Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. The soldiers had left now, months after the fighting was over, but the two teenagers still stepped carefully through the ruined streets of their city.
The island of Motia had been their home, and their parents' home, and their grandparents, and still more, all the way back along the centuries, since their ancestors had come to this place from Tyre so long ago. Its high walls had seemed so solid to them, so reassuring, so permanent. Parts of the fortification still stood, but inside little remained. Motia was gone, reduced to rubble and cinders by the Syracusans.
The gentle sea breeze they had felt so many times lifted motes of dust and ash from the burned and collapsed structures as it blew around their loose tunics. They avoided fallen, blackened timbers, walls reduced to scattered stones, and scorched mud bricks. Here and there, the adolescents could see tiny bits of the city they'd know. Carts stacked with storage jars, a house miraculously untouched by fire, a set of mason's tools still in the spot where their owner had left them.
Those reminders were few and far between, set amid a landscape of urban devastation. The two teenagers were looking for their home near the large rectangular pool at the heart of the island city. Debris littered the artificial basin. A marble statue of a god, its head missing and perhaps taken as a trophy by one of the Syracusan conquerors, lay just underneath the surface of the water. The colorful paint was beginning to dissolve, leaving white patches of stone visible.
Broken pottery surrounded the statue, hurled intentionally for the sheer fun of destruction. The attackers hated them, the teenagers realized, but precisely why, they didn't know. They spoke the Greek tongue used by so many of their neighbors. They liked the fine pottery imported from Athens. They had never burned a Greek town or city, though they knew that the armies of Carthage had destroyed many settlements in previous years. But what business of theirs could that be?
A dog, its fur patchy and wildness filling its eyes, growled at them as they neared their little house. One of the teenagers kicked a stone in its direction. It yelped and fled, the sound of its paws on the rubble shockingly loud in the near silence. The dog was a survivor like them, one adolescent said to the other. If only their parents had been so fortunate. Working together, they began shifting the pile of rubble from the house's entryway. They weren't sure what they hoped to find.
Not their father's stash of silver coins, which the soldiers had surely plundered, but perhaps a memento or two of their past lives. There was no going back. Motia was a tomb now. They had no illusions about that. But they wanted something, anything, to remind them of the people they had known and lost. The two teenagers dug and dug, the whispers of the breeze, their only companion. Toward the end of the 5th century BC,
the island of Sicily became the center of a new and extraordinarily violent competition between imperial powers. Carthage and Syracuse fought for decades for control of Sicily and set the stage for the later and much better known Punic Wars to come. That's what we'll talk about today on Tides of History. From Wondery, I'm Raza Jafri. And in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the case file on Mons Klöben, the spy who gave London its Christmas tree.
If you stand in London's Trafalgar Square at Christmas, you'll see a towering, sparkling tree. What you won't see is the story behind it. The story of Mons Cluven, 007 author Ian Fleming. and a secret mission to Norway. This is how wartime espionage gave Britain's capital city a much cherished festive tradition. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app. or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Gave London Its Christmas Tree early and ad-free with Wondery+.
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slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. The Mediterranean during the Classical Age was a big place. Compared to previous areas, such as the Early Iron Age, we know a great deal about it. We have archaeology in increasing quantities, of course, but also an explosion of written sources.
Inscriptions began to appear, but more importantly, we have access to narrative histories that provide a skeletal outline of the actual events that transpired after about 500 BC. The downside to historical narratives, however, no matter how spotty or biased they might be, is that they exert an enormous amount of gravitational pull on our attention. We tend to go where the written sources take us, and for the 5th century BC, that's largely to the Greek mainland.
It's hard to pass up Herodotus, Thucydides, and other literary products of Athens' golden age. In the following century, Alexander the Great stands astride the age like a genuine colossus. He draws our eyes ever further east, away from the Mediterranean and toward the vast expanses of Asia, where the fortunes of generations of conquerors rose and fell.
To the extent that we can keep our attention on the central and western Mediterranean at all during this time, we tend to look to Rome, which was in the process of becoming the hegemonic force in Italy. You don't need me to tell you how that story ends or why we might spend so much time on it.
Yet all of those trends, based fundamentally on the combination of our available sources and our knowledge of how things would turn out in the centuries to come, obscure much more than they reveal about what actually happened in the Mediterranean during the 5th and 4th centuries.
