The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  The new tyrannical order was soon put to a serious test. The Carthaginians recognized the potential danger that the emergence of two cooperating and aggressive mini-empires, centered on Akragas and Syracuse, posed to allied Punic towns in northwestern Sicily and perhaps to its larger and longterm commercial interests. Things came to a head when, in 482 BCE, the tyrant of the important north-Sicilian polis of Himera (i24: size 5) was deposed. The old tyrant had maintained friendly relations with the Punic towns to his west. Theron, the new tyrant of Himera, quickly allied himself with the Arkagas–Syracuse axis. Meanwhile, the tyrant who was then ruling Zancle–Messana, on the northeastern point of Sicily, allied himself with the Carthaginians. With both a new threat and a new ally, the Carthaginians were motivated to act. They gathered a large force of soldiers drawn from Carthage’s extensive North African empire, supplemented by mercenaries from around the western Mediterranean.

  Confronted with the prospect of a Carthaginian invasion of Sicily, Gelon pressed the wealthy new citizens of Syracuse to provide emergency funds. Given that they owed their positions to him, they had little choice other than to comply. The cash infusion enabled him to mobilize a very large army composed mostly, it seems, of Greek mercenaries. At just this moment, according to Herodotus (7.157–162), Gelon was approached by envoys from the Greek mainland, asking for his help against Persia. Gelon offered to loan the mainland Greeks 20,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and many slingers and archers—but only if they would make him their commander-in-chief. The proud Spartans, as the obvious local leaders of the anti-Persian coalition, demurred, as Gelon surely guessed they would.

  In 480 BCE, as the Persian land army was marching south into central Greece, the Carthaginian expeditionary force landed at one of the Punic towns in northwestern Sicily. The big army proceeded east, to the territory of Himera, where they made camp. Answering Theron’s summons, Gelon brought up his army in an attempt to relieve Himera. After several skirmishes, in which the Carthaginians suffered substantial losses (including the death of their commander), a full-scale battle was joined. In later Sicilian legend, the land battle of Himera was fought on the same day in September as the naval battle of Salamis.

  As on the mainland, Greek specialists in organized violence proved their worth. The Carthaginian land forces were routed and either massacred or captured and enslaved. The Carthaginian ships were burnt; only a few survivors made it home to report the disaster. In the aftermath, Carthage paid a massive war indemnity of 2,000 talents of silver (twice the annual income of the Athenian empire at its height: ch. 8), plus, it was said, a gigantic side payment of 100 talents of gold to Gelon’s wife for brokering the deal (Diodorus 11.25.2). The indemnity money, along with booty in the form of equipment and slaves, provided Gelon with ample funds with which he could reward his loyal supporters. In return, Carthage retained its allies in northwestern Sicily. It would be three generations before Carthage again attempted to challenge the Greek domination of Sicily. Six years after the battle of Himera, in 474 BCE, Gelon’s brother and successor-tyrant, Hieron, added to the tyrant family’s military reputation by winning a great naval victory over the Etruscans, off Cumae on the west coast of Italy.

  The victories over the Persians at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale by the mainland Greeks were won by the citizens of independent city-states and were celebrated accordingly. The victories won by Sicilian forces over the Carthaginians and Etruscans, along with the booty reaped from them, were claimed by the tyrant and his family. The surviving stone base for what was reportedly a massive (16-talent) gold tripod was dedicated to Apollo at Delphi by “Gelon, son of Deinomenes … a Syracusan.”30 An epigram probably associated with this and other Delphic dedications states that Gelon and his three brothers, sons of Deinomenes, dedicated tripods, from a hundredth part of the “booty that they took, having been victorious over barbarian nations.”31 Only slightly more generously, two bronze Etruscan helmets dedicated at Olympia after the naval victory at Cumae in 474 were inscribed with a text that states that they were given by “Hieron, son of Deinomenes, and the Syracusans.”32

  The rich dedications made by Gelon and Hieron at Delphi and Olympia, along with their patronage of famous mainland Greek poets (notably Pindar and Simonides, who wrote flattering odes) and their active participation in athletic competitions at mainland Greek festivals (especially superexpensive chariot races), points to the Sicilian tyrants’ evident desire to be seen as active participants in a wider Greek cultural koine.

