New 'Did You Know?' : In The 5th And 4th Centuries BCE, Dionysius I Made Syracuse One Of The Strongest Powers Of Sicily And Italy

(“Dion Presents Plato to Dionysius,” an colored engraving print from Hermann Göll, Die Weisen und Gelehrten des Alterthums, Leipzig (Otto Spamer) 1876, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

For Hellenistic history, Dionysius I (or Dionysius the Elder) is a bittersweet figure. On the one hand, he led Syracuse, a Sicilian city-state of Greek descent, to be a regional power that could defeat the empire of Carthage in multiple wars. On the other iron-fisted hand, however, Dionysius’ authoritarianism and inhospitable expansion throughout Sicily and lower Italy gained him the label of ‘tyrant.’

Continue reading about the great, but tyrannical, Dionysius I of Syracuse, HERE.