Carthage, Syracuse, and the Battle for Sicily

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

By 480 BC, the same year Xerxes and the Persians descended on Greece, Sicily had become a battleground for the rising powers of the Central Mediterranean: Carthage, on one side, and the Greek colony of Syracuse on the other. The result was a massive battle, and its remains still survive in the archaeological record.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wundery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now.
0:04.3	Join Wundery shifted in the camera. Sweat ran down off his forehead, the salt stinging his right eye.
0:23.8	His helmet had shifted in the chaos, the cheekpiece blocking his view out of the left.
0:28.6	The sounds were muffled, running together into one tremendous wall of noise coming at him from all directions,
0:34.7	the individual notes only audible if he concentrated.
0:38.4	Arrows whizzing through the air, iron spear points clanging off bronze shields, the meaty thuds of blades entering flesh and drowning
0:45.9	at all cries of fear and pain.
0:49.6	The injured cried out for water or their mothers in many different tongues more than the man had ever heard
0:54.7	or could understand, but the meaning was clear. They wanted relief, and here outside the walls of
1:00.3	the city of Himera, they wouldn't find it.
1:04.2	He gripped the wooden shaft of the spear in his hand and thought for a moment of the first
1:07.8	time he'd held one.
1:10.1	Youth had long since left him behind, but the memory was crystal clear, even in the midst of the fighting.
1:16.0	His father, dead these long years, showing him how to hold it, how to thrust, how to twist the
1:20.8	blade to withdraw it if it got stuck. A spear had killed his father and the boy had left home
1:26.8	traveling south to the cities of the Greeks. He knew how to fight and they needed
1:31.7	soldiers and so he had left behind the mountains and valleys of his upbringing, never to see them again.
1:37.0	Even the tongue of his youth was mostly forgotten to him now. So many years had he spent speaking in the fashion of Corinthians and Ionians and now the people of Syracuse in Sicily.
1:47.0	Just as quickly as it had come on him, the memory passed, and he snapped back to the here and now. He was tired, the spear heavy
1:55.6	in his hands, the breath coming and heaving gasps. Somehow he'd gotten out ahead of his
2:00.9	companions, a group of the other mercenaries serving Galon, the tyrant of Syracuse.
2:04.8	The ground was littered, the dead, and dying. The fighting had already passed this way once or twice before,
	...

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