There were other players in that world, really important actors, whom it's all too easy to overlook if we're not careful. Carthage, first and foremost, but also the cities of Sicily and Magna Graecia, the western edge of the Greek world's core.
Syracuse, located on Sicily's eastern shore, was the most important among them, but there were many others. Each of them was no less a part of the mainstream of Greek culture and society than their more established counterparts on the Greek mainland. Croton and Tarentum in southern Italy?
Agrigento in Sicily and many more boasted monumental buildings of extraordinary quality, populations that sometimes dwarfed those of the older and better known Palaeis and, above all, wealth. Thanks to their position at the hinge between the two halves of the Mediterranean, The Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily were perfectly placed to profit from agricultural and craft production on a massive scale. There was a whole world of complex interactions happening in the central Mediterranean.
full of epic histories of ambition, power, and conquest that has received far less attention than the better-known events of the Greek mainland and parts further east. That's what we'll focus on today. What exactly was going on in the central Mediterranean during the 5th and 4th centuries BC? It wasn't a sideshow to events in Italy, where Rome was emerging as the dominant force.
Or in the more central portions of the Greek world, where Athens and Sparta were battling for supremacy and then the Macedonians eventually came out on top. Yet the dynamics of the central Mediterranean were also tied to what was happening in those places. The disastrous Athenian expedition to Syracuse, one of the major reasons they lost the Peloponnesian War, is only the most obvious connection. There were many others, and in fact, there was no obvious dividing line between those worlds.
On a fundamental level, we have to understand that the Greek cities of Magna Graecia and Sicily were every bit as Greek as those in the homeland. By this time, they were well-established police in their own right. They were hundreds of years old.
and they formed one part of the dense network of connections that made up the Greek world as a whole. The oldest colonies had been around for 400 years by the time Alexander the Great became king of Macedonia. The youngest were still more than a century old. Seeing them as a fringe or a frontier misses something fundamental about how that world operated, the economic, cultural, and political links that bound the whole together.
The other major player, Carthage, was an expanding power on a par with the other growing entities of that age. The Carthaginians were by no means destined to end up as a conquered footnote, and breeding their eventual fate back onto this period does them, and us, a disservice. When we last left this part of the world, it was 480 BC, and an army made up mostly of Greeks of various stripes, but led by the city of Syracuse,
had just defeated a Carthaginian force at Himera. This battle ended what we might consider the first phase of Carthaginian imperialism. There were many Phoenician colonies in the central and western Mediterranean, everywhere from the Atlantic coasts of Iberia and Morocco to Sicily, and Carthage spent much of the 6th and early 5th centuries BC establishing itself as the preeminent force among them.
In the first decades and centuries after their foundation, in the 9th and 8th centuries BC, the Phoenician colonies had been oriented toward the indigenous peoples in their areas and back toward the homeland in the Levant. By the middle of the 5th century BC at the latest, Those networks of trade were increasingly centered on Carthage, with dense connections between Punic settlements, indigenous communities, and others in the immediate region.
This reorientation may have been a product of the successive conquests of the Phoenician mother cities by the large nearby empires, Assyria, Babylonia, and then Persia. But it also had something to do with the organic development of the colonies into major centers in their own right. They weren't children anymore, and Carthage seized the preeminent place among them through economic might and the occasional use of force.
The extent to which Carthage was an imperial power itself in this age is up for debate. The evidence is pretty sparse, and what little there is seems to speak more to ambitious aristocratic kin groups than an organized state policy. As elsewhere in the Mediterranean at this time, there wasn't much daylight between the crude machinery of these city-states and the families that dominated them. Nor should we view ethnic conflict as a given. The historian Walter Hameling writes, quote,
The social world of the aristocracy is even more important than the abstract state with its various rights. Private and treaty relations stood side by side, and both could influence the actions of the state. nowhere in there was some crude sense of conflict between ethnic groups. Syracuse was already Carthage's major rival in the region.
Under the leadership of the tyrant Gilon, the city had won a resounding victory over its Punic enemy in 480 BC at Himera. Gilon died two years later and was succeeded by his brother Huron, who was, if anything, an even more effective ruler. Diodorus Siculus, the much later historian whose work forms the basis for our understanding of this period, described Heron as, quote, greedy, prone to violence, and an inveterate liar.
