Mercenaries in Sicily in the late V-III Centuries B.C.

The study examines the problem of the development of mercenarism in Sicily in the late V – III centuries BC. The purpose of the work is to give a description of the development of mercenarism and its role in the military and socio-political life of Syracuse in the late Vth - IIIrd century BC. The work characterizes mercenaries in Sicily and examines the problems of mercenary relationships with citizens and employers. Previous researches have focused only on Greek mercenaries in Central Greece, foreign mercenaries, such as Campanians, often did not fall in the field of view of researchers. In this work, features and problems of mercenarism are considered in the light of the concept of crisis of the policy and the transformation of the social and political organization of the Greek world in the era of pre-Hellenism. We tested this consept using historical-genetic and comparative-historical methods. The results show that mercenaries in Sicily differed from the Greek mercenaries. The phenomenon of Campanian mercenaries allows to say that foreign mercenaries received land allotments in the territory of the cities granted to them for settlement by tyrants of Sicily. Thus we can conclude that mercenaries began to constitute a social layer different from citizens and throughout the period under review, they had a kind of marginality in the Greek world.