Wandering Greeks (13 page)

Dionysius I, who became tyrant of Syracuse in 405, knew better than anyone that mercenary settlements could be usefully turned to political as well as military advantage. They served not only as payment for services rendered, but also as a stronghold of loyal support. It is also the case that a mercenary army is a portable
polis
in waiting, so to speak, since mercenaries look to their commander for settlement when their period of service draws to an end. The earliest one to be founded in Dionysius's reign, however, owed nothing to his initiative. A year after he took control of Syracuse, some Campanian mercenaries, whom he had recently ejected from Aetna because of their untrustworthiness, marched to Entella, where, “having persuaded the citizens to receive them as
sunoikoi
[fellow-inhabitants], they attacked them by night, slew those of military age, married the wives of the men they had deceived, and took possession of the city” (D.S.14.9.9). How Dionysius responded to this flagrant act of rebellion is not recorded. Henceforth, however, he took personal responsibility for settling his mercenaries.

Accordingly in 403, after seizing Catania and enslaving its population, Dionysius resettled it with a contingent of Campanian mercenaries. In the same year he enslaved the population of Naxos. Naxos (not to be confused with the Aegean island of the same name) was the oldest Greek settlement on Sicily. He now destroyed it, leaving perhaps only its temples intact, and handed over its territory to the neighboring Sicels in the hope of gaining their support (D.S. 14.15.2). He also took Leontini and removed its population to Syracuse, this time leaving the city intact. Two or three years later he founded a colony at Adranum, about ten miles to the northwest of Mount Aetna. After defeating Carthage in 396 he resettled Leontini with his mercenaries (14.78.2–3). Last in 392 he expelled “most of the Sicels who were living in Tauromenium” if and “selected and settled in their place the most suitable of his mercenaries” (4.96.4).

By the time of his death in 367 Dionysius had relocated the inhabitants of no fewer than fourteen
poleis
, five of which were intended for his mercenaries. With the exception of Messina (formerly Zancle), all the cities on the east coast of the island were now either abandoned or
had been resettled. Much of southern Italy was also within his sphere of influence. But though he had confined the Carthaginians to the northwest part of Sicily, he had not succeeded in his larger aim, which was to expel them from the island altogether. Moreover his resettlements, particularly those involving mercenaries, were a failure. Mercenaries almost by definition lack the skills and mindset that are needed to create a stable urban entity and promote civic virtues. Nor should we forget the horrendous consequences that his program of self-aggrandisement had for the tens of thousands of indigenous peoples who became displaced, of whom we learn virtually nothing.

Timoleon's Revival of Syracuse

Some twenty years after the death of Dionysius I, the Corinthian general Timoleon undertook one of the most ambitious ancient urban relocation programs on record. In ca. 365 Timoleon had been implicated in
the killing of his brother and had been living under a cloud ever since. When he was approached by Syracusan exiles living in Corinth, he decided to throw in his lot with them. He arrived in Sicily in ca. 346/5 at the head of a small army to challenge Dionysius's successor and eldest son, Dionysius II. After successfully besieging Syracuse, Timoleon drove Dionysius into exile. He then defeated the Carthaginians and went on to “uproot all the tyrants throughout the island” (D.S.16.82.4). He too, however, never succeeded in driving the Carthaginians out of Sicily.

Even so, it was extremely fortuitous for the Sicilian Greeks that Timoleon arrived at the exact moment he did. By all the evidence, archaeological as well as literary, Dionysius I's policy of mass resettlement had been a failure, and at the time of his death the Sicilian
polis
could fairly be described as a failing enterprise. Writing of the period immediately prior to Timoleon's arrival, Plutarch describes the island as
“anastatos
[uprooted] and
apolis
[bereft of cities] because of wars, added to which most of the cities were occupied by barbarians of mixed ethnicity and by unemployed mercenaries” (
Tim
. 1.1). Horses, he goes on to say, were grazing in the Syracusan agora, other cities were inhabited by deer and wild pigs, and their citizens were neglecting the summons to fulfill their civic duties (22.4–5; cf. D.S. 16.83.1). One estimate is that the population of Syracuse, which at its peak exceeded 100,000, had now sunk to below 10,000, doubtless as a result of “casualties in war and strife, executions and banishments, voluntary withdrawals of citizens unable to make a livelihood in conditions of insecurity” (Westlake 1969, 284). Though Plutarch's description of Sicily as
anastatos
and
apolis
may be something of an exaggeration, the picture he paints of long-term devastation is amply supported by archaeological data.

Now that he had dealt with the Carthaginian threat to Syracusan independence, in ca. 340 Timoleon appealed to Corinth for help in increasing the city's population. The Corinthians responded by inviting the Syracusans and Sicels who were living outside Sicily to return to their ancestral home “on equal and fair terms,” much as if Syracuse were a new foundation (Plu.
Tim
. 23.6). Initially only a few of them answered the call. It is fair to assume that many of those who had left their home
lands long ago had done very well for themselves and were reluctant to exchange their current prosperity for an uncertain future in what many of them no longer thought of as home. So the Corinthians extended the offer of Syracusan citizenship to all Greeks, irrespective of ethnicity. Once again the response was disappointing. Eventually, however, when peace was formally concluded with Carthage, some 60,000 Greeks volunteered, including 10,000 mercenaries (Plu.
Tim
. 23.6 = Athanis,
FGrH
562 F 2; cf. D.S. 16.82.5).

