238 fflSTOKY OF GREECE. plantations and expulsions of inhabitants were reversed, and all their arrangements overthrown. In the correction of the past injustice, we cannot doubt that new injustice was in many cases committed, nor are we surprised to hear that at Syracuse many new enrolments of citizens took place without any rightful claim,' probably accompanied by grants of land. The reigning feeling at Syracuse would now be quite opposite to that of the days of Gelo, when the Demos, or aggregate of small self-working pro- prietors, was considered as " a troublesome yoke-fellow," fit only to be sold into slavery for exportation : it is highly probable that the new table of citizens now prepared included that class of men in larger number than ever, on principles analogous to the liberal enrolments of Kleisthenes at Athens. In spite of all the con- fusion, however, with which this period of popular government opens, lasting for more than fifty years until the despotism of the elder Dionysius, we shall find it far the best and most pros- l^erous portion of Sicilian history. We shall arrive at it in a subsequent chaptei". Respecting the Grecian cities along the coast of Italy, during the period of the Gelonian dynasty, a few words will exhaust the whole of our knowledge. Ehegium, with its despots Anax- ilaus and Mikythus, figures chiefly as a Sicilian city, and has been noticed as such in the stream of Sicilian politics. But it is also involved in the only event which has been preserved to us respecting this portion of the history of the Italian Greeks. It was about the year B.C. 473, that the Tarentines undertook an expedition against their non-Hellenic neighbors the lapygians, in hopes of conquering Hyria and the other towns belonging to them. Mikythus, despot of Rhegium, against the will of his citizens, despatched three thousand of them by constraint as aux- iliaries to the Tarentines. But the expedition proved signally disastrous to both. The lapygians, to the number of twenty thousand men, encountered the united Grecian forces in the field, and completely defeated them : the battle having taken place in a hostile country, it seems that the larger portion, both of Rhegians and Tarentines, perished, insomuch that Herodotus pronounces it to have been the greatest Hellenic slaughter within ' Diodor. xi, 86- 7:o'/J~A.u)v eluy koI tjf ervxe TiSTvoTnToypafn/isvuv,
