Excerpt from Livy: Book XXI Some Campanian mercenaries - Mamertines, or Chil dren of Mars, as they called themselves - had seized the town of Messina, upon the Straits of Messina. Hiero made war upon them; and, unable to resist, the Mamertines were divided in mind. One party was in favour of calling in the aid of Rome; the other, that of Carthage. The latter prevailed for a little while; but the Romanizing party soon recovered the ascendancy, and in their turn sent off an embassy to beg for help. By the time that it reached the Senate, Carthage had already come into the field. So good an opportunity of getting the entre'e of Sicily was not to be lost. The Romans warned the Carthaginians to keep their hands off, while the latter prepared to defend their rights. Thus the two nations went to war to decide which was to have the privilege of chastising Syracuse. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.