All of those traits were probably assets for a budding tyrant in the early 5th century BC. They didn't stop Huron from courting the favor of the broader Greek world. His wealth brought famous philosophers and writers to Syracuse, including the playwright Aeschylus.
Huron also commissioned the poet Pindar, another famous character, to write an ode celebrating his chariot-racing victories at the Pythian and Olympic Games. Other leading Syracusan citizens likewise participated in the mainstream of Greek literary and cultural life. Despite their many flaws, Syracuse does seem to have prospered in material terms under the rule of the tyrants. It brought the city military glory, including a crushing victory over an Etruscan fleet in 474 BC.
Galon and Huron were, for all intents and purposes, kings, as the historian Richard Evans points out in his wonderful book Ancient Syracuse, and that's how Diodorus refers to them in his text. This succession of tyrants did not, however, succeed in creating a stable and legitimate system of monarchy. By the end of the 460s BC, they had been driven out of the city, and Syracuse became a democracy for the next 60 years.
The precise sequence of events is labyrinthine, involving a number of different Sicilian Greek cities, population transfers, and conflict within Syracuse, but the important thing to note is that the tyrants were ejected and Syracuse ruled itself. The result was an extraordinarily heterogeneous city made up of a variety of groups from all over Sicily and beyond, none of whom, even the elite, had actually been there all that long.
With the tyrant's demise, though, Syracuse soon lost its position of dominance in Sicily, both political and economic. Throughout the 450s BC and beyond, the preeminent force on the island was actually a man named Ducatius, who wasn't Greek or Carthaginian, but a native Seacole.
This is a good reminder that although our sources focus on the activities of the Greeks, and to a much lesser extent those of the Carthaginians, there were still many other groups of people living in the central Mediterranean. The divisions between those groups weren't as straightforward as ethnic labels might imply, either. Ducatius was a sikhil from a prominent family, which meant that he had spent his entire life interacting with the leading Greeks of communities such as Syracuse.
Calling Ducatius, quote, Hellenized captures some of what was happening in Sicily at this point, but it's probably more accurate to say that this was a complex, multi-ethnic world in which various groups, linguistic and ethnic, were constantly interacting with one another. In these circumstances, with Syracuse's power on the wane, Ducatius stepped into the gap. He took over most of the interior of Sicily and inflicted a substantial defeat on an army from Syracuse in 451 BC.
It was only by chance that the Syracusans defeated Ducatius the following year and had him exiled to Corinth with a generous pension. This was obviously a complicated political environment in which to operate. and our ability to reconstruct the shifts in alliances, local and regional interests, and pure enmity is limited by our source material.
Without digging into the intricacies of how to read Diodorus Siculus, which have occupied far more specialized minds than ours, the best we can say is that Sicily was a shifting tapestry of relationships, histories, and interactions we can barely understand. When Ducatius returned to Sicily from Corinth in 446 BC, for example, ostensibly to found a new colony, the result was a conflict between Syracuse and the key Sicilian Greek city of Acragus.
Syracuse was still closely tied to its mother city of Corinth, and the key players in that city probably wanted to use Ducatius' new colony as a means to regain territories lost at the end of the tyrant's rule in Syracuse. This is despite the fact that the Syracusans had fought Ducatius for years and exiled it. A few years later, in 440 BC, the Syracusans attacked the city Ducatius had founded, destroyed it, and enslaved the survivors.
These kinds of twists and turns are hard enough to follow when we have huge volumes of information from many different sources. They're nearly impossible when we have one narrative written centuries after the events and maybe a few scattered references elsewhere. The upshot is that Sicily was a volatile political environment in which fortunes could rise and fall quickly. Syracuse could dominate the island.
but only when it was under the rule of a powerful individual who could keep the city focused and sway other important communities. Carthage, for its part, seems to have wanted nothing to do with this morass of instability during this time. With this in mind, it's easy to see why the Athenians failed in their invasion during the Peloponnesian War a couple of decades later. Keeping track of who was siding with whom and for what reasons was hard enough.
