Little by little the Siceliots gained the upper hand. They enlarged the breaches with pick and shovel and crowbar. They leveled the broken wall down to the ground, pulled back the tortoises, and pushed forward the two belfries. These were wheeled wooden towers sixty feet high—to overtop the tall houses of Motya—and very narrow to go through the winding streets of the city. They swayed alarmingly as they rolled slowly forward, pushed by hundreds of sweating soldiers. Coatings of green hides, nailed to their outsides, protected them against the torches and firepots the Motyans threw at them.
The belfries did not get far into the city, because the Motyans had thrown up barricades across the streets in front of them. From the stalled belfries, some Greeks attacked these barriers with picks and shovels. Others invaded the houses on either side, battering down the planks that had been nailed across the doors and windows. Planks were thrust out from the tops of the belfries to the roofs and upper windows of the houses. Syracusan soldiers charged clattering across these planks. Motyans rushed from their hiding places and out upon the planks from the other ends. The foes met in the middle, grappled on the narrow ways, and crashed to the streets far below. Other men fought across the housetops, through rooms and hallways of the buildings, up and down the stairs.
Little by little the invaders enlarged their hold upon the city, but at a fearful cost. The dead ran into thousands.
Dionysios made a practice, each day at sundown, of breaking off the battle. Then, when he had accustomed the Motyans to this routine, a sudden night attack through the captured apartment houses carried the defenses, and the attackers poured into the city through a dozen gaps.
Some defenders, losing hope at last, fled to the temples or tried to hide in their homes. Others, guessing the fate in store for them, cut the throats of their wives and children and rushed snarling upon the invaders, to die in a last wild fury of hacking and stabbing. Up and down the streets the slaughter raged.
Dionysios, entering with his staff on foot through one of the breaches, saw his soldiers running about and striking down old men, women, and children in a frenzy of blood lust. He roared:
"What do the abandoned fools think they are doing? How shall I ever pay for this war, if I have no prisoners to sell? Stop them at once!" He addressed his staff. "Go through the streets, crying: 'Cease all killing, by order of Dionysios!' "
Zopyros and the others scattered to try to stop the slaughter. But, although they bawled themselves hoarse shouting, "Cease all killing!" their efforts proved useless. The soldiers paid no attention but continued unchecked their raping, torturing, and slaying.
Zopyros walked the section of the city assigned to him, shouting his message. As he walked, he kept looking for Abarish, the steward of Elazar who had been so in love with Greek philosophy and who—if he still lived—must have revised his ideas on the subject. Failing either to check the slaughter or to find Abarish among the living or the dead, Zopyros reported back to Dionysios. So did the other staff officers. The tyrannos commanded:
"Go out again, men; but this time cry to all Phoenicians to take refuge in the Hellenic temples! Pass the word: all Punics to the Hellenic temples!" He spoke to the captain of his bodyguard. "Agathias! Split up your men and post a guard at each Hellenic temple. They shall protect the Punics who take refuge there. Order your men to cry the message loudly as they pass through the city. All Punics to the Greek temples!"
"But how about you, sir?" said Agathias.
"I can take care of myself. Get along with you!"
Dawn saw a few thousand surviving Motyans huddled on the grounds of the Greek temples. At each temple, a squad of Dionysios' bodyguards blocked the gate in the wall of the temenos with leveled spears while, outside, thousands of soldiers milled about, gripping armfuls of loot and growling threats. Their eyes gleamed with eagerness to resume the slaughter.
Dionysios, red-eyed from lack of sleep but still a dominant figure in his iron breastplate and scarlet cloak—the latter now stained with blood and smoke—strode through the corpse-littered streets. His staff, reeling with fatigue, staggered in his wake. Several houses were burning. A few officers tried, with little success, to organize bucket brigades of soldiers.
Most of the soldiers had completely thrown off discipline. They rushed about after loot, hurling household furnishings they did not want from the windows of the tall houses, to the peril of those in the streets below. Others swarmed about the entrances to the temenoi of the Greek temples, not yet quite mutinous enough to rush the squads of guards who protected the Motyans within.
Seeing the blood lust on the faces of the soldiers and knowing that the lives of the surviving Motyans hung by a thread, Dionysios muttered to his staff: "If I don't do something to appease the dogs, they'll butcher the prisoners in spite of me. I have it!" He raised his voice. "All Hellenic mercenaries who fought for the Motyans are to be separated from the rest of the prisoners, bound, and marched to the mainland!"
By noon the captive Greeks—bloodstained, hollow-eyed, and stripped to their shirts—stood bound in long lines on the shore of the mainland near the end of the causeway. Thousands of Dionysios' soldiers—dirty, wild-eyed men of various arms and nations all mingled together—moved restlessly around them. From his great black horse the tyrannos harangued them:
"... the Motyans, scoundrels though they be, at least fought for their own. But these slimy traitors, these renegades from Hellenism, these unnatural men, these parricides—no easy fate shall be theirs! We must set an example for all time, to any Hellene who would offer his sword to the implacable foes of Hellas. And so I say—crucify them!"
The soldiers cheered frantically and beat their weapons against their shields. They jeered the prisoners and gleefully taunted them with their coming agonies. All afternoon, cross after cross arose in an endless line along the beach, each with its burden. By sunset every one of the Greek prisoners hung, dying slowly and painfully, upon his cross.
As for Dionysios' soldiers, by nightfall their avidity for blood, pain, and death had been sated. They quietly rejoined their units, scrubbed the blood and dirt from their bodies in the waters of the bay, and cleaned and put away their weapons. Some got roaring drunk; some gambled away their loot; some rolled up in their cloaks and slept like exhausted animals. Some gathered around campfires to tell stories and sing, for all the world like kindly, good-natured men who had never butchered a prisoner in their lives.
Meanwhile, far into the night, in battered Motya, captive after captive was hustled to the slave block for the swarming slave dealers to bid on.
As the sentries called the end of the first watch, Zopyros stared at the line of crosses, black against the starlit sky, and once more wondered if he had clone the right thing. Although no more squeamish about death than most men of his brutal age, he knew that such massacres as he had witnessed were contrary to everything Pythagoras had taught. Yet what could he have done, either to stop the carnage or to avoid becoming involved in it? If he had followed Archytas' advice and refused the commission that Dionysios had pressed upon him, even more Phoenicians would have been killed; for he alone, of the members of Dionysios' staff, was able to call out the message to flee to the Greek temples in the Punic tongue.
For that matter, what could Dionysios have done, once he had committed himself to the siege? Deprived of the pleasure of this mass crucifixion, the soldiers might have wrought an even greater slaughter among the defeated. To be sure, the victims expiring on the long row of crosses were mercenaries, and such an end was a normal hazard of the soldiering trade. Wiry, thought Zopyros, he, now a mercenary, might someday face such a fate himself! With a shudder he drew his cloak about him and turned back towards his tent.