Sicily

While the Greeks of the mainland were repulsing the Persians, the Greeks on Sicily had to face a threat of equal proportions. Greek cities on that island had coexisted - usually peacefully enough, but always somewhat uneasily - with a number of Carthaginian strongholds in the island’s northwestern corner. Tensions between the Carthaginians and nearby Greek colonists occasionally flared up into open war - such as when the Lacedaemonian adventurer Dorieus attempted to found a colony at Heracleia which lay rather too close to what the Carthaginians considered their sphere of influence. The Carthaginians quickly drove the Lacedaemonian colonists from the area (Hdt. V 43-48).

In the late 480s the Carthaginians - on Herodotus’ presentation - intervened in ongoing conflicts among the Greek cities on the island. Terillus, the tyrant of Himera (a colony founded by Zancle/Messene), had just lost a war against Theron, the tyrant of Acragas (a joint Rhodian and Cretan colony). Terillus, driven from Himera, sought aid from Carthage, and in this Anaxilas, the tyrant of the Chalcidian colony of Rhegium on the Italian side of the strait, opposite Sicily, supported him. The Carthaginians responded with a full-scale invasion of the island under the command of Hamilcar; Herodotus (VII 165; cf. Diod. XI 20) puts their numbers at 300,000, but this too is surely an inflated figure (if not so inflated as his figures for the Persians’ army).

At least one Greek colony actively backed the Carthaginians - Selinus (Diod. XI 21) - and there may have been others (cf. Diod. XI 26). Gelon, the tyrant of the Corinthian colony of Syracuse, however, backed Theron in the ensuing war (Hdt. VII 166). When the Greeks of mainland Greece sent ambassadors in 481 to Syracuse to ask Gelon to send help against the Persians, Gelon’s hands were tied (cf. Hdt. VII 165). With the Carthaginians about to invade Sicily, he could not afford to send troops to Greece itself. In 480 - according to Herodotus on the exact same day as the battle of Salamis and according to Diodorus on the exact same day as Thermopylae (both are too good to be true) - the combined armies of Gelon and Theron decisively defeated Hamilcar’s forces at Himera (Hdt. VII 166; Diod. XI 22-24). The repulse of the Carthaginians inaugurated a long period of peace between Greeks and Carthaginians on the island.

The simultaneousness of the Carthaginians’ invasion of Sicily and the Persians’ of mainland Greece made no particular impression on Herodotus who obviously viewed the two events as serendipitous. Not so later historians who - in large part under the influence of the very nationalism which the Persian Wars had engendered - saw a nefarious plot by the Greeks’ enemies, east and west, to blot Greek civilization from the map with carefully coordinated attacks (Ephorus, BNJ 70, Fr. 186; cf. Diod. XI 1 - based, ultimately, on Ephorus). That plot, though some modern scholars have viewed it as historical, is pure fiction - Herodotus, in particular, knows nothing of it. The story of the plot probably arose after him.

Gelon, at any rate, died in 478 and was succeeded as tyrant by his brother Hiero (Diod. XI 38). In 474 the Chalcidian colony of Cumae (see chap. 5) on the Bay of Naples appealed to Hiero for aid against the Etruscans who dominated much of central Italy at the time. The Etruscans had attacked Cumae once before in the late sixth century (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Rom. Ant., VII 3); moreover, Carthaginians and Etruscans had in the past cooperated against the Greeks (Hdt. I 166). Hiero responded to the appeal and in 474 the combined fleets of Syracuse and Cumae defeated the Etruscans off Cumae (Diod. XI 51; cf. Pind., Pyth. I, and Fornara, Nr. 64).

The Syracusan tyrants had thus shored up the position of the Greeks in the West against their two most powerful opponents.