E-Book, Deutsch, Englisch, Band Band 205, 326 Seiten, E-Book-Text
Reihe: Historia – Einzelschriften.
Zambon Tradition and Innovation
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-515-09545-7
Verlag: Franz Steiner
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark
Sicily between Hellenism and Rome
E-Book, Deutsch, Englisch, Band Band 205, 326 Seiten, E-Book-Text
Reihe: Historia – Einzelschriften.
ISBN: 978-3-515-09545-7
Verlag: Franz Steiner
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark
At the beginning of the Hellenistic Age, Sicily became the landing-place for political innovations produced by Hellenistic culture in the West – and very soon it turned out to be the theatre for the comparison of different ethnicities: Sicilian natives, Greeks, Italics, Carthaginians and Romans.
This book investigates the decades between 289 and 241 B.C. and the social as well as political development of Sicily by re-examining crucial events that made the island the first Roman provincia after the first Punic War: the failure of the first Hellenistic kingship in the West; the Sicilian expedition of Pyrrhus; the new Hellenistic kingship of Hiero of Syracuse; the first Punic War and the victory of Rome. Also, this study highlights how successfully the political modernization and the social innovations of the Hellenistic Age took place in Sicilian cities – and the way some novelties were rejected and some traditional institutions still existed, even after the complete Roman conquest.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
1.2. Mercenaries, marauders and settlers:
the foundation of the Mamertine State in Messina (287 BC)
Unfortunately, one must again have recourse to the fragmentary historical text of Diodorus to have some news about the following events, to say what the mercenaries did after the departure from Syracuse and which direction they travelled before reaching Messina; but I will conceive once more to reconstruct the facts plausibly. According to Diodorus, there were no halting-places during the voyage from Syracuse to Messina, which was – as we shall see – the landing place of the soldiers. Even in this occurrence it is correct to assume that some information could even be lost, due to the summary of the original text; Diodorus could have been aware of some midway steps of the mercenaries; but I am confident these took place while marching to Messina, not in the districts west of Syracuse. Therefore, one must assume that the mercenary troops marched towards the northern extremity of Sicily, following the way along the eastern coast of the island. They had to pass through the territories of independent towns, such as Catane and Tauromenium, where new tyrannies had been established after having regained the freedom from the Syracusan power in 289 BC. The local tyrants, who were obviously engaged in strengthening their authority in the city-states, skilfully did not thwart in that occurrence the mercenaries’ passage. Otherwise, the soldiers could follow even the route inside Sicily, marching northwards across the plain of Catane and bypassing the mount Etna. Finally, anyway, the former Agathocles’ troops reached Messina[30]. Elsewhere, together with the occupation of Messina by the Mamertines, Diodorus (23, 1, 4) reveals another violent action that they perpetrated against the two towns of Gela and Camarina. In the passage of Diodorus, Hiero II, king of Syracuse, brings to the Roman ambassadors’ mind first of all the two episodes of violence against Gela and Camarina, and he evokes then the capture of Messina; certainly this is not by chance, and it seems to me obvious that Hiero’s words perceive a plain chronological progression of the events. Moreover, the same information provided by Diodorus compels to propose a completely different route travelled by the soldiers: after they ran from Syracuse, they must not have immediately moved northwards. They had to turn their steps towards the southern coast of Sicily and from there they went westwards, as far as they could into Gela’s territory and the borders of the increasing dominion of Agrigentum’s new tyrant, Phintias. From the southern coast, they had to move again northwards, passing through Sicily quite upright, until they arrived into the lands where the river Simetus flows, eventually reaching the northern Sicilian coast[31]. It seems to me really incredible that the news concerning the attack against Gela and Camarina produced much trouble for many scholars, and that they must have had to insinuate an alliance between Agrigentum’s tyrant, i.e. Phintias, and the ex-agathoclean army – or, anyway, a direct connection between them – to give good reason for the events. I already reviewed the problem in another paper[32], and I want to point out again the same conclusions that I achieved earlier. As a matter of fact, we do not only have the above-mentioned diodorean evidence about the raid of the mercenary army against Gela; we also have a further suggestion drawn once again from the remains of Diodorus’ book 22 (2, 2). This indication apparently contradicts my previous statement. In fact, the historian wrote that Phintias founded a city by the sea and gave it his name: the new foundation had fortification walls, a notable market place and temples of the gods. He settled there with the last inhabitants of Gela, who were driven from their homes after he tore down the walls and the houses of their hometown. What is worth stressing is that in this occurrence the destroyer of Gela is the tyrant of Agrigentum, Phintias. He acted without any assistance