Who was Agathocles of Syracuse

Agathocles (361 BC – 289 BC) was Tyrant of Syracuse and King of Sicily, Agathocles’ father was a fugitive from Rhegium and a simple potter. He had taken refuge in the Thermae of Himera, in northwestern Sicily, where Agathocles was born in 361 BC. According to Diodorus Siculus, who, however, knows that he is relying on sources hostile to Agathocles, his father received bad omens for his newborn son from an oracle and decided to abandon the infant on the street. His mother, secretly, the next night, took the infant and took him to her brother, who raised him.

Agathocles took the name of his grandfather, from the clan of his mother and his uncle. The reason for the separation of the family is not certain and perhaps the father, being a fugitive and relatively poor, was unable to support the child. However, 7 years later the family (who had or already had another son, Antandros) was reunited and a few years later moved to Syracuse, fearing the unrest caused by the mobility of the Carthaginians in western Sicily. An additional motivation for their migration was the fact that Syracuse was facing a shortage of resources from civil and foreign wars, so they were looking for new colonists to whom they automatically granted citizenship.

Soon Agathocles’ father died – probably from illness – and the orphaned siblings began to work as potters. Agathocles was particularly strong and decided to join the army, where with his boldness – but probably also with his charm – he quickly achieved the rank of centurion. Some historians believe that his military rise was helped by the romantic weakness or esteem that the very wealthy and influential Syracusan general Damas or Damascus had for him.

When Damas died, however, Agathocles married his widow, with whom he later had two children, and found himself – around 333 BC – in a position of great influence both because of his rank and his now very significant fortune. He used both elements repeatedly to seize power in Syracuse as a general, but the Syracusans, either because they did not trust his democratic intentions, or on the contrary because they considered him too democratic, were particularly wary. After one of his victories, they did not even allow him to enter the city unless he swore – which he did – that he would not threaten the democracy. He himself consistently maintained that he was a supporter of the democratic party, but his critics accuse him of essentially demagoguery using the people for the benefit of his own party.

In those years, however, in Syracuse, a city of about 40,000 people, democracy functioned somewhat unorthodoxly, since essentially political and military control was in the hands of the Council of Six Hundred, all of whom were representatives of the oligarchy, and who were manipulated by Sostratos or otherwise Sosistratos, an ambitious, ruthless and influential general. He, but also the oligarchs in general, were Agathocles’ main opponents.

To overthrow them, he took advantage of a dispute in a neighboring city in 317 BC and, under the pretext that he had to intervene immediately there with a select body, he obtained the right to form an army by personally selecting the soldiers. According to Diodorus, he chose 3,000 men who were – for different reasons each – absolutely loyal to him. Then, with some of them near him, he summoned two oligarchs on the pretext that he wanted to consult them. They appeared with a guard of 40 men – or perhaps 40 oligarchs appeared in person – and if what Diodorus says is true, Agathocles then began to shout that they had attempted to kill him and had his own soldiers arrest them.

He immediately presented himself to the demos, claiming that “the oligarchs made an attempt on his life because he was a democrat at the moment when he was preparing to fight for Syracuse” and that he had been forced to arrest them. He thus succeeded in inciting a popular uprising which, in the sight of the men loyal to Agathocles, quickly took on dimensions and was generally directed against the rich. The dissatisfaction of the landless and the recently naturalized poor in Syracuse, who lived in squalor and although they were not united by the democratic party because they did not belong anywhere, they were united by their hatred for the rich oligarchs. At the same time, he focused his 3,000 men on specific targets – the 600 oligarchs and their families.

After the extermination of all his political opponents, he took command and absolute power, declaring that he wanted to be accountable to the people only for his own mistakes and that “if he shares power with others, he will be held responsible for their own mistakes as well.

His first action was the redistribution of the λand of the oligarchs, which he confiscated and distributed to landless citizens. The second was to forgive the debts of all citizens. He then turned to the reconstruction of the city’s finances, the production of weapons and the construction of a large fleet. This social policy of his perhaps explains the strongly critical attitude of all his historians who, regardless of their homeland, as a rule belonged to the oligarchs.

In 314 he defeated the dissatisfied Syracusans who had abandoned the city and had allied themselves with the inhabitants of Acragan against him, in order to overthrow him. When he neutralized them, he governed Syracuse without any particular problems and expanded to almost all of eastern Sicily, until in 310 BC he found himself in a very difficult position due to the advance of the Carthaginians and the siege of Syracuse.

