gentum, two members at least of the deposed family seem to have remained as private persons in that city. These were Xenocrates[1] (a brother of Thero) and his son Thrasybulus. Hiero had married a daughter of Xenocrates, and this may, perhaps, explain the circumstance that they were willing to remain at home in their altered position, and that Hiero permitted them to do so.
Hiero died in B.C. 467, the fifty-fifth year of Pindar's life; and in two years more his dynasty was overthrown, and his kingdom broken up.
Of the persons mentioned in the above brief sketch, Thero, Hiero, Chromius, Xenocrates, and Thrasybulus were patrons of Pindar. For Thero he wrote two Odes (Ol. ii. iii.), for Hiero four (Ol. i.; Pyth. i. ii. iii.), for Chromius two (Nem. i. ix.), for Xenocrates and Thrasybulus two (Pyth. vi.; Isthm. ix.)
After the fall of Hiero's family, its chief adherents gathered anew to re-found the city of Camarina: and for one of these, Psaumis (about B.C. 452), Pindar wrote his two last Odes (Ol. iv. v.)
The other Sicilian or Italian Greeks commemorated by Pindaric Odes were Agesias, an honoured inhabitant of Syracuse in the reign of Hiero (Ol. vi.); Ergoteles of Himera, originally a refugee from Crete, who made Sicily his adopted country (Ol. xii.); Midas, the flute-player of Agrigentum (Pyth. xii.); and a boy named Agesidamus, of the tribe of the Italian or Western Locrians, to whom Pindar addressed two
- ↑ It is possible, however, that Xenocrates died before the fall of the dynasty.
