Mamertines

Italian (specifically Campanian) mercenaries, originally in the service of Agathocles of Syracuse. The name derives from Mamers, the Oscan name for the war-god Mars, the Mamertines styled themselves "the men of Mars." On Agathocles's death in 289 BCE the Mamertines, discharged and traveling home through Sicily, seized the Greek city of Messana in 288 BCE; they massacred or expelled the male population and held the city as a base for raiding Greek Sicily for the next two and a half decades. Their position became untenable in 265 BCE when Hiero II of Syracuse moved against them. The Mamertines' resulting appeal, directed both to Carthage and to Rome, was the proximate trigger for the First Punic War. Once Roman protection was established at Messana in 264 BCE, the Mamertines remained nominally Roman allies, retaining a measure of autonomy; the group fades from the historical record over the course of the second century BCE as the city was integrated into the Roman provincial system. Their appearance in the historical record is brief but structurally decisive: they are the Italian mercenary band whose specific crisis in 265 BCE produced the war that ended in the destruction of Carthage.