Chapter 25 examines Goethe’s Italian journey of 1786–8, the turning point in his life. It was crucial not only in furthering his knowledge of antiquity, which had been the original purpose of his journey, but also for his development as a poet and as a human being. The chapter focuses in particular on his time in Sicily, which Goethe had wanted to visit as a proxy for ancient Greece, but which exerted a lasting influence both on his aesthetics and on his science. For Goethe, Italy represented an organic fusion of nature and culture.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

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.

The author first addresses the contents and the nature of the proems of the Histories, secondly the arrangement of Ephorus’ work and, thirdly, the main contents of each of the thirty books that formed it.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.

This chapter explores the Thesmophoria as a festival that was celebrated in multiple places in the ancient Greek world. McLardy approaches this festival from a comparative perspective, investigating its manifestations at Attica and on Sicily. Through an analysis of similarities and differences in the celebrations at these two locations, she shows how the festival drew on local landscapes, myths, and histories. In highlighting the local horizon, McLardy takes issue with an approach that has focused on describing the general elements of the festival (at the price of everything else) and that has pieced them together in a composite account. In her contribution, local elements are more than mere deviations from a universal template. Rather, such local dimensions of the Thesmophoria illustrate how Greek religion remained deeply embedded in the way people lived.

This chapter explores the Thesmophoria as a festival that was celebrated in multiple places in the ancient Greek world. McLardy approaches this festival from a comparative perspective, investigating its manifestations at Attica and on Sicily. Through an analysis of similarities and differences in the celebrations at these two locations, she shows how the festival drew on local landscapes, myths, and histories. In highlighting the local horizon, McLardy takes issue with an approach that has focused on describing the general elements of the festival (at the price of everything else) and that has pieced them together in a composite account. In her contribution, local elements are more than mere deviations from a universal template. Rather, such local dimensions of the Thesmophoria illustrate how Greek religion remained deeply embedded in the way people lived.