Trying to actually control the course of events in a single Sicilian Greek city, let alone several, was a task that proved too much for all but the most gifted and ruthless tyrants. The Athenians, lest we forget, actually began involving themselves in Sicilian affairs quite early in the war. Sicily wasn't far away. Its cities were wealthy and populous. There were plenty of ships and soldiers on an island riven with pretty much continuous conflict.
Sicilian grain fed the cities of the Peloponnese, the Spartan-dominated region of Greece, and the support of Syracuse alone, leaving aside the other cities, might have been enough to turn the tide of the war. Carthage would return with a vengeance in the next era of Sicilian political life, but into a context that was increasingly tied to what was happening in mainland Greece.
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If you want more laughs, stories and more of us going on script, be sure to follow Everything To Play For wherever you get your podcasts. Are yours going to be all about Wales? Yes. Our understanding of the ins and outs of Sicilian political life grows fuller as we enter the era of the Peloponnesian War, primarily because Thucydides tells us a great deal about what was happening on the island as an adjunct to the broader conflict.
It's clear that Syracuse's imperial ambitions on Sicily hadn't diminished during the period of democracy. The city's popular government was no less interested in exercising power over its neighbors than the tyrants had been. The democratic government was certainly less competent at it, though. The exercise of that power primarily took the form of enforced tribute, which the Syracusans used to pay for armies and fleets.
So when the Athenians first began to show some interest in Sicily in the early years of the war, they found eager partners among the local Greeks who were unhappy with Syracuse's pretensions to overlordship. Many of those Sicilian Greek cities, in fact, paid tribute to Athens to subsidize the cost of Athenian intervention. They hoped to use the mainlanders as leverage to either free themselves entirely from Syracusan dominance,
or at least as a threat to negotiate a better deal for themselves. For their part, the Athenians immediately grasped the potential benefits of greater influence in Sicily. Access to manpower, which was especially important given the plague raging in the city,
and access to Sicilian grain, which would both strain their Peloponnesian opponents and render Athens less dependent on imports from the Black Sea. What the Athenians didn't have were the excess military resources to actually establish control. They won some battles, took over a few cities, won some skirmishes, and generally failed to dislodge Syracuse from its position or much alter the course of local events.
This changed with the massive Athenian expedition that launched in 415 BC, the brainchild of the fascinating and divisive Alcibiades. It's up for debate how much the average Athenian actually knew about Sicily in general, and Syracuse in particular. The Athenians certainly don't seem to have grasped the difficulty of the task they'd set for themselves. Sicily was large, populous, and wealthy, and a few dozen triremes and a couple thousand soldiers weren't going to get the job done.
When Nicias, architect of the mid-war peace with Sparta, pointed this out, the Athenians increased the size of the expedition rather than abandoning it as hopeless. Alcibiades even put forth some far-fetched ideas about using Sicily as a base to conquer Carthage and other Punic colonies in the central Mediterranean. Viewed in this light, the Sicilian adventure was pretty much doomed to failure from the beginning.
though the true scale of the disaster shocked even the most pessimistic observers. The Athenians lost hundreds of ships and thousands of men, most of whom were irreplaceable. The cost of the expedition ruined Athenian finances and left the city on the brink of collapse.
These are all things I covered in depth during our episodes on the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians made a miraculous recovery, only to be defeated by Spartan will and Persian gold, along with their own shortcomings in the years that followed. We don't really need to go back over them all again. What matters in this context is the impact that Athenian intervention had on Sicily. It was profound, mounting to the beginning of a new chapter in the island's political history. Why?
Because some, though not all, of the Sicilian Greeks had lined up with Athens against Syracuse and its allies during the time of the expedition. When the few surviving Athenians escaped, never to return during the war, Syracuse was left with a vengeful populace accustomed to conflict, a much larger military force, and unresolved conflicts with their neighbors.
The other Sicilian Greeks were now confronted by an emerging superpower, the nightmare they had been trying to avoid in the first place. The city of Segesta, located in the western half of the island, had been the original object of the Athenian expedition.
It was the Segesteans who had called on Athens for aid in the first place, mostly against the neighboring city of Salinas, which was allied to Syracuse. That war of neighbors didn't stop when the Athenians left, and without help, Segesta would be crushed. So, the Sagasteans turned to Carthage for aid. We don't know much about what was happening in Carthage during the 70 years separating the Battle of Himera in 480 BC from these events.
