Hiero II of Syracuse

Hiero II ruled Syracuse for fifty-four years by picking the winning side early and staying on it, which is why his city was prosperous and unbesieged for two generations while Sicily was fought over by two great powers. He was an officer under Pyrrhus, and when Pyrrhus left Sicily the army chose Hiero as its commander; he married the daughter of a leading citizen, beat the Mamertines of Messana at the Longanus river, and was acclaimed king around 270 BCE. It was the Mamertines' appeal for help that brought Rome and Carthage into the island together and began the First Punic War. Hiero began that war allied to Carthage, was besieged in Syracuse by the consuls in 263, and made terms almost at once - and then kept them for the next forty-eight years, supplying Roman armies with grain through the worst of the war and through the mercenary revolt that followed it. The alliance made Syracuse the one Greek city in Sicily that neither side sacked. At home he governed under a body of law, the Lex Hieronica, whose grain tithe the Romans thought well enough of to keep using after they annexed the island. He was Archimedes' patron and kinsman, commissioned the Syracusia - a ship so large that no harbour except Alexandria could take her, and which he gave away to Ptolemy - and is the king in the story who asked whether his crown was truly gold and was answered from a bath. He died in 215 BCE at over ninety. His grandson Hieronymus switched to Carthage within a year, and the war machines Archimedes built could delay Marcellus for two years but not save the city. His long reign is unusual in Greek Sicily for producing no tyrannicide plot worth recording. Polybius, who disliked most monarchs, wrote that he ruled without killing or exiling a single citizen. The coinage of his reign is abundant and names his wife Philistis on it, which is rare for a Greek queen.

• Lived: 308 BCE – 215 BCE
• Nationality: Syracusan
• Roles: ruler