  Despite Gelon’s massive population transfers, and those of Hieron after him, the tyrants of Sicily were never treated by their subjects as godlike kings. Nor did they ever seek to change the game by playing that role. No Sicilian tyrant put his own likeness or name on coins. Throughout the tyrannical period of the fifth century BCE, as before and after, the Syracuse mint produced silver coins “of the Syracusans.” Diodorus of Sicily, the Roman-era historian to whom we owe most of our knowledge of the classical history of Greek Sicily, notes that when Gelon fell ill, he gave orders that he was to be buried according to the modest standard demanded by established Syracusan sumptuary legislation. The grateful citizens later built him an impressive tomb at which he was honored as a hero—but not as a god (Diodorus 11.38.2–5). The limits placed on the self-presentation of the hugely ambitious Sicilian tyrants testify to the strength that the Greek cultural norm of citizenship had achieved by the early fifth century. The Greek world had become robustly exceptional in respect to civic identity.

  Gelon, Hieron, and their fellow Sicilian tyrants pragmatically placed coalition-building ahead of attempts to promote an ideology of kingship. They were successful insofar as they created and sustained extensive elite coalitions, included within their coalitions large numbers of skilled mercenaries, and kept the peace by preventing revolutionary uprisings by poorer citizens and serfs. Their methods were straightforward: a combination of payoffs to coalition members, credible threats against potential troublemakers, and pluralistic ignorance among the citizen population. Ignorance of each citizen about what other citizens really thought about the tyrant was fostered under Hieron by an extensive secret police.33

  In the end, Greek tyrants on Sicily proved no more capable of creating a stable equilibrium than were earlier tyrants in the eastern Greek world. Sicilian tyrants were undermined, as were their eastern predecessors, by intraelite competition and intrafamilial conflict. Moreover, the very integration into a wider Greek cultural koine, sought so assiduously by the tyrants themselves, meant that Sicilian Greeks were aware of political developments on the mainland—including the success story of posttyrannical democracy at Athens.

  SICILY AFTER THE TYRANTS

  The era of the early Sicilian tyrants came to an abrupt end when one of the four sons of Deinomenes, who was the disgruntled ruler over the now second-tier town of Gela, joined the tyrant of Akragas in an attempt to unseat Hieron, Gelon’s brother, who had inherited the imperial capital of Syracuse. Hieron survived the challenge, defeating his rivals’ army, but his victory in turn precipitated the final collapse of the tyranny at Akragas, where a republican, probably broadly based oligarchic, government was instituted in 472. The Akragans did not have an easy regime transition: The many mercenaries previously hired by the tyrant and still resident in Akragas sought to seize control of the polis. Clearly they anticipated that the new regime, in which they were decidedly not to be citizens, would not honor the tyrant’s commitments to them.

  Despite these troubles, following the pattern of interstate emulation that had precipitated the wave of Sicilian tyrannies after 505, the emergence of a republican regime at Akragas triggered the end of tyranny at Syracuse and the other Sicilian Greek states. Shortly after the death of Hieron in 467, the last of the four sons of Deinomenes was expelled from Syracuse, and a democracy was soon established. Within a few years, Sicily was virtually free of tyrants. The mini-empires established by the tyrants of Akragas, Zancle–Messana, and Syracuse disintegrated; the Greek poleis of S
icily returned to the status of genuinely independent states, each of which adopted some variation of a republican (oligarchic or democratic) government.

  The difficulties faced by the new regime at Akragas were far from unique. In Syracuse, after the tyrant was deposed, a citizens’ assembly had voted to establish a democracy. Who had the right to attend the assembly is far from clear now, as perhaps it was then, but at any rate the assemblymen also voted to construct a colossal statue of Zeus the Liberator and to establish the Eleutheria, an annual freedom festival which would include athletic contests (like the Athenian Panathenaia) and would culminate in a great citizens’ feast. The Assembly then turned to more contentious matters and decided to limit eligibility for state offices (although perhaps not the right to attend assemblies) to the “old citizens,” thus at least partially disenfranchising many, perhaps all, of those who had been brought to Syracuse and treated as citizens by the tyrants.

