumed what indeed took place, that the weight of the war would fall on them first. They decided, therefore, to gather not only their grain and other crops but also all their possessions from the countryside within their walls. [4] At this time, it so happened, both the city and the territory of the Acragantini enjoyed great prosperity, which I think it would not be out of place for me to describe. Their vineyards excelled in their great extent and beauty and the greater part of their territory was planted in olive-trees from which they gathered an abundant harvest and sold to Carthage; [5] for since Libya at that time was not yet planted in fruit-trees,1 the inhabitants of the territory belonging to Acragas took in exchange for their products the wealth of Libya and accumulated fortunes of unbelievable size. Of this wealth there remain among them many evidences, which it will not be foreign to our purpose to discuss briefly.

1 But cp. Book 4.17.4 where we are told that Heracles planted much of Libya in vineyards and olive orchards.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Libya (Libya) (3)
Sicily (Italy) (2)
Italy (Italy) (1)
Carthage (Tunisia) (1)
Agrigentum (Italy) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (4 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (3):
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), AGRIGENTUM
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), SICI´LIA
    • Smith's Bio, Megillus
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: