When Himilcon learned of the approach of the enemy, he dispatched to meet them both his Iberians and his Campanians and more than forty thousand other troops. The Syracusans had already crossed the Himera River when the barbarians met them, and in the long battle which ensued the Syracusans were victorious and slew more than six thousand men. [2] They would have crushed the whole army completely and pursued it all the way to the city, but since the soldiers were pressing the pursuit without order, the general was concerned lest Himilcar should appear with the rest of his army and retrieve the defeat. For he remembered also how the Himeraeans had been utterly destroyed for the same reason.1 However, when the barbarians were in flight to their camp before Acragas, the soldiers in the city, seeing the defeat of the Carthaginians, begged their generals to lead them out, saying that the opportunity had come to destroy the host of the enemy. [3] But the generals, whether they had been bribed, as the report ran, or feared that Himilcon would seize the city if it were stripped of defenders, checked the ardour of their men. So the fleeing men quite safely made good their escape to the camp before the city. When Daphnaeus with his army arrived at the encampment which the barbarians had deserted, he took up his quarters there. [4] At once both the soldiers from the city mingled with his troops and Dexippus accompanied his men, and the multitude gathered in a tumultuous throng in an assembly, everyone being vexed that the opportunity had been let slip and that although they had the barbarians in their power, they had not inflicted on them the punishment they deserved, but that the generals in the city, although able to lead them forth to attack and destroy the host of the enemy, had let so many myriads of men off scot-free. [5] While great uproar and tumult prevailed in the assembly, Menes of Camarina, who had been put in command, came forward and lodged an accusation against the Acragantine generals and so incited all who were present that, when the accused tried to offer a defence, no one would let them speak and the multitude began to throw stones and killed four of them, but the fifth, Argeius by name, who was very much younger, they spared. Dexippus the Lacedaemonian, we are told, also was the object of abuse on the ground that, although he held a position of command and was reputed to be not inexperienced in warfare, he had acted as he did treacherously.
