22.
At daybreak all the people, armed and unarmed, gathered at the Senate House in Achradina. There, standing on the altar of Concord,
1 which had been erected on that spot, one of the leading men, Polyaenus by name, delivered a speech at once outspoken and restrained.
[
2]
He said that men who had experienced the terrors of slavery and its humiliations had been inflamed against an evil which they knew. As for civil strife, the Syracusans had heard from their fathers, rather than seen for themselves, what disasters it brings.
[
3]
He praised them for having taken up arms readily, and would praise them the more willingly if they did not use them except when compelled by absolute necessity.
[
4]
For the present he approved of sending representatives to Adranodorus, to instruct him to put himself under the authority of the senate and people, open the gates of the Island and surrender the citadel.
[
5]
At the same time, if Adranodorus should try to turn a regency into a kingship of his own, he favoured reclaiming their freedom from Adranodorus much more fiercely than from Hieronymus.
[
6]
After this speech representatives were sent directly. Then began a session of the senate, which in the reign of Hiero had indeed continued to be the council of state, yet since his death had not been called together nor consulted about anything until that day.
[
7]
When the legates reached Adranodorus, he for his part was
[p. 247]moved by the agreement of the citizens, also by the
2 occupation of other quarters of the city, and especially by the betrayal and loss of the most strongly fortified part of the Island.
[
8]
But his wife Damarata, daughter of Hiero and still puffed up with princely pride and a woman's boldness, called him aside from the legates and reminded him of the oft-repeated utterance of Dionysius the tyrant, that one should leave a tyranny, not on horseback, but dragged by the feet.
[
9]
It was easy, she said, to give up the possession of an exalted station at any moment one wished; to create and achieve it was difficult and all but impossible. He should gain time for deliberation from the legates.
[
10]
He should use it to summon the soldiers from Leontini, and if he should promise them money from the royal treasury everything would be in his power.
[
11]
These feminine counsels Adranodorus neither wholly rejected nor at once adopted, thinking it a safer way to gain power if for the moment he should yield to the crisis. And so he bade the legates report that he would be under the authority of the senate and people.
[12]
On the following day at dawn he opened the gates of the Island and came to the market-place of Achradina. There he mounted the altar of Concord, from which Polyaenus had addressed the people the day before, and began a speech in which he first begged pardon for his hesitation.
[13]
For he had kept the gates closed, he said, not that he wished to separate his cause from that of the people, but because he feared what limit there would be to slaughter, when swords should once be drawn;
[14]
whether they would be content with the death of the tyrant, which would be sufficient to secure freedom, [p. 249]or on the other hand every one who either by blood3 or marriage or certain duties was connected with the palace would be slain, as being chargeable with another's guilt.
[15]
After he observed that those who had freed their native city wished also to keep her free, and that the common good was the aim of all, he had not hesitated to surrender to the city his own person and in addition all that had been confided to his honour and protection, since the man who had given that charge had been destroyed by his own madness.
[16]
Turning then to the assassins of the tyrant and addressing Theodotus and Sosis by name, he said: “It is a memorable deed that you have done.
[17]
But believe me, your glory is but begun, not yet finished, and unless you provide for peace and harmony there remains a very great danger that this may be the funeral of the liberated state.”
