Hermopolis, as the chief town is called, is built round the harbour on the east side of the island. It is governed by an active municipality, whose revenue and expenditure have rapidly increased. Among the public buildings are a spacious town-hall in the central square, a club-house, an opera-house, and a Greek theatre. Old Syra, on a conical hill behind the port town, is an interesting place, with its old Roman Catholic church of St George’s still crowning the summit. This was built by the Capuchins, who in the Middle Ages chose Syra as the headquarters of a mission in the East. Louis XIII., hearing of the dangers to which the Syra priests were exposed, took the island under his especial protection, and since that time the Roman Catholic bishops of Syra have been elected by the pope. About the beginning of the 19th century the inhabitants of Syra numbered only about 1000; whenever a Turkish vessel appeared they made off to the interior and hid themselves. On the outbreak of the war of Greek independence refugees from Chios, after being scattered throughout Tenos, Spezia, Hydra, &c., and rejected by the people of Ceos, took up their residence at Syra under the protection of the French fiag. Altogether about 40,000 had sought this asylum before the freedom of Greece was achieved. The chief city was called Hermopolis after the name of the ship which brought the earlier settlers. Most of the immigrants elected to stay, and, though they were long kept in alarm by pirates, they have continued steadily to prosper. In 1875 1568 sailing ships and 698 steamers (with a total of 740,731 tons) entered and 1588 sailing ships and 700 steamers (with a total of 756,807 tons) cleared this port; in 1883 3379 sailing and 1126 steam vessels (with a total of 1,056,201 tons) entered and 3276 sailing and 1120 steam vessels (with a total of 960,229 tons) cleared. Most of the sailing vessels were Greek and Turkish, and most of the steamers were Austrian, French, and Turkish.

The island was called Ortygia, a name connected with the Delian legend of Artemis (see Holm, Gesch. Sic., i. 886), but often simply the Island (Liv., xxv. 24, 30). Though the lowest part of the city, its position and strength made it the citadel, and it is therefore often spoken of by Diodorus and Plutarch as if it had been a real acropolis. It is famous for the fountain of Arethusa, connected in Greek legend with the river Alpheus in Peloponnesus. The sweet water perished when an earthquake brought in the sea in 1170. At the time of the first settlement the island was held by Sicels; some have thought that a Phoenician element lingered on under both Sicels and Greeks. It is certain (Herod., vii. 166) that Syracuse and Carthage stood in relations to one another which were not usual between Greek and barbarian cities. It has also been thought from some legendary hints that Polichne was the original Syracuse, and that the plural form (Συράκουσαι ) arose from the union of Ortygia and Polichne. But the plural form is common enough in other cases. The chief evidence for the belief is that the great temple of Olympian Zeus stood in Polichne and that (Plut., Nic., 14) the register of Syracusan citizens was kept there.

Till the beginning of the 5th century b.c. our notices of Syracusan history are quite fragmentary. Almost the only question is whether, as some stray notices (Athen., i. 56; see Müller’s Donans, i. 161, Eng. tr.) might suggest, the primitive kingship was retained or renewed at Syracuse, as it certainly was in some other Greek colonies. A king Pollis is spoken of; but nothing is known of his actions. It is far more certain that Syracuse went through the usual revolutions of a Greek city. The descendants of the original settlers kept the land in their own hands, and they gradually brought the Sicel inhabitants to a state not unlike villainage. Presently other settlers, perhaps not always Greek, gathered round the original Syracusan people; they formed a distinct body, δημος or plebs, personally free, but with an inferior political franchise or none at all. The old citizens thus gradually grew into an exclusive or aristocratic body, called yάμοpοι or landowners. We hear incidentally of disputes, seditions, and changes, among others the banishment of a whole yens (Thuc., V. 5; Arist., Pol., v. 3, 5, 4, 1 ); but we have no dates or details till we have entered the 5th century b.c. In its external development Syracuse differed somewhat from other Sicilian cities. Although it lagged in early times behind Loth Gela and Acragas (Agrigentum), it very soon began to aim at a combination of land and sea power. Between 663 and 598 it founded the settlements of Acrae, Casmenae, and Camarina, of which the first was unusually far inland. The three together secured for Syracuse a continuous dominion to the south-east coast. They were not strictly colonies but outposts; Camarina indeed was destroyed after a revolt against the ruling city (Thuc., v. 1). That the inland Sicel town of Henna was ever a Syracusan settlement there is no reason to believe. Of this early time some architectural monuments still remain, as the two temples in Ortygia, one of which is now the metropolitan church, and the small remains of the Olympieum or temple of Zeus in Polichne,—all of course in the ancient Doric style.

