Leontini

The Sicilian city that sent Gorgias to Athens as an ambassador in 427 BCE, where his prose style astonished the assembly and rhetoric took hold.

Leontini lay inland from the eastern Sicilian coast and spent most of its history being squeezed by Syracuse. In 427 it sent Gorgias to ask Athens for help. He got the alliance, and he also gave the Athenians their first sustained taste of a prose deliberately worked for sound, with balanced clauses and rhyme. Younger men copied it immediately. He settled in mainland Greece and, by several accounts, lived past a hundred.