huh my classical education is so poor I didn't realise that Syracuse is actually in Sicily, how embarrassing! Carthage being in Tunisia makes sense, and Antioch in Turkey near Syria, Tyre in Lebanon, Caesarea in Judea, no idea where I thought Syracuse was supposed to be, it was just free floating around the Mediterranean somewhere.
It is pretty weird that the largest Greek city in the classical world was halfway across the Mediterranean, almost like if New York City was in Hawaii or something. Other than occasional forays like the Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War they've largely got a whole separate history going on - mainly this cycle of tyrants taking over and being overthrown, which you can sort of see having an influence in some Greek political philosophy. (Syracuse is where Plato was imprisoned.) And then gradual enmeshment with Carthage and Rome. But all of the stuff you think of when you think of classical Greek history from the Persian Wars onward, very little to do with Syracuse. A lot fewer sources survive for Sicily than for mainland Greece, and sometimes they feel like dispatches from an alternate timeline with an entirely different cast of characters.
were people often going back and forth? it's like a week's journey, which is relatively short but also a week on a ship, it's not that short.
Yeah, at least to some extent. I mentioned Plato being brought over as a tutor, also guys would get sent into exile from Syracuse and go to mainland Greece. A Corinthian named Timoleon led an expedition from Greece where he overthrew the tyrant there and became ruler himself. But it was far enough from the eastern Mediterranean that its politics never had the Persian orientation mainland Greece had to adopt.
actually that's reminding me of viking settlements and colonies, where there are kings of some regions and even large armies but also occasionally a bunch of dudes just over there doing their own thing while remaining in communion so to speak with the broader Norse world.
That's not an unreasonable comparison. There were Greeks in modern France who were neighbors with Gauls and Greeks in modern Ukraine who were neighbors with Scythians. Those settlements maintained contacts, especially with their mother cities, but had their own largely separate interests and histories we often know little about.
see that's wild, we point at "Ancient Greece" like it's this one specific thing, but the Mediterranean is like an ice skating rink and they're all just zipping around it! then later you have the Jewish diaspora heading all over the area too, there's so much texture to these movements of people.
(and later their descendants all end up in New York! wild).
And aside from the Greeks there was a whole similar and deeply intertwined network of Phoenician (or Canaanite) colonies from whom we have almost no surviving written sources, though we have some very biased but not entirely fanciful external sources from ambivalent to hostile outsiders (Romans, Greeks, and Judahites).
