Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens by Robin Waterfield

Author:Robin Waterfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Tyranny in Syracuse

The Gamoroi were briefly ousted late in the sixth century, though it is not clear what kind of constitution replaced them; it was possibly some kind of democracy—and the Athenian democracy was taking off at much the same time—since they were ousted by a coalition of ordinary citizens and serfs. In any case, the replacement did not last long. The exiled aristocrats joined forces with Gelon, the tyrant of Gela, and returned in 485 to install him as ruler of Syracuse as well, with themselves holding all the privileged positions under him. The political unification of Syracuse and Gela created by far the largest and strongest bloc on the island, and Gelon also entered into a marriage alliance with Theron, the ruler of Acragas. Gela, Acragas, and Syracuse were all Dorian cities. But despite this auspicious beginning, Gelon’s Deinomenid dynasty (named after his father) would rule Syracuse for only twenty years before being swept away in another of the great upheavals that characterize Syracusan history.

Gelon died in 478, but in his short reign he made Syracuse the dominant military and cultural force in the whole of Sicily—a position the city retained, with few interruptions, for the next two and a half centuries. He developed a war fleet of some two hundred triremes, easily outnumbering any other city on the island. He initiated a program of monumental building that made Syracuse the most beautiful city in the Greek world (before the development of Athens later in the century), and sponsored artists and intellectuals. He made himself the most powerful ruler in the Greek world at the time—perhaps even the most powerful man in Europe—but his methods were sometimes drastic. For instance, he greatly expanded the city beyond the original settlement on Ortygia and filled the new suburbs with former inhabitants of Gela and elsewhere—towns that were ruthlessly reduced and depopulated. He cleared Syracuse of its urban poor by selling them into slavery, and the city was remodeled as an elite enclave, like Sparta.

The Sicilian tyrants rarely did things by halves, and Gelon was not alone in instituting massive relocations of people. Since the tyrants rarely dared to arm the rural and urban poor—that would have been asking for trouble—they employed mercenaries in large numbers. A chief purpose of these relocations, then, apart from the assertion of dominance, was to free up land—especially land close to the Carthaginians—with which to reward mercenaries and friends. We know of thirty such forced relocations in Sicilian history, about as many as we know from the rest of the Greek world in total; sometimes whole towns simply ceased to exist, or were reduced for decades.

But Syracuse’s newly augmented power attracted the attention of the Carthaginians in the west of the island. At the battle of Himera in 480 (which took place, some said, on the same day as the battle of Salamis in Greece), Gelon and Theron decisively defeated the Carthaginians, who had invaded ostensibly in support of Greek enemies of Syracuse, and six

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