Diodorus reports that Gelon was so successful in his attack on the Carthaginians that ther resulting number of captives transformed the Sicilian economy because of the increased labor power that was available to the state and to land-owning aristocrats.
Since Gelon had given orders to take no one alive, a mass slaughter of the fugitives ensured: before it was over no less than 150,000 of them had been butchered. (11.5.3)
The cities chained the captives thus divided among them and employed them as laborers on public works. An especially large number went to the Acragantines, who used them for the embellishment both of their city and of the surrounding countryside: indeed, so great was the multitude of war captives they received that many private citizens had five hundred fettered prisoners at their disposal. One supplementary reason for the vast number of these captives, in addition [the Carthaginians] having sent out so many troops, was that when the rout took place, many of the fugitives fled into the interior and particularly into the territory of the Acraganintes; and since the Acragaintes captured every single one of them, the city was overflowing with prisoners of war. The bulk of them were tunred over to the state; and it was these men who quarried the stones that went to build not only the biggest temples of the gods, but also the subterranean conduits used to drain off water from the city, which are of such a size that their construction amply merits inspection – though because it was done on the cheap it tends to be underrated.
DS 11.25.2-3 Green translation.
In the Odyssey, Homer reports that one of the slaves in Laertes’ household was from Sicily (. In the second century BCE, Sicily was home to two most successful slave rebellions in the ancient world: slave leaders held the island independent from Rome for years at a time. A key reason that these rebellions happened on Sicily is that there was a large number of slaves there compared to a small number of slave-owners. Athenasius comments that this was the same reason that there was frequent unrest on the Greek island of Chios, while the historical sociologist Orlando Patterson puts this pattern into a global perspective.
What is fascinating about Diodorus’ account of Gelon is that it demonstrates that the high number of slaves on Sicily preceded the Roman conquest of Sicily.