The Phoenician, whether from old Phoenicia or from Carthage, came from lands which were mere strips of sea-coast with a boundless continent behind them. The Greek of old Hellas came from a land of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas. So did the Greek of Asia, though he had, like the Phoenician, a vast continent behind him. In Sicily they all found a strip of sea-coast with an inland region behind; but the strip of sea-coast was not like the broken coast of Greece and Greek Asia, and the inland region was not a boundless continent like Africa or Asia. In Sicily therefore the Greek became more continental, and the Phoenician became more insular, than either nation had been in its own land. Neither people ever occupied the whole island: the presence of the other hindered either from occupying even the whole of the coast; nor was either people ever able to spread its dominion over the earlier inhabitants very far inland. Sicily thus remained a world of its own, with interests and disputes of its own, and divided among inhabitants of various nations. The history of the Greeks of Sicily is constantly connected with the history of old Hellas, but it runs a separate course of its own. Their position answers somewhat to that of the English people of the United States with regard to the mother-country of Great Britain. It differs in this, that the independence of the Greek cities in Sicily was not the result of warfare with the mother-country. Otherwise the analogy would have been almost exact, if France or Spain had kept its old power in North America. The Phoenician element ran an opposite course, as the independent Phoenician settlements in Sicily sank into dependencies of Carthage. The entrance of the Romans put an end to all practical independence on the part of either nation. But Roman ascendency did not affect Greeks and Phoenicians in the same way. Phoenician life gradually died out. But Roman ascendency nowhere crushed out Greek life where it already existed, and in some ways it strengthened it. Though the Greeks never spread their dominion over the island, they made a peaceful conquest of it. This process was in no way hindered by the Roman dominion; the work of assimilation went on still faster.

The question now comes, Who were the original inhabitants of Sicily? The island itself, ∑ικϵλία , Sicilia, plainly takes its name from the Sikels (∑ικϵλoί , Siculi), a people whom we find occupying a great part of the island, chiefly east of the river Gela. They appear also in Italy, in the toe of the boot, and older history or tradition spoke of them as having in earlier days held a large place in Latium and elsewhere in central Italy. They were believed to have crossed the strait into the island about 300 years before the beginning of the Greek settlements, that is to say in the 11th century b.c. They found in the island a people called Sikans (∑ικαvoί , Sicani ) , whose name might pass for a dialectic form of their own, did not the ancient writers straitly affirm them to be a wholly distinct people, akin to the Iberians. Sikans also appear with the Ligurians among the early inhabitants of Italy (Virg., Aen., vii. 795, viii. 328, xi. 317, and Servius’s note). It is possible then that the likeness of name is accidental, that the Sikels belonged to the same branch of the Aryan family as the Italians, while Sikans, like Ligurians and Iberians and the surviving Basques, belonged to the earlier non-Aryan population of western Europe. But, whatever the origin of either, in the history of the island Sikans and Sikels appear as two distinct nations with a clear geographical boundary. And we may venture to set down the Sikels as undeveloped Latins, who were hindered by the coming of the Greeks from reaching the same independent national life as their kinsfolk in Italy, and, instead of so doing, were gradually Hellenized. On the other hand, some Sikel elements made their way into the Greek life of Sicily. That the Sikels spoke a tongue closely akin to Latin is plain from several Sikel words which crept into Sicilian Greek, and from the Sikeliot system of weights and measures,—utterly unlike anything in old Greece. When the Greek settlements began, the Sikans had hardly got beyond the life of villages on hill-tops (Dion. Hal., v. 6), more truly perhaps villages with places of shelter on the hill-tops. The more advanced Sikels had their hill-forts also, but they had learned the advantages of the sea, and they already had settlements on the coast when the Greeks came. As we go on, we hear of both Sikel and Sikan towns; but we may suspect that any approach to true city life was owing to Greek influences. Neither people grew into any form of national unity. There was neither common king nor common confederation either of Sikels or of Sikans. They were therefore partly subdued, partly assimilated, slowly, but without much effort.

In the north-east corner of the island we find a small territory occupied by a people who seem to have made much greater advances towards civilized life. The Elymoi were a people of uncertain origin, but they claimed a mixed descent, partly Trojan, partly Greek. Thucydides however unhesitatingly reckons them among barbarians. They had considerable towns, as Segesta (the Greek Egesta) and Eryx, and the whole history, as well as the remains, of Segesta, shows that Greek influences prevailed among them very early. In short, we find in the island three nations distinct from the Greeks, two of which at least easily adopted Greek culture and came in the end to pass for Greeks by adoption.