  Among the disenfranchised were some 7,000 of the tyrant’s mercenaries. The mercenaries rightly saw the decision about offices as signaling the end of their privileged position in a rent-seeking coalition and as proof that their interests could be ignored by the new government. Predictably, they chose to fight and, equally predictably, these experts in violence proved difficult opponents for the numerically superior Syracusans. Thanks to the efforts of an elite unit of 600 citizen-soldiers, the Syracusans eventually won out, but the war was long and debilitating (Diodorus 11.72–73, 76.1–2).

  The civil war fought against mercenary forces in Akragas and Syracuse was an acute form of a general problem faced by every Greek city in Sicily after the fall of the tyrants: The tyrants’ policy of moving populations and building up a few favored cities at the expense of others posed hard questions for the new posttyrannical regimes: Who was a citizen—and of what polis? Who had a rightful claim to what property? The mid-460s saw attempts by individual citizens and individual poleis to return to a pre-tyrannical status quo ante. A number of states, including Gela, Akragas, and Himera, witnessed episodes of what might be called civic cleansing: People who had been forced to emigrate from their homes by the tyrants now returned to their native cities, seized power, accused tyrant-era immigrants of having wrongfully taken other men’s property, and sent the immigrants into exile (Diodorus 11.76.4).

  Those exiled by posttyrannical regimes were unlikely to be welcomed home by the people currently occupying their (former) native cities, and the situation was highly volatile. The complex questions about who deserved what status, and what property, and where could not readily be answered on a polis-by-polis basis. Yet until these questions were answered, it was impossible to take the next essential step, that of defining, in a reasonably definitive way, rights related to civic membership and property: the immunities, participation rights, and right to control goods that would be assigned to various residents in each polis. In the meantime, while the Greek poleis were distracted by these sociopolitical matters, the inland Sikel population was being organized on a new military footing by an ambitious and competent Sikel leader. Some Greek states, including Syracuse, were initially willing to cooperate with the Sikels against Greek rivals if and when it allowed them to pursue a civic cleansing agenda (Diodorus 11.76.3).

  After several years of strife, and in the face of the potential collapse of Greek Sicily’s prosperity into a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, what might be described as a weakly federalist solution was put into place: according to Diodorus (11.76.5–6), almost all the poleis, eager to put an end to persistent civil conflicts, coordinated their citizenship policies according to a Common Resolution (koinon dogma). The terms of the Resolution called for a negotiated settlement with any former mercenaries still in residence, for a general recall of those people sent into exile during the posttyrannical incidents of civic cleansing, and for returning the poleis to the “old citizens” (i.e., the original pre-tyrannical era inhabitants).

  The apparent contradiction between “recalling” exiles while simultaneously “returning” poleis to their original citizens may have been resolved by creating different gradations of citizenship, with different immunities and/or participation rights. Meanwhile, mercenary forces still in control of strongholds were induced to give them up by guarantees that their movable property would be inviolate, conjoined with the grant of control over Zancle–Messana, where ex-mercenaries would, collectively, be a majority of the citizen body. Finally, a mechanism was devised whereby the land in each polis was apportioned among people with legitimate claims to it under the Resolution. Like much else in Diodorus’ compressed account, the details of this last measure remain obscure. Some kind of dispute resolution mechanism, rather than wholesale redistribution of land, seems, however, to be indicated: The well-documented rise of rhetorical expertise in Sicily was later attributed to the increase in legal disputation arising from the posttyrannical situation.34

  How the poleis of Sicily managed to come to this remarkable regional accord is unknown. Diodorus’ reference to a single Resolution and the arrangements for mercenaries to take over Zancle–Messana point to a unitary convention to which many states were signatories, rather than a one-state solution that was subsequently imposed upon or emulated by other states. But the way forward to the cooperative solution on citizenship status seems to have been prepared through the by-now-familiar tendency of the Sicilian Greek cities to move quickly, en bloc, in adopting new social and legal arrangements. In the event, the Common Resolution worked: At least some of the demographic results of tyrannical social engineering, including the dramatic increase in the population of Syracuse, were now accepted as established social facts. Diodorus (11.76.6) reports that the civil wars that had wracked the Sicilian poleis in the immediate posttyrannical era now came to an end. Although there is no legislator (mythic or real) whose name we can attach to this Sicilian Greek invention of a new approach to citizenship, the Common Resolution was of a piece with the Lycurgan reforms at Sparta and the Solonian/Cleisthenic reforms at Athens. And in each case, the result was a distinctive citizen-centered superpolis.

