army of citizens with which to rid the land of the destroyers of the peace and rescue his Greek kinsmen. Hiero met with the Mamertines when they were nearing Syracuse. Marching out his troops, he first sent his unruly mercenaries forward and allowed them to be butchered by the Mamertines. The faithless part of his army disposed of, Hiero marched his citizen soldiers back to the city where he drilled them to a better fighting condition. Leading his confident army north, he found the Mamertines again at the Longanus River on the plain of Mylae where he easily defeated them, and proclaimed himself king. The Mamertines were not accustomed to large pitched battles and had become reckless after beating Hiero's mercenaries. In the battle, Hiero captured the Mamertine leaders and the remnants fled back to the safety of Messina. Hiero had restricted the Mamertine activity and placed them in a dire situation. When Hiero returned to besiege their base at Messina in 265 BC, the Mamertines called for help from a nearby fleet from Carthage, which occupied the harbour of Messina. Seeing this, the Syracuse forces retired, not wishing to confront Carthaginian forces. Uncomfortable under the Carthaginian "protection," the Mamertines now appealed to Rome to be allowed into the protection of the Roman people. At first, the Romans did not wish to come to the aid of soldiers who had unjustly stolen a city from its rightful possessors. However, unwilling to see Carthaginian power spread further over Sicily and get too close to Italy, Rome responded by entering into an alliance with the Mamertines. In response, Syracuse allied itself with Carthage, imploring their protection. With Rome and Carthage brought into conflict, the Syracuse/Mamertine conflict escalated into the First Punic War. Legacy Once the scale of the conflict had escalated beyond them, the Mamertines were lost to the historical record and their fate is lost, swallowed up in the larger events of the Punic wars. After the First Punic War, however, their name was not quite forgotten in the ancient world since "Mamertine wine" from the vineyards of north-eastern tip of Sicily was still known and enjoyed in the 1st century. It was the favourite of Julius Caesar and it was he who made it popular after serving it at a feast to celebrate his third consulship. Even centuries after the Mamertine occupation, the inhabitants of Messina were still called Mamertines.