I'm debating with myself about whether toward this book three stars or something more and I've settled on 3.5 stars. I guess it is really hard to do justice to a city like Syracuse that has had such a long and tumultuous history. Dummett puts his finger on the issue quite clearly when he identifies geography as being a major contributor to both the vibrancy of the culture in Syracuse but also the violence that has been visited upon the city many, many times. It's a greek city positioned between Rome and Carthage and open to invasion from anywhere in the Mediterranean. Add to this the conflicts between Anthenians, Spartans, Macedonians ....and throw in a few internal conflicts with the Romans, then the Arabs, then the Crusades ..and life was never going to be easy for Syracusans.
I think Jeremy Dummett has done a workman-like job of condensing this history and being reasonably objective about it but I think it's slightly confused between being a history of Syracuse and a guide book to the Modern City. I can see where he is coming from. As, the exhortation on the dust cover says: "Don't leave for Sicily without this guide". His market for the book is probably going to be the english speaking tourists heading off for a holiday in Sicily/Syracuse ..so he probably needs to include a bit about where the touristic highlights are today.
Though, personally I felt that this latter section detracted from the book for me. Maybe I'd be be more generous if I was on my way to Syracuse right now. And I'm not totally convinced that Dummett has established that Syracuse really is a city of legends. Most of the happenings appear to be pretty well documented. Many of them not nice...but not really legends.
Somewhere, I've read a fairly detailed account of the failed Athenian invasion of Syracuse, which, to my recollection, was more detailed and interesting than Dummett's summary. Likewise, I've read better accounts of Plato's visits to Syracuse. (Must say, that I've always found it amusing that Plato, the great theorist about how to run a country/city came to grief when he was actually given the chance to put his ideas into practice. It seems the the reality of dealing with real people with real flaws was a bit too much for Plato).
And, I would have like to have learned a bit more about Archimedes. What an extraordinary character ......but we don't seem to have very much solid information about him.
But there certainly seems to have been a dearth of good leaders ..and even those who were good leaders seemed to be brought undone through some failing of their own or events beyond their capacity to influence. Overall, an interesting book which delivers a fairly comprehensive history of Syracuse and it's place in the world but left me wanting a bit more. Three and a half stars from me. ( )