Volume 6: The Meeting of Two Heroes, Chapter 1: The Expansion of Syracuse

When the news of Daonia's conquest of the Bruttii reached Syracuse, Dionysius was inspecting the construction of the city's defensive fortifications, accompanied by Masias.

Seeing the project nearing completion, he was in a pleasant mood. Suddenly hearing this news, his face instantly darkened, and he blurted out a curse: "Those damned Carthaginians, obstructing my plans!..."

...

In the early spring of 397 BC, the Carthaginian Suffete Himilco led a massive army, said to be a hundred thousand strong, from the city of Carthage. After a minor skirmish at sea with the Syracusan navy, he successfully landed in Sicily and quickly bribed traitors to easily seize the city of Eryx on the western side of the island. He then launched a fierce assault on Motya and succeeded.

The Syracusan army was forced to lift its siege of Segesta. Himilco did not press his advantage in pursuit but instead destroyed Motya and built a new city nearby on the coast, naming it Lilybaeum.

While the Carthaginian army halted its advance, the cautious Dionysius kept his own troops stationary within Syracuse.

Shortly after laying the foundation for Lilybaeum, Himilco resumed his eastward offensive at the start of February. This time, he did not follow the route of Syracuse's previous year's campaign but instead sailed around to the northeastern tip of Sicily, easily seizing the undefended Messina.

The fall of Messina was a great shock to Rhegium across the strait. This wealthy Greek city of Magna Graecia, relying on its advantageous geography and prosperous port transit trade, had long maintained secret dealings with Carthage to guard against Syracuse's covetous designs on the Strait of Messina. Suddenly, this friendly foreign city-state bared its fangs and captured Rhegium's sister city—Messina. Why sister cities? Because Messina was originally founded jointly by colonists from Cumae and Chalcis, initially called Zancle, later renamed Messina after an influx of Messenian immigrants. The Messinians realized early on that security required the opposite side of the strait to be in friendly hands, so they encouraged their mother city Cumae and the Messenians to establish the allied city of Rhegium.

Rhegium was seized by panic. They quickly decided to send envoys to the headquarters of the South Italy Alliance in Scylletium, requesting to join the alliance. By this point, aside from Locri and its dependent city-states, all the other Greek city-states of Magna Graecia had treaties with Daonia.

After completely destroying Messina, Himilco, to curry favor with the native Sicels of eastern Sicily so they would join Carthage in attacking Syracuse, planned to build a new city—Tauromenium—on the coast south of Messina as a gift to the Sicels.

By March, Dionysius felt he could no longer allow the Carthaginians to continue their attacks on his allied city-states. If he did nothing, his allies might defect to Carthage. So he assembled both his army and navy and advanced north to the plain of Catania.

Off the coast of Catana, a naval battle erupted between Syracuse and Carthage. Initially, the Greek ships outnumbered the Carthaginian vessels and held an advantage in equipment. However, Dionysius's nepotism led to his brother Leptines, as naval commander, making tactical errors, resulting in a devastating defeat for the Syracusan navy.

The Greek army on land watched the naval battle from the shore and were shocked by the navy's plight. Their morale began to waver.

Fortunately, Himilco's land army did not arrive in time for the battle. In those days, Mount Etna, southwest of Tauromenium, suddenly erupted. Torrents of scalding volcanic ash and lava poured down, destroying the roads to the south. The sky was darkened by a thick blanket of volcanic ash, forcing the Carthaginian army to take a detour.

The Syracusan army, reverently chanting hymns to the fire god Hephaestus along the way, hastily retreated back to Syracuse. Catana and Leontini fell one after another into Carthaginian hands.

Riding the momentum of his naval victory, Himilco finally led his army safely to Syracuse. The Carthaginian navy also sailed into the Great Harbour of Syracuse. They then encamped along the banks of the River Anapus, attempting to besiege Syracuse by both land and sea.

At this point, Dionysius anxiously dispatched envoys on fast ships to Campania in Italy, his mother city Corinth in mainland Greece, and the dominant power Sparta, seeking urgent aid. Although Magna Graecia was the closest region to Syracuse, Dionysius deliberately or inadvertently ignored it, not seeking help from the dominant power of southern Italy, the Daonia Alliance.

Daonia could not send troops uninvited; doing so would make the Sicilians suspect ulterior motives. Moreover, after frequent wars and rapid expansion, Daonia also needed time to rest, consolidate, and integrate. So, even as the Greek city-states of Sicily faced total annihilation, the Daonians and the Greeks of Magna Graecia watched from across the sea with mixed emotions.