  DEMOCRACY AT SYRACUSE

  Syracuse’s fifth century democracy is much less well documented than Athens’, but what we do know points to an ongoing struggle to find an institutional design that would fit the distinctive form taken by citizenship in posttyrannical Sicily. The new government of Syracuse was centered on a citizen assembly with final authority over legislation, and it is, therefore, properly described as a democracy. It was not, however, a democracy that closely resembled the democracy established in Athens after 508. In comparison to Athens’ federalist approach to popular self-government, Syracuse’s fifth century democracy was at once more elitist and more populist. There is no evidence that Syracuse used a regionally representative, agenda-setting citizen council—the institution that, as we have seen, was a linchpin for the democracy in Athens. Syracuse seems never to have inscribed laws on stone for public display, as the Athenians did with increasing frequency. Unlike Athens, the Syracusans did not use a lottery when selecting magistrates. It is likely that elected officials, especially 15 annually elected generals, were more central to the government of Syracuse than they were to that of Athens. Overall, the Syracusan democracy appears to have been dominated by elites—although rarely by a unified elite coalition. Rivalry among men competing fiercely for positions of influence constantly risked compromising the stability of Syracusan government.35

  Moreover, as Diodorus (11.85.3) acerbically notes, at Syracuse “many had been added to the roll of citizens without plan and in a haphazard fashion.” There is no indication that Syracuse ever adopted a federalist model, despite having a big territory, many subsidiary villages and towns, and a population that was probably close to that of Athens. Demes and artificial tribes had proved effective in engaging Athenian citizens in the ongoing civic project of enrolling new citizens and in networking citizens from diverse regions and social backgrounds. Citizenship at Syracuse, by contrast, appears to have
remained at the national level and to have been manifest politically only in the citizen assembly.36

  With neither a citizen council nor the integrative levels of tribes and demes, Syracusan politics centered around individuals able to build temporarily powerful coalitions. The instability of the coalitions is signaled by reports of unruliness among the masses of ordinary citizens and the rise of “demagogues.” These were charismatic leaders who gained influence by appealing directly to mass audiences through rousing speeches in the citizen assembly. As such, they posed a potential threat to the authority of elected officials. Athens too had its demagogues, but in light of the civic experience many citizens gained through Council service and the networks encouraged by the deme–tribe system, they frequently played a productive, rather than a disruptive role in the Athenian democracy.37

  Diodorus (11.86.4–5) takes as exemplary of the troubles faced by Syracuse’s new democracy the rise of a certain Tyndarides, who gathered a large following of poorer citizens. He reportedly had armed them and was rumored to be planning to use them in a bid to seize control of the government. The Syracusan legal system at first seemed equal to the challenge: Tyndarides was tried and sentenced to death. An attempt by his supporters to rescue him on the way to the gallows led, however, to a violent counterattack by “respectable” citizens—i.e., elites and their retainers. These men seized and slaughtered Tyndarides’ supporters, along with the condemned man himself. Thus, noted Diodorus, “as this sort of thing kept happening time and again,” the Syracusans sought to address the problem of political unrest by emulating the Athenian law on ostracism (Diodorus 11.86–87).

  Assuming that Diodorus had his facts right, the decision by the democrats of Syracuse to emulate a specific institution developed by a prominent mainland state, in an attempt (unsuccessful, as it turned out) to redress a specific sociopolitical problem, is an example of the general phenomenon of interstate institutional transfer. Diodorus says that the goal of the Syracusan law was the same as that of the Athenian law on ostracism: to allow the citizenry to expel, by plurality vote, an influential man “most able through his influence to tyrannize over his fellow citizens” (Diodorus 11.86.5). As at Athens, the Syracusans did not envision a criminal procedure, but a preemptive move against a potential threat to the democratic order. But Syracuse did not imitate ostracism in a slavish manner. Rather than writing the name of the most dangerous man on a potsherd, the citizens of Syracuse wrote names on olive leaves, and the period of exile was five years, as opposed to ten at Athens. Moreover, while the Athenian ostracism law remained on the books through the late fourth century, Syracuse’s so-called “petalism” law was soon repealed.38