It was the important position to which Motya had thus attained that led Dionysius I of Syracuse to direct his principal efforts to its reduction, when in 397 BCE he in his turn invaded the Carthaginian territory in Sicily.

Aeschylus travelled to Sicily once or twice in the 470s BC, having been invited by Hiero I of Syracuse, a major Greek city on the eastern side of the island ; and during one of these trips he produced The Women of Aetna ( in honor of the city founded by Hieron ) and restaged his Persians.

At Syracuse, he repaired the city walls and the temples of the gods.

In 288 BC, the Mamertines — a group of Italian ( Campanian ) mercenaries originally hired by Agathocles of Syracuse — occupied the city of Messana ( modern Messina ) in the northeastern tip of Sicily, killing all the men and taking the women as their wives.

In Sicily, the Mamertines ravaged the countryside and collided with the expanding regional empire of the independent city of Syracuse.

During World War I, the city of Syracuse, New York outlawed the playing of pinochle in a fit of anti-German sentiment.

Syracuse ( ; ; ; Syrakoúsai ) is a historic city in Sicily, the capital of the province of Syracuse.

Syracuse was allied with Sparta and Corinth, exerting influence over the entire Magna Grecia area of which it was the most important city.

The patron saint of the city is Saint Lucy ; she was born in Syracuse and her feast day, Saint Lucy's Day, is celebrated on 13 December.

Gelo himself became the despot of the city, and moved many inhabitants of Gela, Kamarina and Megera to Syracuse, building the new quarters of Tyche and Neapolis outside the walls.

After the end of the conflict Dionysius built a massive fortress on the Ortygia island of the city and 22 km-long walls around all of Syracuse.

In 1085 the Normans entered Syracuse, one of the last Arab strongholds, after a summer-long siege by Roger I of Sicily and his son Jordan of Hauteville, who was given the city as count.

Since 2005, the entire city of Syracuse, along with the Necropolis of Pantalica which falls within the province of Syracuse, were listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The college began looking for a new home at the same time that Syracuse, ninety miles to the east, was engaged in a search to bring a university to the city, having failed to convince Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to locate Cornell University there rather than in Ithaca.

* Appius Claudius leads his troops outside the city of Messina to defeat the Syracusans in battle forcing Hiero to retreat back to Syracuse.

( 11 ) Citizenship was granted to them both and it was ordered that five hundred iugera of land be granted to each of them too: for Sosis in the Land of Syracuse which had belonged either to the king or enemies of the Roman People, plus such a house in Syracuse that he desired belonging to anyone who had been punished according to the laws of war, ( 12 ): for Moericus and the Spaniards who had gone over with him, a city and land in Sicily belonging to those who had defected from the Roman People.

" The Greeks, who were the most dominant culture on the island of Sicily due to the powerful city state of Syracuse to the east, instead called the settlement Panormus.

Palermo ( Balarm during Arab rule ) displaced Syracuse as the prime city of Sicily.

Despite this, origins such as Syracuse or the Iranian city of Shiraz have been proposed.

Nicias indeed proposed, when the expedition first arrived in Sicily ( 415 BCE ); that they should proceed at once to Selinunte and compel that city to submit on moderate terms ; but this advice being overruled, the efforts of the armament were directed against Syracuse, and the Selinuntines in consequence bore but a secondary part in the subsequent operations.

The city fortifications were, in many places, in disrepair, and the auxiliary force promised by Syracuse and Agrigentum ( modern Agrigento ) and Gela, was not ready and did not arrive in time.

Agathocles ( 361 – 289 BC ), ( Greek name Ἀγαθοκλῆς ( Agathokles ): derived from αγαθός ( agathos ) good and κλέος ( kleos ) glory ), was a Greek tyrant of Syracuse ( 317 – 289 BC ) and king of Sicily ( 304 – 289 BC ).

Having banished or murdered some 10, 000 citizens, and thus made himself master of Syracuse, he created a strong army and fleet and subdued the greater part of Sicily.

