Gelon

They knew that Sparta would never agree to that.

The allies may have had higher hopes when they approached the tyrant Gelon in the powerful Greek city of Syracuse over in Sicily.

But Gelon played it much the way Argos did.

He said he could send 200 triremes, 20,000 hoplites, cavalry, and other troops, but only if he would get command of all the Greek forces.

Again, neither Sparta nor Athens could accept that.

In reality, Gelon could probably never have spared all those troops because there was a conflict brewing with Carthage closer to home.

In the spring of 480 BCE, about the time Xerxes was marching his army across the Hellespont, the alliance met again at the Isthmus.

Some envoys had come from Thessaly, that big region up north.

Thus the struggle was going on in the pass of Thermopylae while the Greek fleet was fighting at Artemisium.

Thus also at the moment when the confederates were breaking the Persian power by sea at Salamis, the Syracusan tyrant Gelon was destroying the Carthaginian army of Hamilcar at the Sicilian Himera.

And thus also we shall see again that the catastrophe of Mardonius at Plataea happens on the very day on which the confederate Greeks break in pieces the Persian fleet at Mycale.

We must not, however, forget that there was another version which made the battle of Himera synchronized not with that of Salamis but with the struggle in Thermopylae.

He may have been as intent on upholding the supremacy of Sparta as his own, but his countrymen did not so interpret his conduct.

There is, however, no material difference between the policy of Pausanias after the battle of Plataea and the policy deliberately adopted and carried out by the Spartan state toward the close of its deadly struggle with Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

End of Section 26 Section 27 of Lives of Greek Statesmen by George William Cox This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Pamela Nagami Gelon The picture of the Greek world in the age of Xerxes is not complete without a reference to the western settlements, some of which attained a magnificence never reached by the parent cities, whether of continental or sporadic Hellas.

Of these western colonies, Syracuse rose to greatness under Gelon, who, contemporaneously with the invasion of Xerxes, had to fight against an enemy not less formidable and who gained over that enemy a success as decisive as that which Sparta and Athens achieved at Salamis and Mycale.

There is, however, no material difference between the policy of Pausanias after the battle of Plataea and the policy deliberately adopted and carried out by the Spartan state toward the close of its deadly struggle with Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

End of Section 26 Section 27 of Lives of Greek Statesmen by George William Cox This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Pamela Nagami Gelon The picture of the Greek world in the age of Xerxes is not complete without a reference to the western settlements, some of which attained a magnificence never reached by the parent cities, whether of continental or sporadic Hellas.

Of these western colonies, Syracuse rose to greatness under Gelon, who, contemporaneously with the invasion of Xerxes, had to fight against an enemy not less formidable and who gained over that enemy a success as decisive as that which Sparta and Athens achieved at Salamis and Mycale.

Gelon, moreover, was invited to take part in the resistance offered to Xerxes, and the offer and refusal alike throw light on the relations between the eastern Greeks and the younger colonies of the west.

In its vices as well as in its better qualities, this newer world closely resembled the old.

There were the same tribal jealousies and disunion, and there were the same feuds leading to frequent revolutions, the same transitions from oligarchical government to tyrannies.

In the size of their cities and the grandeur of their temples, they were almost more than rivals of their eastern kinsfolk.

But the marvelously rapid growth of these settlements was prodigiously aided by the advantages which they enjoyed in the soil, the climate, and the physical resources of the country.

And the Corinthian Greeks who landed on Ortigia in the eighth century kicked them out and then essentially began this program of rapid expansion, conquering more and more territory around what today we identify as the city of Siracusa.

And this rapid expansion of Siracusa under a whole series of rather well-known leaders, leaders with names like Gelon or Dionysius I or Hiero II.

And if you are familiar with ancient Greek history, then these are names that you are most likely familiar with.

Uh, and in fact, inevitably the expansion of Siracusa and its territory would come head-to-head with the other foreign presence on the island of Sicily, which was of course Phoenician, and specifically the Phoenicians of Carthage, North Africa, modern-day Tunisia.