The second period of Syracusan history, which roughly begins with the 5th century, is far better ascertained. It is a period of change in every way. The aristocratic commonwealth becomes in turn a tyranny and a democracy; and Syracuse becomes the greatest Greek city in Sicily, the mistress of other cities, the head of a great dominion,— for a moment, of the greatest dominion in Hellas. Strange to say, all this growth begins in subjection to the ruler of another city. Hippocrates, tyrant of Gela, held the chief power in eastern Sicily at the beginning of the 5th century b.c. (498-491). He threatened Syracuse as well as other cities, and it was delivered only by the joint intervention of Corinth and Corcyra, and by the cession of the vacant territory of Camarina. In 485 the Syracusan 8ημος or plebs joined with the Sicel serf population to drive out the gamoroi, the ruling oligarchs. These last craved help of Gelon, the successor of Hippocrates, who took possession of Syracuse without opposition, and made it the seat of his power. Syracuse now grew by the depopulation of other cities conquered by Gelon. He gave citizenship both to mercenaries (Diod., xi. 73) and to settlers from old Greece (Paus., v. 27, 16, 17; Pind., Olymp., vi.), so that Syracuse became a city of mingled race, in which the new citizens had the advantage. The town spread to the mainland: the new town of Achradina, with separate fortifications, arose on the eastern part of the adjoining peninsula (Diod., xi. 73), while Ortygia became the inner city, the stronghold of the ruler. Indeed in the form of unwalled suburbs the city seems to have spread even beyond Achradina (Diod., xi. 61, 68, 72). Gelon’s general rule was mild, and he won fame as the champion of Hellas by his great victory over the Carthaginians at Himera. He is said to have been greeted as king; but he does not seem to have taken the title in any formal way.

Gelon’s brother and successor Hiero (478-467) kept up the power of the city; he won himself a name by his encouragement of poets and philosophers; and his Pythian and Olympian victories made him the special subject of the songs of Pindar. He appeared also as a Hellenic champion in the defence of Cumae, and he attempted to found a Syracusan colony on the island of Aenaria, now Ischia. But his internal government, unlike that of Gelon, was suspicious, greedy, and cruel. After some family disputes the power passed to his brother Thrasybulus, who was driven out next year by a general rising (see Sicily, p. 16). In this revolution Thrasybulus and his mercenaries held the fortified quarters of Ortygia and Achradina; the revolted people held the unwalled suburbs, already, it is plain, thickly inhabited. Thrasybulus yielded to the common action of Siceliots and Sicels. Syracuse again became a free commonwealth, and, as the effect of the tyranny had been to break down old distinctions, it was now a democratic commonwealth. Renewed freedom was celebrated by a colossal statue of Zeus Eleutherius and by a yearly feast in his honour. But when the mercenaries and other new settlers were shut out from office new struggles arose. The mercenaries again held Ortygia and Achradina. The people now walled in the suburb of Tyche to the west of Achradina (Diod., xi. 73). The mercenaries were at last got rid of in 461. Although we hear of attempts to seize the tyranny and of an institution called petalism, like the Athenian ostracism, designed to guard against such dangers, popular government was not seriously threatened for more than fifty years. The part of Syracuse in general Sicilian affairs has been traced in the article Sicily (q.v.); but one striking scene is wholly local, when the defeated Ducetius took refuge in the hostile city (451), and the common voice of the people bade “spare the suppliant.” We have but one solitary notice of the great military and naval strength of Syracuse in 439 (Diod., xii. 30). Yet all that we read of Syracusan military and naval action during the former part of the Athenian siege shows how Syracuse had lagged behind the cities of old Greece, constantly practised as they were in warfare both by land and sea.

The Athenian siege (415-413) is of the deepest importance for the topography of Syracuse, and it throws some light on the internal politics. Hermocrates, the best of counsellors for external affairs, is suspected, and seemingly with reason, of disloyalty to the democratic constitution. Yet he is, like Nicias and Phocion, the official man, head of a board of fifteen generals, which he persuades the people to cut down to three. Athenagoras, the demagogue or opposition speaker, has the best possible exposition of democratic principles put into his mouth by Thucydides (vi. 36-40). Through the whole siege there was a treasonable party within the city, which—for what motive we are not told— kept up a correspondence with the besiegers.