Our textual sources for this period are few and far between, amounting to a few lines that don't tell us much. The general picture is one of a city whose leading elites had been burned by their attempts to play general in Sicily and Sardinia. Several sites that show a Phoenician presence in Sardinia during the 6th century BC show evidence of destruction and then abandonment during the 5th, and they were only reoccupied later, during the 4th or even later centuries BC.
In western Sicily, the region of the island where the Punic presence was greatest, smaller settlements were abandoned and larger ones grew, which is probably a sign of continuing strife. In the vicinity of Carthage itself, however, the archaeology… points to a substantial expansion of the city and greatly intensified exploitation of the nearby landscape in North Africa. Those elites reoriented themselves around building agricultural estates in Carthage's hinterland.
where they produced immense quantities of produce for sale both in the city and further afield. Trade with Athens in particular and the Aegean more generally intensified. The Carthaginians also took an interest in searching for new long-distance trade routes. An intriguing Greek text just a few pages long survives in a single early medieval manuscript.
The Periplus of Hano purports to be a translation and summary of a longer Carthaginian text, and it recounts a large-scale naval expedition down the west coast of Africa, south of Tangier. Dating to around 400 BC and detailing events that took place at most a century earlier, the Periplus is almost certainly genuine. It fits neatly with archaeological evidence confirming a Punic presence on the Atlantic coast of Africa.
We don't know how far South Hanno's journey actually went, perhaps as far as the Canary Islands, maybe to Senegal or even further. Regardless, we should probably place it in the context of the Carthaginians redirecting their energy from state-aided elite imperialism to trade. Another voyage probably dates to this period, that of Himilco. who turned north into the Atlantic instead of south and reached the ten rich islands known as the Cassaterides.
This was probably southern Britain, namely Cornwall, and contacts with the locals there would have been extraordinarily lucrative given Mediterranean demand for tin. We tend to think of the Phoenician settlers in the central and western Mediterranean as traders from the very beginning, and to some extent they were, but we should never forget that agriculture and craft production were always the centerpiece of their wealth.
They weren't trading for the sake of it. They were trading goods they had grown or made. So, by the time the Athenians left Sicily with their tails between their legs, it's safe to say that Carthage hadn't declined so much as reoriented itself after a brief period of imperial ambition in the late 6th and early 5th centuries. The city was bigger
richer, and had much more extensive and intensive trade routes covering the Mediterranean and beyond. Its position in North Africa was much stronger, with more territory directly subject to the city and still greater swaths tied to Carthaginian elites through personal ties.
Although the details are obscure to us, it also seems like Carthaginian influence in Western Sicily was, if anything, stronger than it had been 70 years earlier. At the same time, they were keen observers of what was happening in Sicily and beyond.
The historian Walter Ammeling puts it like this, quote, and Athens, through its intervention, altered the balance of power and the political dynamics so enduringly that Carthage from now on could not avoid intervening in Sicily and establishing its own military presence there.
Now, I think that's going a bit too far to say that they couldn't avoid intervening. The historian Dexter Hoyos has noted that the Carthaginians were perfectly capable of defending what they already controlled without entertaining new imperial ambitions. Instead, following Hoyos, it looks more like the Carthaginian elites were closely watching what was happening in Syracuse and the other Sicilian Greek cities.
With the Athenian withdrawal, the most influential among those elites decided that the time was ripe to see what fruit's intervention might bring them. In other words, this was a deliberate reversal of a long-established policy. One source claims that it was the grandson of the man who had been defeated at Himera who wanted to avenge his ancestors' failures, but this was probably nothing more than a post hoc justification.
Instead, we're basically looking at a blatant power grab at a time of extreme instability in Sicilian political life. When Segesta appealed to Carthage for aid, the Carthaginians responded decisively. and their support ensured the survival of Segesta in 410 BC. Seeing that the Syracusans hadn't done much to aid their allies in Salinas against Segesta, the Carthaginians launched an all-out invasion in 409 BC.