Nelson's fleet reached Syracuse on Sicily on 19 July and took on essential supplies.

* Syracuse, Sicily

Leaving the Carthaginians alone at Messana would give them a free hand to deal with Syracuse ; after the Syracusans had been defeated, the Carthaginian takeover of Sicily would essentially be complete.

According to the terms of the treaty, Syracuse would become a Roman ally, would pay a somewhat light indemnity of 100 talents of silver to Rome, and, perhaps most importantly, would agree to help supply the Roman army in Sicily.

Following the defection of Syracuse, several other smaller Carthaginian dependencies in Sicily also switched to the Roman side.

Importantly, Syracuse was granted nominal independent ally status for the lifetime of Hiero II, and was not incorporated into the Roman province of Sicily until after it was sacked by Marcus Claudius Marcellus during the Second Punic War.

Archimedes ( 287-212 BC ), of Syracuse, Sicily, when it was a Greek city-state, is often considered to be the greatest of the Greek mathematicians, and occasionally even named as one of the three greatest of all time ( along with Isaac Newton and Carl Friedrich Gauss ).

The Romans then mounted two sieges of Capua, which fell in 211 BC, and completed their conquest of Syracuse and destruction of the Carthaginian army in Sicily.

* 878 – Syracuse, Italy, is captured by the Muslim sultan of Sicily.

In historical times, Megara was an early dependency of Corinth, in which capacity colonists from Megara founded Megara Hyblaea, a small polis north of Syracuse in Sicily.

* Ortygian Nymphs ( Local springs of Syracuse, Sicily ), named for the island of Ortygia

Papyrus plants at Syracuse, Sicily

In 415 BC, Athens dispatched a massive expeditionary force to attack Syracuse in Sicily ; the attack failed disastrously, with the destruction of the entire force, in 413 BC.

In the 17th year of the war, word came to Athens that one of their distant allies in Sicily was under attack from Syracuse.

The Corinthians, the Spartans, and others in the Peloponnesian League sent more reinforcements to Syracuse, in the hopes of driving off the Athenians ; but instead of withdrawing, the Athenians sent another hundred ships and another 5, 000 troops to Sicily.

It began as a local conflict in Sicily between Hiero II of Syracuse and the Mamertines of Messina.

According to the Parian Marble, Sappho was exiled to Sicily sometime between 604 and 594 and Cicero records that a statue of her stood in the town-hall of Syracuse.

He was twice banished for attempting to overthrow the oligarchical party in Syracuse.

In 311 BC Agathocles was besieged and defeated in Syracuse in the battle of Himera.

Archimedes of Syracuse (; BC – BC ) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.

Archimedes, the renowned mathematician, was said to have used a burning glass ( or more likely a large number of angled hexagonal mirrors ) as a weapon in 212 BC, when Syracuse was besieged by Marcus Claudius Marcellus.

Following high school, he was majoring in communications and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, before he dropped out of school.

In 1920, he became the stage manager for the Knickerbocker Players, a troupe that shuttled between Syracuse and Rochester, New York, and the following year he was hired as general manager of the newly formed Lyceum Players, an upstate summer stock company.

He was recruited to work on a variety of projects, including the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and the Sundrome terminal at Idlewild Airport in New York City, and dormitories at New College of Florida.

She was the founder of Syracuse Oratory School, and Baum advertised his services in her catalog to teach theatre, including stage business, playwriting, directing, and translating ( French, German, and Italian ), revision, and operettas, though he was not employed to do so.

He returned to New York, enrolling at Syracuse University, but he recalled in his 2006 memoir, Just One More Thing, that he was unsure what he wanted to do with his life for years after leaving high school.

The delay was costly and forced the Athenians into a major sea battle in the Great Harbor of Syracuse.

** Syracuse: There was a harvest festival of Demeter and Persephone at Syracuse when the grain was ripe ( about May ).

The citizens of Syracuse at one point attempted to convince the Holy See to officially endorse the sainthood of the pope, but this was not successful.