Page 341 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

and Aeschylus – who possibly witnessed the production of his last plays, Prometheus
Bound and Prometheus Released, in the city’s theatre. Dionysius the Elder (405–367
BC) – “cruel, vindictive and a profane plunderer of temples” and responsible for the
first of the Euryalus forts – comically harboured literary ambitions to the extent of
regularly entering his poems in the annual Olympic Games. His works were

consistently rejected, until the Athenians judged it politic to give him the prize,
whereupon his delirious celebrations were enough to provoke the seizure that killed
him. His son Dionysius II (367–343 BC) dallied with the “philosopher-king” theories
of his tutor Plato until megalomania turned his head and Plato fled in dismay.
Dionysius himself, recorded Plutarch, spent the end of his life in exile “loitering about
the fish market, or sitting in a perfumer’s shop drinking the diluted wine of the taverns,

or squabbling in the streets with common women”.

Rarely, the rulers themselves initiated democratic reforms – men such as Timoleon
(343–337 BC), who arrived from Corinth to inject new life into all the Sicilian cities,
and Hieron II, who preserved Syracuse’s independence from the assertions of Rome
by a novel policy of conciliation, abandoning expansion in favour of preserving the

status quo. His long reign (265–215 BC) saw the construction of such monuments as
the Ara di Ierone II, and the enlargement of the Teatro Greco to more or less its
existing proportions.

The end of the glory days

Following the death of Hieron II, Syracuse, along with practically every other Sicilian
city, sided with Carthage against Rome in the Second Punic War. For two years the
city was besieged by the Romans, who had to contend with all the ingenious
contrivances devised for its defence by Archimedes, though Syracuse eventually fell
in 211 BC, an event that sent shockwaves rippling around the classical world. The city

was ransacked, and Archimedes himself – the last of the great Hellenic thinkers – was
hacked to death, despite the injunctions of the Roman general Marcellus.

Syracuse languished under Roman rule, though its trading role still made it the most
prominent Sicilian city, and it became a notable centre of early Christianity, as
attested by its extensive catacombs. The city briefly became the capital of the
Byzantine empire when Constans moved his court here in 663 AD, but otherwise

Syracuse was eclipsed by events outside its control and played no active part against
all the successive waves of Arab, Norman and other medieval conquerors. The 1693
earthquake laid low much of the city, but provided the impetus for some of its
Baroque masterpieces, notably the creations of the great Siculo-Spanish architect
Giovanni Vermexio, who contributed an imposing facade to the Duomo, itself
adapted from the bones of an early Greek temple and later Norman cathedral – and

thus a building that encapsulates perfectly the polyglot character of modern Siracusa.