Cinzia Susanna Bearzot

L’impero del mare come egemonia subalterna nel IV secolo (Diodoro, libri XIV-XV)

In two passages of book XIV Diodorus emphasizes the recognized hegemony exercised by Sparta both on land and sea after the Peloponnesian War (XIV 10 and 13). We have to put these places side to side with others: XIV 84 and 97, XV 23, XV 60, XV 78-79, from which comes out a judgment of failure of the maritime hegemony as such: it takes its full value only if it is combined with that on earth. Unlike Xenophon, who still believed in the dual hegemony and in the division of spheres of influence between Sparta and Athens, Diodorus reflects a perspective which is not Athenian and which reopens the debate on the conditions for the exercise of Panhellenic hegemony. Diodorus probably draws this topic from an historiographical tradition interested in Boeotian hegemony.

Dionysius I (432-367 BCE)

Dionysius, son of Hermocritus and member of the faction of his father-in-law Hermocrates, the Syracusan oligarchic leader and aspiring tyrant who died in 407 BCE, was a cultivated, talented, and ambitious man. He turned into a tyrant in 406/5 when the assembly granted him the title of strategos autokrator for the war against the Carthaginians who were menacing Syracuse. Assisted by mercenaries, Dionysius transformed the office of strategos into a form of tyranny characterized by strong military support and by a direct relationship with the population and the army. As common in the tradition of the Siceliots ever since the Dinomenids, Dionysius employed mercenaries on a large scale, whose service he won by his charisma as a military leader, by awarding them lands (taken from the Chalcidian cities of Naxos, Leontini, and Catana), and by allowing citizenship rights. Keywords: Ancient History; Greek History

Ancora sulle Eumenidi di Eschilo e la riforma di Efialte (in margine ad una pagina di Chr. Meier)

Chr. Meier’s theory, according to which Aeschylus counted among the oppositors to the democratic reform of the Areopagus, does not stand up to a critical evaluation of the evidence.