234 msTORY OF Greece. maintained themselves a little longer at Rhegium and Messeng, but the citizens of these two towns at length followed the general example, compelled them to retire,^ and began their era of freedom. But though the Sicilian despots had thus been expelled, the free governments established in their place were exposed at first to much difficulty and collision. It has been already mentioned that Gelo, Hiero, Thero, Thrasydseus, Thrasybulus, etc., had all condemned many citizens to exile with confiscation of property ; and had planted on the soil new citizens and mercenaries in numbers no less considerable. To what race these mercenaries belonged, we are not told : it is probable that they were only in part Greeks. Such violent mutations, both of persons and property, could not occur without raising bitter conflicts, of interest as well as of feeling, between the old, the new, and the dispossessed proprie- tors, as soon as the iron hand of compression was removed. This source of angry dissension was common to all the Sicilian cities, but in none did it flow more profusely than in Syracuse. In that city, the new mercenaries last introduced by Thrasybulus, had retired at the same time with him, many of them to the Hiero- nian city of ^tna, from whence they had been brought ; but there yet remained the more numerous body introduced princi- pally by Gelo, partly also by Hiero, — the former alone had enrolled ten thousand, of whom more than seven thousand yet remained. What part these Gelonian citizens had taken in the late revolution, we do not find distinctly stated : they seem not to have supported Thrasybulus, as a body, and probably many of them took part against him. After the revolution had been accomplished, a public assembly of the Syracusans was convened, in which the first resolution was, to provide for the religious commemoration of the event, by erecting a colossal statue of Zeus Eleutherius, and by celebrating an annual festival to be called the Eleutheria, with solemn matches and sacrifices. They next proceeded to determine the political constitution ; and such was the predominant reaction, doubtless aggravated by the returned exiles, of hatred and fear against the expelled dynasty, — that the whole body of new citizens, who bad been domicili-
- Diodoi". xi, 76.