Many of the Sicilian Greeks who migrated to Syracuse had been living in Carthaginian territory. They did so in part to escape the tithe that the Carthaginians exacted from all subject peoples domiciled within their territories. Indigenous people who had long been hellenized probably contributed to the ranks of the immigrants as well. Another group comprised deportees from Leontini, whom Timoleon forcibly relocated to Syracuse. The Leontines had earned his resentment because their tyrant Hicetas had opposed him when he first arrived in Sicily (D.S. 16.82.7). It may be that an exchange of populations took place between the deportees arriving from Leontini and some of the colonists who had settled in Syracuse (Westlake 1969, 290).

It probably took several years before Syracuse's fortunes finally revived. No population transplantation ever runs entirely smoothly, and there was considerable opportunity for disagreement even within the ranks of the newcomers. Those who arrived first would obviously have received preferential treatment, including, most conspicuously, larger allotments of land, and this is likely to have built in resentment from the beginning, especially if there was only a relatively short lapse of time between the arrival of other groups of settlers. We learn, too, that Syracusan exiles returning from abroad were permitted to repurchase their former homes, which meant that the current owners had to be bought out and in effect evicted (Plu.
Tim
. 23.6–7). We do not know how they were compensated. It is also unclear how the original owners would have provided proof of ownership. Probably many bogus claims were lodged by those falsely claiming to have been exiled. Timoleon also resettled the town of Aetna, after first slaughtering its mercenary population (D.S. 16.82.4).

Timoleon's goal seems in large part to have been to rehellenize Sicily, both by increasing the size of its Greek population and by reducing the numbers of foreign mercenaries. As the author of the
Eighth Epistle
attributed to Plato had noted several years earlier, there had been a real possibility “may the god prevent it—that the Greek language would be eliminated from the whole of Sicily, either by the Carthaginians or by the Italians” (353e). It was largely due to Timoleon that this danger had finally been averted, and for that he deserves much credit. He excelled, we might say, in what Purcell (1990, 47) described in a masterly phrase as “the creative politics of management of the human resource.” He also seems to have been an accomplished self-publicizer. He could not have succeeded without convincing thousands of Siceliots that they would benefit by supporting his cause, as he arrived in Sicily with inadequate forces to win by military might alone.

Writing of the year in which he established a new constitution for Syracuse (339/8), Diodorus states: “An abundance of new settlers now flooded into Sicily and thanks to a long period of uninterrupted peace the land was again cultivated, producing crops in all their variety” (16.83.1). Plutarch is equally congratulatory of Timoleon's efforts, ending his biography with the following eulogy (39.7): “Using the constitution and the laws which he introduced, the Syracusans lived happily for a long time.” Tomolan was buried in the agora at Syracuse—a fitting honor for a man who had earned his status as the city's second founder and a strong indication of the depth of gratitude he had earned from its people.

Mass Resettlement in the Peloponnese

Mainland Greece also experienced mass resettlement in the fourth century. The decisive defeat of the Spartans by the Boeotians and their allies at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 resulted in the establishment of three cities in the Peloponnese. The initiative was aimed at containing Spartan influence and reducing its people to a second-rate power. The first of the three was Mantinea in eastern Arcadia (371/370), actually a
refoundation. This was followed by Messene in the southwest Peloponnese (369) and Megalopolis in southwest Arcadia (368). I will reserve discussion of Messene for
chapter 11
, since it was promoted as the refoundation of a settlement whose people had continued to exist in exile for hundreds of years.

Mantinea
. Largely at the prompting of the Argives, Mantinea had been refounded as a synoecism of four or five Arcadian villages some time between 464 and 459. In 385, however, the Spartans had carried out a
dioikismos
(the division of a
polis
into its original communities or villages) (D.S. 15.12; cf. Str.
Geog
. 8.3.2 C337). Very likely the villages out of which Mantinea had been constituted as a
polis
had never been completely abandoned. Though the wealthy seem to have been happy with this arrangement, since it enabled them to live closer to their estates, the
majority of the population resented the Spartan move deeply. Their resentment rankled and, following Sparta's defeat at Leuctra, they voted “to make Mantinea a single city and to surround it with a wall” (Xen.
Hell
. 6.5.3). They then proceeded to put the decision into effect, despite efforts from Sparta to dissuade them. A number of Arcadian towns participated in the building project, while the Eleans contributed three talents. The alliance between the Mantineans and the other Arcadians proved to be short-lived, however. At the Battle of Mantinea, fought less than a decade after the synoecism, the Mantineans betrayed the Arcadian cause and sided with the Spartans (Paus. 8.8.10).

Megalopolis.
The synoecism of Megalopolis in ca. 368/7 was on a much larger scale than that of Mantinea and involved at least twenty communities (D.S. 15.72.4). Though Pausanias was of the opinion that the Theban general Epaminondas “might with justification be regarded as its
oikistês
,” this claim remains unproven (8.27.2, cf. 9.14.4). The synoecism was not named “Big City” for nothing. Megalopolis's fortification walls had a circumference of 5 miles, which means that the city could have accommodated a population of about 30,000. Scholars differ as to whether the enclosed area was fully inhabited, however. One attractive theory is that it was intended to provide shelter for the army, poised to attack the Spartans should they attempt to pass the road that ran close to the city. If that is the case, its population may have been no more than 10,000.