Book 6
12.1
Hard by is a bronze chariot with a man mounted upon it; race-horses, one on each side, stand beside the chariot, and on the horses are seated boys. They are memorials of Olympic victories won by Hiero the son of Deinomenes, who was tyrant of Syracuse after his brother Gelo. But the offerings were not sent by Hiero; it was Hiero's son Deinomenes who gave them to the god, Onatas the Aeginetan who made the chariot, and Calamis who made the horses on either side and the boys on them.
12.2
By the chariot of Hiero is a man of the same name as the son of Deinomenes. He too was tyrant of Syracuse, and was called Hiero the son of Hierocles. After the death of Agathocles, a former tyrant, tyranny again sprung up at Syracuse in the person of this Hiero, who came to power in the second year of the hundred and twenty-sixth Olympiad275 B.C., at which Festival Idaeus of Cyrene won the foot-race.
12.3
This Hiero made an alliance with Pyrrhus the son of Aeacides, sealing it by the marriage of Gelo his son and Nereis the daughter of Pyrrhus. When the Romans went to war with Carthage for the possession of Sicily, the Carthaginians held more than half the island, and Hiero sided with them at the beginning of the war. Shortly after, however, he changed over to the Romans, thinking that they were stronger, and firmer and more reliable friends.
12.4
He met his end at the hands of Deinomenes, a Syracusan by birth and an inveterate enemy of tyranny, who afterwards, when Hippocrates the brother of Epicydes had just come from Erbessus to Syracuse and was beginning to harangue the multitude, rushed at him with intent to kill him. But Hippocrates withstood him, and certain of the bodyguard over-powered and slew Deinomenes. The statues of Hiero at Olympia, one on horseback and the other on foot, were dedicated by the sons of Hiero, the artist being Micon, a Syracusan, the son of Niceratus.