The speech of Athenagoras is that of a very clever demagogue; it sums up very forcibly all that can be said against oligarchy, and it may have been perfectly sincere. But his views were overruled, and preparation was made in earnest for the city’s defence. When the Athenian fleet under Nicias and Lamachus was at Rhegium in Italy, the question for the commanders was whether they should seek to strengthen themselves by fresh alliances on the spot or strike the blow at once. Lamachus was for immediate action, and there can hardly be a doubt that Syracuse must have fallen before a sudden attack by so formidable an armament in the summer of 415. The Syracusans were neither at unity among themselves nor by any means adequately prepared for effectual defence. Throughout the whole struggle it is perfectly clear that they owed their final deliverance to the most extraordinary good fortune. Athens had the prize within her grasp, and she lost it wholly through the persistent dilatoriness and blundering of her general, the desponding, vacillating Nicias. It was at his advice that the summer and autumn of 415 were frittered away and the siege not begun till the spring of 414. By that time the Syracusans were both in better spirits and better prepared: their troops were better organized, and they had built a wall from the Great Harbour to Panagia so as to screen them from attack on the side of Epipolae on the northwest. The effect of this was to bar the enemy’s approach and push back his blockading lines, which had to be carried over an inconveniently large extent of ground. The Syracusans had been at first thoroughly cowed; but they were cowed no longer, and they even plucked up courage to sally out and fight the enemy on the high ground of Epipolae. They were beaten and driven back; but at the suggestion of Hermocrates they carried a counter-work up the slope of Epipolae, which, if completed, would cut in two the Athenian lines and frustrate the blockade. At this point Nicias showed considerable military skill. The Syracusans’ work was destroyed by a prompt and well-executed attack; and a second counter work carried across marshy ground some distance to the south of Epipolae and near to the Great Harbour was also demolished after a sharp action, in which Lamachus fell. However, the blockade on the land side was now almost complete, and the Athenian fleet had at the same time entered the Great Harbour. The citizens began to think of surrender, and Nicias was so confident that he neglected to push his advantages. He left a gap in his lines at the point where Epipolae slopes down to the sea, and he omitted to occupy an important position on its north-western ridge, known as Euryalus, a pass which commanded on this side the approach to the city from the interior.

The second act of the drama may be said to open with the irretrievable blunder of Nicias in letting the Spartan Gylippus first land in Sicily, and then march at the head of a small army, partly levied on the spot, across the island, and enter Syracuse by way of Epipolae, through the Euryalus pass. Gylippus was felt to be the representative of Sparta, and of the Peloponnesian Greeks generally, and his arrival inspired the Syracusans with the fullest confidence. Just before his arrival a few ships from Corinth had made their way into the harbour with the news that a great fleet was already on its way to the relief of the city. The tables were now completely turned, and we hear of nothing but defeat and disaster for the besiegers till their final overthrow. The military skill of Gylippus enabled the Syracusan militia to meet the Athenian troops on equal terms, to wrest from them their fortified position on Plemmyrium, and to reduce them to such a plight that, as Nicias said in his despatch to Athens towards the close of 414, they were themselves besieged rather than besieging. In the spring of the following year Syracuse once again gave herself up for lost, when seventy-three warships from Athens, under Demosthenes, entered the harbour with a large force of heavy infantry and light troops. Demosthenes decided at once to make a grand attack on Epipolae, with a view to recovering the Athenian blockading lines and driving the Syracusans back within the city walls. The assault was made by night, by the uncertain light of the moon, and this circumstance turned what was very nearly a successful surprise into a ruinous defeat. The affair seems to have been well planned up to a certain point, and well executed; but the Athenian van, flushed with a first success, their ranks broken and disordered by a pursuit of the enemy over rough ground, were repulsed with great loss by a body of heavy armed Boeotians, and driven back in disorder. The confusion spread to the troops behind them, and the action ended in a wild flight through the narrow roads and passes of Epipolae. The army was now thoroughly out of heart, and Demosthenes was for at once breaking up the camp, embarking the troops, and sailing back to Athens. But Nicias could not bring himself to face the Athenian people at home, nor could he be prevailed on to retire promptly to some position on the coast, such as Catana or Thapsus, where the army would be at least able to maintain itself for a time. He dallied till the end of August, many weeks after the defeat, and on the 27th of that month was an eclipse of the moon, on the strength of which he insisted on a delay of almost another month. His fleet too lingered uselessly in the harbour, till, after a frantic effort to break out and a desperate conflict, it was utterly defeated and half destroyed. The broken and demoralized army, its ranks thinned by fever and sickness, at last began its hopeless retreat in the face of the numerous Syracusan cavalry, and, after a few days of dreadful suffering, was forced to lay down its arms. The Syracusans sullied the glory of their triumph by huddling their prisoners iuto their stone-quarries,—a living death, dragged out, for some of them at least, to the space of seventy days.

