Chapter 3 shifts discussion to the broader political landscape of the kingdom and to the nature of Hieron’s relationship with the cities of southeastern Sicily that recognized his political authority as a king.

Chapter 2 places Hieron’s kingship in conversation with the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean and goes on to explore the qualities of his rule that set Hieron’s basileia ahead of its time – as, for example, in his diplomatic dealings with Rome.

In the opening lines of the twenty-third book of his universal history, Diodorus Siculus praises his native Sicily as “the fairest of all islands, since it can contribute greatly to the growth of an empire.”1 Sitting at the intersection of prevailing maritime routes, the island served as a natural landing for ships plying their way between the Mediterranean’s Eastern and Western Basins. Its broad coastal plains supported large urban centers and entrepôts that opened onto the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north, the Ionian Sea to the east, and the vast Libyan Sea to the south and west, inviting contacts from the Italian Peninsula, the Greek mainland, and North Africa. Indeed, located at the heart of the Mediterranean basin, Sicily has occupied an equally central place in the geopolitics of the region across much of the last three millennia.

Chapter 1 sketches the events that transpired in eastern Sicily during the turbulent years leading up to Hieron’s ascension to power, as would-be tyrants and bellicose kings grappled for political and military control of the island.

Chapter 7 examines the ways in which coinage was employed by Hieron to bolster his rule. The chapter begins with an introductory survey of the coins struck by the royal mint over the course of Hieron’s reign. It then addresses how variations in the style and types of coins struck at different points in his reign elucidate how Hieron employed coinage to promote an ideology of legitimate kingship and the orderly succession of power.

Chapter 5 builds the case that, in order to better facilitate the collection of agricultural taxes, the Hieronian state brought about the standardization of volumetric measurement throughout southeastern Sicily during the course of the third century BCE.

In the chapters that form the first part of the book, I asked the reader to view the monarchy of Hieron II as one fundamentally akin, in both principle and practice, to the forms of autocratic rule familiar to us from the Successor kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The surviving evidence – both literary and material – offers clear witness to the flexible approach taken by Hieron and his court in service of legitimating his political authority over the cities of southeastern Sicily. Moreover, it reveals that the modes of communication and display emanating from the royal capital at Syracuse were fashioned in a manner receptive to contemporary trends taking place in the courts of the Successor kings. We see this, for instance, in Hieron’s early efforts to wrap his claims of legitimate political authority in the cloak of military power, grounded in demonstrable success on the battlefield.

Chapter 8 considers how the consolidation of royal authority impacted the agricultural and economic landscapes of southeastern Sicily, paying particular attention to the ways in which the tithe administration may have fostered trade and economic prosperity for the cities of the kingdom.

Chapter 6 takes as its focus the remains of two aboveground granaries that once stood in the agora of Morgantina, one of the cities that recognized Hieron’s authority as king. After a brief discussion of the buildings’ architectural form and function, the chapter explores where the Morgantina granaries fit within the corpus of known Hellenistic granary buildings and goes on to argue they played a central role in the projection of Hieron’s royal authority at the western edges of his kingdom.

Chapter 4 focuses on an institution central to the administration of the Hieronian state: the agricultural tithe collected annually from the cities subject to Hieron’s authority.