Rethinking the polis. Space society and political agency in the Syracuse of the tyrants

This paper starts from the urgency, evident in today’s studies, of rethinking the shape of the polis, freeing the investigation of its spaces and urban landscapes from the heuristic preconception of the existence of recurrent and/or pre-constituted schemata. But it also attempts to respond, starting from the fertile ground created by the mobility turn and by the rethinking of the spatial turn in historical studies, to the need to secure an interpretative model for the polis, in which spatial and social investigation can complement each other. The case examined is that of the polis of Syracuse - in particular the area of Ortygia - in the years of the tyrannies of Gelon (485-478 BCE) and Dionysius (407-367 BCE), periods in which there was a surprising interdependence between the political actions of the tyrants, the consequent spatial organisation and the social landscape of the city.