Her great deliverance and victory naturally stirred up the energies of Syracuse at home and abroad. Syracusan ships under Hermocrates now play a not unimportant part in the warfare between Sparta and Athens on the coast of Asia. Under the influence of Diodes the constitution became a still more confirmed democracy, some at least of the magistracies being filled by lot, as at Athens (Diod., xiii. 31, 35; Arist., Pol., v. 3-6). Diodes appears also as the author of a code of laws of great strictness, which was held in such esteem that later lawgivers were deemed only its expounders. There seems no reason to suppose, with Holm, an earlier lawgiver Diodes distinct from the demagogue; but the story of his death by his own hand to punish a breach of his own law is, we may suspect, a repetition of the story of Charondas (Diod., xiii. 33; cf. xii. 19). Under these influences Hermocrates was banished in 409; he submitted to the sentence, notwithstanding the wishes of his army. He went back to Sicily, warred with Carthage on his own account, and brought back the bones of the unburied Syracusans from Himera, but was still so dreaded that the people banished Diodes without restoring him. In 407 he was slain in an attempt to enter the city, and with him was wounded one who was presently to outstrip both rivals.

This was Dionysius, son of another Hermocrates, and an adherent of the aristocratic party, but soon afterwards a demagogue, though supported by some men of rank, among them the historian Philistus (Diod., xiii. 91, 92). By accusing the generals engaged at Gela in the war against Carthage, by obtaining the restoration of exiles, by a variety of tricks played at Gela itself, he secured his own election, first as one of the generals, then as sole general (or with a nominal colleague) with special powers. He next, by another trick, procured from a military assembly at Leontini a vote of a bodyguard; he hired mercenaries and in 406-5 came back to Syracuse as tyrant of the city (Diod., xiii. 91-96). Dionysius kept his power till his death thirtyeight years later (367). But it was wellnigh overthrown before he had fully grasped it. His defeat before Gela (see Sicily, p. 18) was of course turned against him. His enemies in the army, chiefly the horsemen, reached Syracuse before him, plundered his house—he had not yet a fortress —and horribly maltreated his wife; but they took no political or military steps against himself. He came and took his vengeance, slaying and driving out his enemies, who established themselves at Aetna (Diod., xiii. 113). This revolution and the peace with the Carthaginians confirmed Dionysius in the possession of Syracuse, but of no great territory beyond, as Leontini was again a separate city. It left Syracuse the one great Hellenic city of Sicily, which, however enslaved at home, was at least independent of the barbarian. Dionysius was able, like Gelon, though with less success and less honour, to take up the part of the champion of Hellas.

During the long tyranny of Dionysius the city grew greatly in size, population, and grandeur. Plato says (Epist., vii. ) that he gathered all Sicily into it. In fact the free Greek cities and communities, in both Sicily and southern Italy, were sacrificed to Syracuse; there the greatness and glory of tho Greek world in the West were concentrated. The mass of the population of Gela and Camarina in the disastrous year 405 had, at the prompting of Dionysius, taken refuge at Syracuse. Gela had in the previous year received the fugitive inhabitants of Acragas (Agrigentum), which had been sacked by the Carthaginians. Syracuse thus absorbed three of the chief Greek cities of Sicily. It received large accessions from some of the Greek cities of southern Italy, from Hipponium on its west and Caulonia on its east coast, both of which Dionysius captured in 389 b.c. There had also been an influx of free citizens from Rhegium. At the time of the Athenian siege Syracuse consisted of two quarters—the Island and the “outer city” of Thucydides, generally known as Achradina, and bounded by the sea on the north and east, with the adjoining suburb of Apollo Temenites farther inland at the foot of the southern slopes of Epipolae. With the vast increase in its population, it now grew into a city of four quarters. The suburb Temenites was expanded into Neapolis (New Town), spreading...