After the better part of a century of Syracusan dominance, the speed and success of the Carthaginian expedition was shocking. They sacked and destroyed Salinas and Himera in the west, and in the next several years did the same to Acragas, Agrigento. and Gela on the southern coast of Sicily. An army and fleet sent by Syracuse to aid Salinas arrived too late, and would anyway have been too small to stop the Carthaginians. In the midst of all this,
the democratic government of Syracuse came under increasing pressure. A reforming attempt to make it more democratic with more elected magistrates in the aftermath of the Athenian expedition made it less stable rather than more. A would-be tyrant named Hermocrates nearly succeeded in overthrowing the popular regime in 408 BC and got as far as the city's agora before he was killed and his supporters exiled. The sacks of Akragas and Gala happened in the aftermath of this event.
and Syracuse was helpless to stop the Carthaginians. Tens of thousands of refugees wandered through Sicily, and it looked as if Carthage might soon rule the entire island. Some of the refugees who came to Syracuse, for example, complained about the ineffectiveness of Syracusan military leadership. That surely didn't help the already volatile political situation in the city.
While all this was happening, events within Syracuse began to spiral. One of the generals elected to office in the midst of the continuous Syracusan defeats was a man named Dionysius. He had been one of those responsible for killing the would-be tyrant Hermocrates a few years earlier. and his strident criticisms of the current military leadership made him an attractive choice. Dionysius capitalized by taking a small force to Gala and organizing the defense there.
dealing harshly with rebellious mercenaries and disloyal citizens before returning to Syracuse. His ostensible reason was to secure more troops to defend Gala. In reality, Dionysius had bigger plans. He seemed to be the only person capable of stopping the relentless Carthaginian advance, and Dionysius exploited the moment for everything it was worth. The Syracusans handed over sole military authority to Dionysius.
Once he'd been given legal powers, Dionysius buttressed his position by doubling the pay of the mercenaries and forming a personal bodyguard of first 600 and then 1,000 men. He made strategic marriages to secure allies among the Syracusan elite. and had his opponents executed. For all intents and purposes, Dionysius was now the ruling tyrant of Syracuse. But despite his control over Syracuse, Dionysius was still faced with an utterly unfavorable situation.
He marched toward Gala to meet the Carthaginians, and a massive battle loomed. Dionysius may have had more than 30,000 men under his command, and the Carthaginians were, if anything, more numerous. But Dionysius' first campaign was a disaster. His complex plan for relieving Gala fell apart, and in the end, all he could do was evacuate the city. Thousands more refugees thronged the roads, and the Syracusan cavalry even tried to ambush Dionysius during his retreat.
When that failed, the plotters went to Syracuse and attempted to secure the city against him, but came up just short. Dionysius' reign looked like it was over before it really began. But in one of those odd twists of history... A plague struck the Carthaginians at their moment of greatest success. Their leading general Hannibal, not the famous one, died, and the surviving leader, Himilco, took the opportunity to make a favorable peace in 405 BC.
The terms were great for Carthage. Its control over western Sicily was confirmed, the southern Greek cities such as Akragas were made to pay tribute, and the cities of central and eastern Sicily were declared independent from Syracuse in control. Dionysius got a bit of breathing room to secure himself in power. Yet nothing had been settled. There was no going back to the days before the Athenian expedition, and new wars loomed on the horizon.
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Dionysius was not yet firmly entrenched as the ruler of Syracuse. In the aftermath of the treaty with Carthage, some of the citizens of Syracuse rebelled against him, succeeding in penning him and his mercenaries on a fortified island. They very narrowly succeeded in forcing Dionysius into exile, and they were only foiled by a combination of luck and the arrival of a group of Italian mercenaries in the tyrant's pay.
Once that attempt failed, however, Dionysius systematically set about making himself untouchable. He built barracks and military port facilities and a palace for his family, all of them highly defensible even from the citizens of Syracuse. To face the outside world, Dionysius ordered the construction of enormous defensive walls that ran 27 kilometers, 18 miles around the city. These walls took only five years to complete.
And when finished, they were among the largest fortifications anywhere in the ancient world. More worrisome for the Carthaginians, Dionysius also began a massive military buildup, assembling tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of cutting-edge warships.
In the decades to come, the tyrant would dominate not just Syracuse but Sicily, and extend his influence north into Italy and even south toward Africa. He was one of the most important political figures of the early 4th century in the Mediterranean. a truly colossal force, and he remade Syracuse into an imperial power in Sicily and beyond. Dionysius' reputation is not good, to put it bluntly.
