Since the appearance of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s thesis about the alliance of the Greek aristocracies to Rome (1858), historiography has been emphasizing, regarding the Sicilian cities during the Second Punic War, a unilateral filiation of the aristocracy to Rome and the plebs to Carthage. Taking the case of Syracuse, we try to understand which events led to an alliance either with Rome or Carthage, who were the characters involved and what were their interests in order to evaluate the sustainability of Fustel’s thesis. The analysis is divided in two parts, before and after the murder of the tyrant Hieronymus.
Second Punic War; Syracuse; aristocracy