But, as we have already seen, the Greeks were not the first colonizing people who were drawn to the great island. As in Cyprus and in the islands of the Aegaean, the Phoenicians were before them. And it is from this presence of the highest forms of Aryan and of Semitic man that the history of Sicily draws its highest interest. Of Phoenician occupation there are two, or rather three, marked periods. We must always remember that Carthage —the new city—was one of the latest of Phoenician foundations, and that the days of the Carthaginian dominion show us only the latest form of Phoenician life. Phoenician settlement in Sicily began before Carthage became great, perhaps before Carthage came into being. A crowd of small settlements from the old Phoenicia, settlements for trade rather than for dominion, factories rather than colonies, grew up on promontories and small islands all round the Sicilian coast. These were unable to withstand the Greek settlers, and the Phoenicians of Sicily withdrew step by step to form three considerable towns in the northwest corner of the island,—Motye, Soloeis or Solunto, on a hill overhanging the sea on the north coast, and the great Panormos, the all-haven (see Palermo), the city destined to be, in two different periods of the world’s history, the head of Semitic power in Sicily.

Our earlier notices of Sicily, of Sikels and Sikans, in the Homeric poems and elsewhere, are vague and legendary. Both races appear as given to the buying and selling of slaves (Od., xx. 383, xxiv. 30, 210). The intimate connexion between old Hellas and Sicily begins with the foundation of the Sicilian Naxos by Chalkidians of Euboia under Theokles, which is assigned to the year 735 b.c. The site, a low promontory on the east coast, immediately below the height of Tauromenion, marks an age which had advanced beyond the hill-fortress and which thoroughly valued the sea. The next year Corinth began her system of settlement in the west: Korkyra (Corcyra), the path to Sicily, and Syracuse on the Sicilian coast were planted as parts of one enterprise. From this time, for about 150 years, Greek settlement in the island, with some intervals, goes steadily on. Both Ionian and Dorian colonies were planted, both from the older Greek lands and from the older Sicilian settlements. The east coast, nearest to Greece and richest in good harbours, was occupied first. Here, between Naxos and Syracuse, arose the Ionian cities of Leontinoi and Katana (Catina, Catania) and the Dorian Megara by Hybla. Settlement on the south-western coast began about 688 b.c. with the joint Cretan and Rhodian settlement of Gela, and went on in the foundation of Selinous (the most distant Greek city on this side), of Kamarina (Camarina), and in 588 b.c. of the Geloan settlement of Akragas (Agrigentum, Girgenti), planted on a high hill, a little way from the sea, which became the second city of Hellenic Sicily. On the north coast the Ionian Himera was the only Greek city in Sicily itself, but the Knidians founded Lipara in the Aeolian Islands. At the north-east corner, opposite to Italy, and commanding the strait, arose Zankle, a city of uncertain date and mixed origin, better known under its later name of Messana (Messene, Messina).

Thus nearly all the east coast of Sicily, a great part of the south coast, and a much smaller part of the north, passed into the hands of Greek settlers,—Sikeliots (∑ικϵλιωται), as distinguished from the native Sikels. This was one of the greatest advances ever made by the Greek people. The Greek element began to be predominant in the island. Among the earlier inhabitants the Sikels were already becoming adopted Greeks. Many of them gradually sank into a not wholly unwilling subjection as cultivators of the soil under Greek masters,—a relation embodied perhaps in the legend that a native Sikel prince led the Greek settlers to the foundation of Megara. But there were also independent Sikel towns in the interior, and there was a strong religious intercommunion between the two races. Sikel Henna (Enna, Castrogiovanni) is the special seat of the worship of Demeter and her daughter. The Sikans, on the other hand, seem more distinct and more steadily hostile. The Phoenicians, now shut up in one corner of the island, with Selinous on one side and Himera on the other founded right in their teeth, are bitter enemies; but the time of their renewed greatness under the headship of Carthage has not yet come. The 7th century b.c. and the early part of the 6th were a time in which the Greek cities of Sicily had their full share in the general prosperity of the Greek colonies everywhere. For a while they outstripped the cities of old Greece. Their political constitutions were aristocratic; that is, the franchise was confined to the descendants of the original settlers, round whom an excluded body (δηµoς or plebs ) was often growing up. The ancient kingship was perhaps kept on or renewed in some of the Sikeliot and Italiot towns; but it is more certain that civil dissensions led very early to the rise of tyrants. The first and most famous is Phalaris of Akragas, whose exact date is uncertain, whose letters are now cast aside, and whose brazen bull has been called in question, but who clearly rose to power very soon after the foundation of Akragas. Under his rule the city at once sprang to the first place in Sicily, and he was the first Sikeliot ruler who held dominion over two Greek cities, Akragas and Himera. This time of prosperity was also a time of intellectual progress. To say nothing of lawgivers like Charondas, the line of Sikeliot poets began early, and the circumstances of the island, the adoption of many of its local traditions and beliefs—perhaps a certain intermingling of native blood—gave the intellectual life of Sicily a character in some things distinct from that of old Hellas. Stesichoros of Himera (c. 632-556 b.c. ) holds a great place among the lyric poets of Greece, and some place in the political history of Sicily as the opponent of Phalaris. The architecture and sculpture of this age have also left some of their most remarkable monuments among the Greek cities of Sicily (see Syracuse). The remains of the old temples of Selinous, attributed to the 7th century b.c., show us the Doric style in its earlier state, and the sculptures of their metopes (preserved at Palermo) are as distinctly grotesque as any Romanesque sculpture of the 11th or 12th century. In both ages the art of the builder was far in advance of that of the ornamental carver.