Later historians treated him as an archetypal example of the power-hungry tyrant, glorifying himself through gigantic building projects and military campaigns while oppressing his subjects and pursuing vainglorious side quests like trying to win poetry competitions.
It's essential to note, however, that the less-than-favorable accounts of his reign are all well after his time. Contemporary historians seem to have had a better view, namely Philistus, a Syracusan who was intimately involved with governance before and during Dionysius' time. Philistus' work doesn't survive, but Diodorus Siculus, our major source for this period, used him extensively. Yet, Diodorus had an agenda in writing his history.
He liked democracy and disliked one-man rule, and did more than a little twisting of his source material to fit that model. Diodorus tells us in so many words that Syracuse suffered under its tyrants and thrived under popular government. Other essential sources for this period followed that same guiding principle. In reality, the opposite was more accurate. Syracuse's democratic regime was no less imperialistic than its tyrants.
was simply less successful in its attempts to exercise influence close to home and project power further away. The evidence of archaeology leaves little doubt that Syracuse built more monumental structures and generally thrived economically to a greater degree under the rule of the tyrants, especially Dionysius. Now, nobody is saying that Dionysius was a good guy.
but the evidence strongly suggests that he was a forceful and competent ruler who made Syracuse safe and prosperous for the better part of four decades. The same was true of Sicily more broadly. After a generation of disruptions thanks to Athenian and Carthaginian intervention, Dionysius' iron fist mostly kept the peace. The cost of that peace for the Greeks of Eastern and Central Sicily was the loss of their freedom.
For other residents of Sicily and beyond, Dionysius' powerful military machine brought them violent warfare. In 397 BC, after eight years of consolidating his position within Syracuse, Dionysius launched his assault on the Carthaginians. He went straight for the oldest and most important Phoenician colony on Sicily, the island city of Motia on the west coast. Accompanied by an army said to number 80,000 men, along with hundreds of ships and a coterie of siege engines,
Dionysius' besiegers constructed a causeway to link Motia to the mainland. Once inside the city, the Syracusans crossed from rooftop to rooftop using wooden bridges to avoid the crowded streets, fighting all the while. The defenders never had a chance, and Motia was nearly destroyed. A settlement that had flourished for centuries was effectively wiped off the map.
When the Carthaginians returned in the following year, they retook the site, but it remained a wreck populated by only a tiny number of people throughout the 4th century BC. Instead, the Carthaginians rebuilt on a nearby mainland spot called Lilibam. constructing one of the ancient world's most impregnable citadels. Excavations confirm the totality of the destruction at Motia, and in fact, archaeology demonstrates that this kind of intense warfare was becoming the norm in Sicily.
Dionysius was simply emulating what the Carthaginians themselves had done in their campaign a decade earlier. Himera and Salinas, along with other sites known to have been attacked during that expedition, show extensive evidence of violence.
At some sites, the destruction was total, and many were never reoccupied. Those that were reoccupied were rebuilt from the ground up. At Salinas, which became a Carthaginian colony, only the basic outline of the city's acropolis, its citadel, remained the same. The buildings were leveled, and the raw materials reused to build new structures on the site. The new colony became known as Roche Melkart, and its previous existence as Salinas was overwritten.
It's common in the ancient sources for the Sicilian Greeks to depict the Carthaginians as barbarians, slotting them into the same narrative role occupied by the Persians in mainland Greece. Without giving in entirely to the notion of civilizational conflict, some sort of unbridgeable divide between Sicilian Greeks and Carthaginians, I think we should take the extensive evidence of destruction in this period as a sign of an increasingly bitter conflict.
Ethnic enmity shouldn't be our default assumption, especially since we know how much trade and interaction took place across cultural borders, but it's hard not to see this time as one of intense hatred and dislike. Remember, there were thousands of refugees living in Syracuse and other cities who had been displaced in the course of the Carthaginian campaigns during the late 5th century BC. They were unlikely to have forgotten what happened.
And if Dionysius employed the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarity, which he probably did, then finding soldiers and support for his cause can't have been too hard. The historian Nathan Pilkington, whose work I've used throughout today's episode and others on early Carthage,
argues forcefully that there was no Carthaginian empire prior to the late 5th century. For Pilkington, the city was simply too small and relatively unimportant even in the 6th century to have exerted real control over any area outside its immediate hinterland. While I'm not entirely on board with this, mainly because of the private power of elite Carthaginian families that we can see in that earlier period, I think it's mostly right.