He then made the clever maneuver of transferring the war to Carthage – that is, he escaped with his fleet from Syracuse and landed on the African coast. He did not manage to win there, but he succeeded in removing the danger from eastern Sicily, conquering various cities in Africa, but not Carthage. His army had begun to resent him and demand to be paid. Either to avoid a mutiny in the army or a complete defeat by the Carthaginians, under the pretext, however, that various cities in Sicily had rebelled, he returned to Europe, leaving two of his sons on the African front. Another version of the story is that Agathocles tried to escape secretly with his two sons, but they did not make it. The army felt that Agathocles had betrayed them and abandoned them and captured his sons.

When Agathocles was imposed on Sicily, he was informed that the troops of Africa, obeying their generals, had mutinied, killed his sons and capitulated to the Carthaginians. According to some sources, the mutineers were so furious against him that when one of his sons tried to prevent his execution by warning them of the reprisals that his father would apply in Syracuse – that he would execute their families – they replied “yes, but at least our children will live a month longer than his.”

Enraged, Agathocles exterminated all the relatives of the mutinous generals, as well as the ordinary soldiers. This great bloodshed sparked a new rebellion against him, led by Deinocrates. Agathocles, in order not to have two open fronts, ceded six cities of Sicily to the Carthaginians and signed a peace, after which he fought Deinocrates undistractedly and defeated him.

From then on he ruled the entire island unhindered, also having significant influence in Southern Italy. Outside his sphere of influence were only the cities that he had ceded in 306 BC to the Carthaginians. In 304 BC, imitating the descendants of Alexander the Great, he took the title of king of Sicily. He declared to the people that he took the title of king so that other kings in the east (i.e. the descendants of Alexander the Great) would treat him equally and that he bore this specific title only for the cities he liberated in Sicily and Southern Italy – not for Syracuse. In fact, in the Parliament there, he emphasized that in what specifically concerned the Syracusans, he continued to bear simply the title of general.

At the same time as concluding marriages for himself and his children, he tried and succeeded in maintaining political balances, both with Ptolemy I of Egypt and with Pyrrhus I of Epirus. To the latter, along with his daughter Lanassa, he gave Corfu as a “dowry” and in compensation he himself married the ancestor of Ptolemy I, Theoxena. She was the daughter of Berenice I (wife of Ptolemy I) from a previous marriage.

The coins of Agathocles’ time also reveal the substantial changes in the administration. When he became tyrant, he did not immediately mint coins with his name, and the usual ones circulated, with the inscription of the word “Syracuse”. He soon added the word “Agathocleos” and the coin now bore a representation of Nike. After 310, he began to mint coins that read “Agathocleos” and it is speculated that the use of the genitive increased the possessiveness in everything that concerned Nike. Shortly afterwards the word “Syracusean” was removed and after 304 the coins only bore the phrase “Agathocleos Vasileos”

For many years he ruled calmly, but at the age of 73 he decided that he had to neutralize the Carthaginians and began to prepare for a campaign. While he was preparing, he fell seriously ill, either from mouth cancer or from poison. However, realizing that his end was near, he announced that he intended to restore democracy. The reasons are not clear and he may have had the motivation to avenge certain descendants of his or he was aware that the issue of succession would expose Syracuse to new civil wars.

He did not consider any of his relatives suitable for such a personal form of government or to have believed in democracy at all. In his intention to restore democracy, a crime that had occurred a few months before must have played a role. Specifically, Agathocles had been married three times and had many children and grandchildren, who had aspirations to the throne. Among the sons he had from his first marriage to the widow of Damas and who had been executed by the rebels in Carthage, he had, among others, a grandson, Archagathus, who was already serving as a soldier.

In a battle where Archagathus had the overall command, Agathocles sent word to him to hand over the generalship to his son Agathocles – a child from his second marriage with Alceia. Archagathos, not only did not hand over the generalship to Agathocles the younger, but he killed him. Many believe that after the crime, Agathocles did not want his son’s murderer to reign at all, even if it was his grandson.

Moreover, the succession was quite complicated, because there was another grandson, Alexander, who would certainly have had ambitions as well. Alexander was in fact the child of the king of Epirus Pyrrhus and Lanassa, daughter of Agathocles from Alcaea as well. Finally, the king of Sicily had two younger children, who would also logically have had ambitions, whom he had acquired from his third wife, Theoxena, a relative (ancestress) of Ptolemy I of Egypt.