This first period of Sicilian history lasts as long as Sicily remains untouched from any non-Hellenic quarter outside, and as long as the Greek cities in Sicily remain as a rule independent of one another. A change begins in the 6th century and is accomplished early in the 5th. The Phoenician settlements in Sicily become dependent on Carthage, whose growing power begins to be dangerous to the Greeks of Sicily. Meanwhile the growth of tyrannies in the Greek cities was beginning to group several towns together under a single master, and thus to increase the greatness of particular cities at the expense of their freedom. Thus Theron of Akragas (488-472), who bears a good character there, acquired also, like Phalaris, the rule of Himera. One such power held dominion both in Italy and Sicily. Anaxilaos of Rhegion, by a long and strange tale of treachery, occupied Zankle and changed its name to Messana. But the greatest of the Sikeliot powers began at Gela in 505, and was in 485 translated by Gelon to Syracuse. That city now became the centre of a greater dominion over both Greeks and Sikels than the island had ever before seen. But Gelon, like several later tyrants of Syracuse, takes his place—and it is the redeeming point in the position of all of them—as the champion of Hellas against the barbarian. The great double invasion of 480 b.c. was planned in concert by the barbarians of the East and the West (Diod., xi. 20; schol. on Pind., Pyth., i. 146; Grote, V. 294). While the Persians threatened old Greece, Carthage threatened the Greeks of Sicily. There were Sikeliots who played the part of the Medizers in Greece: Selinous was on the side of Carthage, and the coming of Hamilkar was immediately brought about by a tyrant of Himera driven out by Theron. But the united power of Gelon and Theron crushed the invaders in the great battle of Himera, won, men said, on the same day as Salamis, and the victors of both were coupled as the joint deliverers of Hellas (Herod., vii. 165-167; Diod., xx. 20-25; Pind., Pyth., i. 147-156; Simonides, fr. 42; Polyainos, i. 27). But, while the victory of Salamis was followed by a long war with Persia, the peace which was now granted to Carthage stayed in force for seventy years. Gelon was followed by his brother Hieron (478-467), the special subject of the songs of Pindar. Akragas meanwhile flourished under Theron; but a war between him and Hieron led to slaughter and new settlement at Himera. These transplantings from city to city began under Gelon and went on under Hieron. They made speakers in old Greece (Thuc., vi. 17) contrast the permanence of habitation there with the constant changes in Sicily. Hieron won the fame of a founder by peopling Katana with new citizens, and changing its name to Aitna.

None of these tyrannies were long-lived. The power of Theron fell to pieces under his son Thrasydaios. When the power of Hieron passed in 467 b.c. to his brother Thrasyboulos the freedom of Syracuse was won by a combined movement of Greeks and Sikels, and the Greek cities gradually settled down as they had been before the tyrannies, only with a change to democracy in their constitutions. The mercenaries who had received citizenship from the tyrants were settled at Messana. About fifty years of general prosperity followed. We have special pictures of almost incredible wealth and luxury at Akragas, chiefly founded on an African trade. Moreover art, science, poetry, had all been encouraged by the tyrants, and they went on flourishing in the free states. To these was now added the special growth of freedom, the art of public speaking. Epicharmos (540-450), carried as a babe to Sicily, is a link between native Sikeliots and the strangers invited by Hieron; as the founder of the local...