Something fundamental in the Carthaginian worldview and in their capabilities had changed by the end of the 5th century. Decades of steady growth in agricultural production and the bulk goods trade was made possible by what we might call local imperialism in North Africa. Slowly but surely, the Carthaginians built fortified centers and specialized agricultural estates in the countryside.
which became bases of control to subdue the local populace. But because of the nature of our sources, that development is visible only in scattered snippets in the archaeological record. The long-term effects of all that growth appear in the seemingly sudden and overwhelming turn to a more obvious kind of imperial power projection in Sicily in the years after Athenian intervention.
The Greek historians whose texts we rely on didn't know much about, or probably care much about, conflicts between Carthage and the indigenous people living in the vicinity of the city. If they had, the outbreak of war on a massive scale in Sicily... probably wouldn't have seemed so surprising. One of the most visible signs of the increasing scale of war during this period is the presence of large numbers of Carthaginian coins across Sicily. These were a new development
tetradrachums, minted according to the Attic Standard, and they were used for paying soldiers. We know that because of when and where they're found. The dating on them is really tight, unquestionably between 410 and 390 BC. and the iconography on the coins is both military and imperial. Mercenaries had to be paid in hard cash to retain their services, and the coins themselves made a statement that Carthage was beginning to see itself in a new and more expansive light.
But it's probably wrong to see Carthaginian military power as depending entirely on paid soldiers. By this time, thanks to the expansion in Africa, the city had a massive local demographic base on which it could draw. Pilkington estimates that Carthage was at least equal in population and resources to the Athenian heartland of Attica during this period. If that's correct, then Carthage could tap hundreds of thousands of people living in and around the city for military service.
The city's soldiers were certainly paid, hence the coins, but we're not talking about armies made up entirely of foreigners imported to fight. That understates both the extent of Carthage's capabilities... and the role its citizens played in furthering their imperial designs. When the Carthaginians struck back after the destruction of Motia, they did so with a vengeance.
Under the command of the general Himilco, the Carthaginians won a major naval victory over Dionysius' fleet, captured the city of Messina, and then laid siege to Syracuse itself. But, once again, plague struck the besieging Carthaginians, and their army collapsed. Himiko bribed Dionysius to allow him to escape and then committed suicide out of shame. To make matters worse, the defeat seems to have triggered a massive rebellion of Libyans and enslaved people within North Africa.
a revolt so serious that it threatened the existence of Carthage itself. It took several years to put down this rebellion, so a Carthaginian force didn't return to Sicily until 393 BC under the command of the general Mago. Mago didn't exactly cover himself in glory, losing a naval battle and then falling into a long, grinding war of attrition in central Sicily against the native Seikos and Dionysius.
Only the threatened rebellion of Dionysius' soldiers, who were tired of guerrilla warfare and no plunder, led to a peace treaty between the two sides in 392 BC. Considering the course of the war, it essentially recognized a stalemate. Dionysius couldn't make any further gains, and the Carthaginians didn't want to keep risking their core territories, so they divided Sicily between them. I doubt anybody thought the peace would last long, and lo and behold, within a decade,
Dionysius and Carthage were at war once again. The events at the end of the 5th century and beginning of the 4th marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the central Mediterranean. Carthage had mostly minded its business outside North Africa during the 5th century, but in the aftermath of the Athenian intervention, the idea of empire in Sicily was too attractive to ignore. The foundation of the Carthaginian Empire dated to these years.
and the rise of Dionysius to rule in Syracuse is inseparable from the Carthaginian threat. Athens blundered its way into destabilizing Sicily, Carthage tried to exploit the situation, And the result was the awakening of a dormant power, Syracuse, and the beginning of a new age of imperial rivalry that would last through the Punic Wars and beyond.
Next time on Tides of History, we'll continue the story of Syracuse and Carthage, and see how Dionysius' ambitions led him to still more wars in Sicily, and even Italy. If you like Tides of History, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.
The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Lewis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web.
to kill her and she wasn't the only target because buried in the depths of the internet is the kill list a cache of chilling documents containing names photos addresses and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy.
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