ABSTRACT
In the year 474 bc, Polyzalos, brother of Pindar’s patron Hiero, won the four-horse chariot race in the Pythian Games at Delphi. In the same year, Telesikrates of Kyrene in north Africa, another colonial Greek city, won the foot race in the same stadium.2 Pindar celebrated that victory in his ninth Pythian Ode. ese are more than coincidences: there was much that Greek Sicily and Greek Kyrene had in common, patronage of Pindar being only the most obvious and symbolic link. Both were places with non-Greek neighbours, and in both Kyrene and Sicily participation in Panhellenic Games was a way of asserting hellenism under pressure. Pindar wrote two more odes for victors from Kyrene, Pythians 4 and 5 (462); both were for Arkesilas IV, hereditary ‘Battiad’ king of Kyrene; that is, descended from Battos, the original founder in c. 630. is rst Battos was the recipient of hero-cult as ‘oikist’ or founder of the city in Pindar’s time (Pythian 5. 93-5), and ‘the man Battos the founder’ still belongs to a special category of dead in the late fourth century, on the evidence of the puricatory law mentioned above, p. 56 (see R/O no 97, A line 22). Such glorication of founding individuals may remind us of Pindar’s praise of the Sicilian tyrant Hiero as founder of Aitna in Pythians 1 and 3, though Pindar, true to a deeply felt inhibition imposed by classical Greek religion, stops just short of calling Hiero a living god or hero.3 And here is another link between Sicily and Kyrene: at Kyrene, as at the Syracuse of Gelon, Hiero and Polyzalos, monarchy survived from the sixth century, when most of the cities of old Greece got rid of their tyrants, into the fth. Again, like Syracuse (which co-existed with Carthage), Kyrene co-existed for decades not just with one great non-Greek power, but with two, Carthage (again!) and Persia. Prolonged warfare between Kyrene and Carthage is attested by the Roman historian Sallust (Bellum Jugurthinum 79, cp. 19; an unexpected source, but his information may go back to the good Greek authority of Posidonius); Sallust says that two Carthaginians with the suspiciously Greek (as opposed to Punic) sounding names the ‘Philaeni’ allowed themselves to be buried alive so as to x the frontier between Carthage and Kyrene at a point considered favourable to Carthage. It is not easy to
know what to make of this, but an end to hostilities may indeed have been negotiated in the fourth century bc, and the ‘altars of the Philaeni’ were an ancient landmark, reidentied in modern times.4 As for Persia, the conquest of Egypt and Cyrenaica as far west as Euesperides (near modern Benghazi, the ancient Berenike) by the Persian Kambyses did not entail the overthrow of the Battiads, nor did it interrupt the cultural trac of Dorian Kyrene with the Peloponnese and even Ionian Attica. Lakonian pottery at archaic Kyrene is a reminder that Sparta was the mother-city of era, which was the mother-city of Kyrene (and see below p. 218 for Lysander’s brother Libys).5 Indeed the line of colonial descent is even longer because Euesperides in its turn was very probably a colony of Kyrene (see FGrHist 470 eotimos F1) and has magistrates called ‘ephors’ (SEG 18. 772, a fourth-century grant of proxeny to two Syracusans), just like Kyrene (SEG 9. 1 line 33; 18. 739), era and Sparta itself. P. M. Fraser, who half a century ago published the proxeny inscription just cited, wrote that ‘no other instance in which the transmission of constitutional forms can be discerned at so many removes is known to me’.6
