Mercenaries for hire: Ancient DNA study makes startling discovery

Between July and late September 480 BC, as the heavily outnumbered Greeks crashed headlong into the full might of the Persian empire at Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis, another battle raged in a faraway Greek colony on the island of Sicily.

The Battle of Himera, one of the most important battles of the Sicilian (or Greco-Punic) Wars that raged for more than three centuries (580-265 BC), was a matter of survival for the westernmost Greek colony in northern Sicily, founded by Dorian and Ionian Greeks around 468 BC. Fought between the Punic people (western Phoenicians) of ancient Carthage, led by Hamilcar I, and a combined army of the Sicilian Greek colonies, Greek victory effectively derailed Carthaginian ambitions to dominate the island.

According to the Greek historian Diodurus Siculus, who was writing more than 300 years after the events, heavily armored citizen-soldiers (hoplites) from other Sicilian city states rushed to the aid of the Himerans, including Agrigento and Syracuse. “There followed a great slaughter of the enemy,” he wrote.

Both Diodorus and the earlier historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, praised the victory as an example of the what made Greek culture great; that Greeks could unite in the face of foreign aggression. But neither author made mention of one key fact: that many of the soldiers who came to Himera’s aid in the summer-early fall of 480 BC weren’t even Greek