Page 340 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Brief history

The ancient city grew around Ortigia, an easily defensible offshore island with fresh
springs, natural harbours on either side and access to extensive trade routes. Though
Corinthian colonists arrived here in 733 BC, apparently at the behest of the Delphic

oracle, it wasn’t until the start of the fifth century BC that the city’s political position
was boosted by an alliance with Greeks at Akragas (Agrigento) and Gela. With the
transfer of Gela’s tyrant, Gelon, to Syracuse and the crushing victory of their
combined forces over the Carthaginians at Himera in 480 BC, the stage was set for the
beginning of the city’s long supremacy. The grandest extant monuments are from this
period, and more often than not were built by slaves provided from the many battles

won by Syracuse’s bellicose dictators.

The colony rebels
Inevitably, the city’s ambitions provoked the intervention of Athens, which dispatched
one of the greatest fleets ever seen in the ancient world. This Great Expedition was

scuppered in 413 BC by a mixture of poor leadership and astute defence: “to the
victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of
defeats”, commented the historian Thucydides. But Syracuse earned the condemnation
of the Hellenic world for its seven-year incarceration of the vanquished Athenians – in
appalling conditions – in the city’s notorious quarries.

Tyrants, dramatists and philosophers

Throughout this period Syracuse was in a state of constant tension between a few
overweening but extremely capable rulers, and sporadic convulsions of democracy.
Occasionally the tyrants displayed a yearning for cultural respectability that sat

uncomfortably beside their vaulting ambition. Hieron I (478–466 BC), for instance,
described by the historian Diodorus as “an utter stranger to sincerity and nobility of
character”, invited many of the luminaries of the age to his court, including Pindar,