of the former Syracusan armed forces – as it is apparent from the diodorean passage – and slashed the walls and houses of the Greek city-state. In opposition to the belief of those modern historians who thought it was necessary to take apart the two suggestions of Diodorus, as if they were pertaining to two absolutely distinct chronological moments, other scholars thought equally allowed to regard the diodorean fragments as fully matching and therefore they tried to reconstruct the events as follows. After leaving Syracuse and before reaching Messina, the mercenaries would have been very important allies of the Agrigentine Phintias. If rewarded by him, they would have helped out the tyrant in the devastation of Gela and Camarina. This restoration seemed to be very feeble to the scholars themselves, and so they wanted to make it stronger with the supplement of a passage from the Histories of Polybius (1, 43, 2), referring to the deeds of a certain Achaean man, whose name was Alexon; according to Polybius, he had been the saviour of the citizens of Agrigentum, when the mercenaries of Syracuse tried to betray them[33]. According to some modern historians, the passage of Polybius shows that the former Syracusan soldiers tried to take control of Agrigentum by fraud, but when Alexon found out and declared their plot, they were forced to leave the town, and then they turned their steps to Messina. Nevertheless, this is an unconvincing hypothesis[34]. I believe that the two passages of Diodorus Siculus are paired, and I will prove that they must be connected in a different way. First of all, with reference to the mercenaries, Diodorus wrote that they put Gela and Camarina to fire and sword, and not that they destroyed the towns; on the other hand, Phintias tore down the houses and the walls, so he physically razed the city. Two more details must not be neglected; first, Phintias demolished the famous Gela’s walls, which had been since always a stumbling block so insurmountable for any besieger, that even some decades before Xenodicus of Agrigentum had to get into Gela at night by fraud, in order to get over the walls defended by the Syracusan troops. Consequently, if the walls stood strong until Phintias’ pulling down, it is worth presuming that the mercenaries did not even go into the city, but they limited themselves to ravaging its territory, breaking the citizens’ resistance thanks to devastations and pillages. The same actions they had to carry out in the surrounds of Camarina, where – this is the second weighty piece of information – we do not record any deed of Phintias. It is better to keep in mind that at least until 289 BC, both Gela and Camarina were part of Agathocles’ kingdom; hence, it is likely that two years after the breaking up of the Syracusan dominance, both the cities still fell within the sphere of influence of Syracuse; at the most, if one wants to exclude Gela, at any rate one can incorporate in it Camarina, which was closer to Syracuse and was exactly the target of the mercenaries’ offensive. After all, the exploit of Phintias (against Gela) and the mercenaries’ deeds (first against Camarina, and in a second time against Gela) are unconnected; I guess that, while Phintias was going to tear down the walls and the houses of Gela and to move its citizens to the new founded city of Phintias, the mercenary troops had to be already on their way to Messina. And now I return back to the events in Syracuse, in the spring of 287 BC and try to make a new reconstruction of the events[35]. The former Syracusan soldiers, after selling their goods, left Syracuse and turned their steps towards the South-East lands, making a way into the boundaries of Camarina and then of Gela, laying them waste and breaking the resistance of the two cities and of the local populations thanks to repeated assaults and quick incursions: a confirmation that those attacks never had the typical violence of a finishing stroke is provided even by the fact that, while Gela was subsequently razed by Phintias and abandoned by its inhabitants, Camarina kept on existing; and more than that, the Greek city-state played a very important role in the complicated events of the first Punic war. This role has been correctly stressed even by La Bua, but he even thought that Camarina had been destroyed too by the Mamertines; indeed, the events of the first Punic war show clearly that the city-state could live on just because, after the incursions of the Mamertines in the neighbourhood, Phintias the tyrant did not give it the finishing stroke; perhaps, at that time, he could not have the chance to enter so deeply in the ???a of Syracuse, that included even the city of Camarina. Nevertheless, the robberies of the mercenaries harmed even the countryside of Camarina, with particular reference to the Greek villages settled on the route going from Syracuse to Gela, and further on to Agrigentum. Some field excavations made at the site of modern Scornavacche, which has been dated to the age of Timoleon and Agathocles, brought to light many marks of a violent destruction of the site, that has been connected with the deeds of the Mamertines[36]. The soldiers plundered the cities and acted clearly according to their mercenary customs; perhaps they even wanted to damage Syracuse, by that time an enemy city, by assailing two cities which were still depending from its sphere of influence. Then, they made their way northwards, until they reached the lands of the river Simetus. It is not surprising that they did not face any resistance or any opposition while...
