ABSTRACT
The Ionian Sea, between Greece and Italy and Sicily, is not usually taken as a specifi c region for study, but during the late fourth and third centuries it was a veritable cockpit of confl ict and diplomacy. It had been a political unit earlier, under the Syracusan monarchy of Dionysios I and II, but the complexity of the political, strategic, and diplomatic situation there between 342 and 212 was new. These confl icts have usually been detailed in separate and discontinuous sections – Romans and Carthaginians, the adventures of Pyrrhos, the time of Agathokles – but taking up a viewpoint, metaphorically speaking, somewhere in the sea from which the events in western Greece, southern Italy, and Sicily can be followed makes it clear that they were interrelated.
