Gelon
Gelon was the tyrant of Gela who took Syracuse in 485 BC, made it the largest city of the Greek west by emptying other cities into it, and in 480, in the same season as Salamis, destroyed a Carthaginian army at Himera on the north coast of Sicily, a victory the Sicilian Greeks set beside the Persian war as its western half. He was a cavalry commander under the tyrant Hippocrates of Gela and took power in that city when Hippocrates was killed fighting the Sicels in 491, setting aside the tyrant's sons whom he was supposed to protect. Four years later the exiled landowners of Syracuse asked his help against the people of the city and the Sicel serfs who had joined them, and he restored the landowners and kept the city, leaving Gela to his brother Hiero. He moved the whole population of Camarina to Syracuse, half of Gela, and the rich of Megara Hyblaea and Euboea, and sold the poor of those places abroad, since he found, Herodotus says, the common people disagreeable to live with. The Greeks of the mainland sent to him in 481 for help against Xerxes. He offered two hundred ships and twenty thousand men on condition of the command, and when Sparta and Athens refused it he sent a man to Delphi with money to give to whichever side won. In 480 the Carthaginians landed a great army under Hamilcar to restore the tyrant of Himera, whom Theron of Acragas, Gelon's father-in-law, had driven out. Gelon marched to Himera, took the Carthaginian camp by a trick with captured letters, and burned the ships. Hamilcar died in the fire, by his own hand in one account. Carthage paid two thousand talents and stayed out of Sicily for seventy years. Gelon presented himself to the Syracusans in a tunic, unarmed, and they hailed him as their benefactor, which was the name on his tomb. He died in 478, his brother Hiero succeeded, and the fifth-century greatness of Syracuse, and the temple of Athena that is now its cathedral, began with him.
- Lived: 540 BCE – 478 BCE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: tyrant, ruler, general