Greek reinforcements began arriving from various places. Most notably, Sparta sent the young general Phoebidas with 30 warships and 500 Spartan warriors.

At this time, the populace inside Syracuse, incited by certain individuals, started a revolt to overthrow Dionysius. Phoebidas led the assembled Greek coalition to stop the uprising, but the rioters appealed to him, accusing Dionysius of poor leadership that had plunged Syracuse into crisis and caused the loss of their loved ones. They also detailed his brutal tyranny at home, begging the allied power Sparta to help them break free from the yoke of this tyrant.

Recalling Agesilaus's earlier instructions, Phoebidas sternly told them: the Spartans had come to Syracuse to help Dionysius fight Carthage, not to help the Syracusans overthrow Dionysius! He urged the rioters to quell their anger and unite to drive out the Carthaginians who were already at the city gates.

At the same time, he made Dionysius guarantee that he would not seek revenge on those who had participated in the revolt and that his rule would be more lenient in the future.

With the full support of the Spartans, Dionysius managed to overcome this crisis.

Once the Carthaginians had settled down outside the city, they began to destroy everything outside Syracuse's walls. They not only ravaged farmland and villages but also desecrated temples of the gods. They destroyed the Temple of Zeus on the acropolis of Epipolae and looted the temples of Demeter and Persephone.

This sacrilegious behavior enraged the Syracusans, and multiple small-scale land and naval battles broke out outside the city and in the Great Harbour, with mixed results.

As summer arrived and temperatures rose, the tide began to turn in favor of the Syracusans. The increasing number of mosquitoes from the marshes near the River Anapus spread plague among the Carthaginian soldiers, and the death toll grew.

Now, under the pressure of both internal strife and external threats, Dionysius's mind sharpened. He devised a clever plan: march at night, use feints to distract the enemy, and then simultaneously attack the weak point of the enemy's fortifications with both his navy and army.

The Carthaginians, weakened by the plague and low in morale, could muster no effective counterattack against Syracuse's assault.

At the cost of over a thousand mercenaries' lives, Dionysius successively captured the Carthaginian fortresses of Polyxena and Daskon, built by the banks of the River Anapus and the coast respectively. At the same time, he inflicted a heavy defeat on the Carthaginian navy. The Carthaginians suffered severe losses. Himilco's central camp was surrounded, with chaos reigning inside, and it seemed on the verge of total annihilation.

Just then, Dionysius ordered a halt to the attack.

That night, there was intense communication between the Carthaginian camp and Dionysius's secret envoys.

For the next three days, both sides remained calm, with no fighting.

On the fourth night, Himilco, leading only the remaining 30 triremes, fled the Great Harbour in panic, abandoning the majority of his Carthaginian soldiers, allies, and mercenaries. These were ultimately annihilated by Syracuse and its allies.

After this great victory, Dionysius did not pursue the Carthaginians relentlessly to fully reclaim Sicily and drive them off the island. The earlier revolt of the Syracusan populace had made him keenly aware that his position as tyrant could only be secured if Carthage retained a presence in Sicily. So he not only let Himilco's remnants escape but also refrained from mopping up the Carthaginian colonial towns in Sicily. Instead, he focused on striking against the native Sicels of the eastern interior, who had sided with Carthage in this war and caused Syracuse considerable trouble. He concluded that simply unifying the Greek city-states on the island was insufficient; he needed to expand Syracuse's sphere of influence into Sicel territory and turn eastern Sicily into a solid, unified block.

The Syracusan army began subjugating one Sicel town after another—Morgantina, Cephaloedium, Henna, and others—forcing more Sicel leaders into subordinate treaties.

He also besieged Tauromenium, the only coastal city Himilco had built for the Sicels, though he failed to take it quickly.

By the next year (396 BC), Syracuse's power had expanded northward to the northeastern corner of Sicily.

On the ruins left by Carthage's burning, Dionysius rebuilt Messina. The new Messina was populated by colonists from Locri and Medma, Syracuse's allied city-states—a move to appease his allies in Magna Graecia—along with several hundred displaced Messenians who had just been driven from their homeland by Sparta and were now homeless. These new residents had no kinship ties whatsoever with the people of Rhegium.

But soon, Sparta sent envoys to express displeasure that Dionysius had settled their enemies in such an important city.