Syracusan Tyranny and Identity Politics

This chapter looks at how tyrants of Syracuse—the Deinomenids, Gelon and Hieron, in the fifth century and Dionysius I in the fourth—manipulated and reshaped three different identities to create legitimacy for their positions: Syracusan polis identity, Dorian ethnicity, and Greekness. Hieron emphasized Dorian ethnicity as a way of unifying his expansive domains. He also reoriented Syracusan polis identity to focus on the city’s urban landscape, especially the island of Ortygia and the spring of Arethusa, to incorporate new citizens within the community and to inscribe himself within it. The Deinomenids also emphasized their victory over Carthage at Himera in 480, encouraging their subjects to privilege their identities as Greeks over other self-perceptions, and Dionysius did much the same during wars against Carthage in the late fifth century. The chapter closes by examining how citizens responded to tyrants’ identity politics when the tyrants lost power.