The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C.. John Bagnell Bury
The of Hippo and Utica, older than Carthage, were probably the parents of the more abiding Phoenician settlements in Sicily. In the east of the island the Phoenicians had no secure foothold. They were not able to dispossess the Sicel natives, or to make a home among them; they appeared purely in the guise of traders. Hence when the Greeks came and seriously set to work to plant true cities, the Phoenicians disappeared and left few traces to show that they had ever been there.
Sicilian, like Italian history, really opens with the coming of the Greeks. They came under the guidance of Chalcis and the auspices of Apollo. It was naturally on the east coast which faces Greece that the first Greek settlement was made, and it is to be noticed that of the coasts of Sicily the east is that which most resembles in character the coast-line of Greece. The site which was chosen by the Chalcidians, Naxos and the Ionians of Naxos who accompanied them, was not a striking one. A little tongue of land, north of Mount Aetna, very different from the height of Cyme, was selected for the foundation of Naxos. Here, as in the case of Cyme, the Chalcidians who led the enterprise surrendered the honour of naming the new city to their less prominent fellow-founders. The first of all the Greek towns of Sicily, Naxos was not destined to live for much more than three hundred years. It was be destroyed by the fire and lava of the dangerous mountain which dominated it. A sort of consecration was always attached to Naxos as the first homestead of the Hellenes in the island which was to become a brilliant part of Hellas. To Apollo Archegetes an altar was erected on the spot where the Greeks first landed,—driven, as ‘the legend told, by contrary winds, owing to Apollo’s dispensation, to the Sicilian shores. It was the habit of ambassadors from old Greece as soon as they arrived in Sicily to offer sacrifice on this altar. In the fertile plain south of Aetna the Chalcidians soon afterwards founded Catane close to the sea and protected by a low range of hills behind, but under the power of Aetna which was to unmake the place again and again; and inland Leontini at the south end of her plain between two hills, with an eastern and western acropolis. These sites, Leontini certainly if not Catane, were wrested from the Sicels. The Chalcidians also won possession of the north-east corner, and thus obtained command of the straits between the island and the mainland. Here Cymaeans and Chalcidians planted Zancle on a low rim of land, which resembles a reaping-hook and gave the place its name. The haven is formed by the curving blade; and when Zancle came in after-days to mint money she engraved on her coins a sickle representing her harbour and a dolphin floating within it. A hundred years later the city was transformed by the immigration of a company of Messenians, and ultimately the old local name was ousted in favour of Messana. From Zancle the Euboeans established the fortress of Mylae on the other side of the north-eastern promontory; and in the middle of the seventh century they founded Himera, the only Greek city on the northern coast, destined to live for scarce two centuries and a half, and then to be swept away by the Phoenician. It was important for Zancle that the land over against her, the extreme point of the Italian peninsula, should be in friendly hands, and therefore the men of Zancle incited their mother-city to found Rhegion; and in this foundation Messenians took part.
While this group of Chalcidian colonies was being formed in north-eastern Sicily, Dorian Greeks began to obtain a footing in south-eastern Sicily, which history decided should become the Dorian quarter. The earliest of the Dorian cities was also the greatest. Syracuse, destined to be the head of Greek Sicily, was founded by Corinthian emigrants under the leadership of Archias before the end of the eighth century. Somewhere about the same time Corinth also colonised Corcyra; the Ionian islands were half-way stations to the west. Which colony was the elder, we know not; tradition did not attempt to decide, for it placed both in the same year. But in both cases Corinth had to dispossess previous Greek settlers, and in both cases the previous settlers were Euboeans. Her colonists had to drive Eretrians from Corcyra and Chalcidians from Syracuse.
The great Haven of Syracuse, with its island and its hill, formed the most striking site on the east coast, and could not fail to invite the earliest colonists. Chalcidians occupied the island of Ortygia (Isle of quails) as it was called—they must have won it from the Sicel or possibly from the Phoenician—and held it long enough to associate it for ever with the name of a fountain in their old home, Arethusa. It is highly probable that the Chalcidian occupation took place very soon after that of Naxos, and it is possible that the Corinthians did not supersede the Chalcidians till many years later. But when they once held Syracuse, they effectually prevented any Chalcidian expansion south of Leontini.
At an early date Megarians also sailed into the West to find a new home. After various unsuccessful attempts to establish themselves, they finally built their city on the coast north of Syracuse, beside the hills of Hybla, and perhaps Sicel natives joined in founding the western Megara. It was the most northerly Dorian town on the east coast. But, like her mother, the Hyblaean Megara was destined to found a colony more famous than herself. In the middle of the seventh century the Megarians sent to their metropolis to invite cooperation in planting a settlement in the south-western part of the island. This settlement, which was to be the farthest outpost of Greek Sicily, was Selinus, the town named of wild celery as its own coins boasted, situated on a low hill on the coast. Megara had been occupied with the goodwill of the Sicel; Selinus was probably held at the expense of the Sican. In the meantime the south-eastern corner was being studded with Dorian cities, though they did not rise by any means so rapidly as the Chalcidian in the north. The Sicels seem to have offered a stouter resistance here. At the beginning of the seventh century, Gela—the name is Sicel—was planted by Rhodian colonists with Cretans in their train. This city was set on a long narrow hill which stretched between the sea and an inland plain. At a later time Acrae and Casmenae were founded by Syracuse. They were overshadowed by the greatness of the mother-city, and never attained as much independence as more distant Camarina which was planted from the same metropolis about half a century later.
The latest Dorian colony of Sicily was only less conspicuous than the first. The Geloans sought an oecist from their Rhodian metropolis and founded, half-way between their own city and Selinus, the lofty town of Acragas, which soon took the second place in Greek Sicily and became the rival of Syracuse. It was perched on a high hill near the sea-shore. The small poor haven was at some distance from the town; “flock-feeding Acragas” never became a maritime power. The symbols on its coins were the eagle and the crab.
In planting their colonies and founding their domination in Sicily, the Greeks had mainly to reckon with the Sicels. In their few foundations in the farther west they had to deal with the Sicans. These older inhabitants were forced to retire from the coasts, but they lived on in their fortresses on the inland hills. The island was too large and its character too continental to invite the newcomers to attempt to conquer the whole of it. With the Phoenicians the Greeks had no trouble. Their factories and temples had not taken root in the soil, and on the landing of a stranger who was resolved to take root they vanished. Traces of their worship sometimes remained, here as in the Aegean. But they did not abandon the western corner of the island, where the Greeks did not attempt to settle. There they maintained three places which now assumed the character of cities. These were Panormus, Solus, and Motya—the Haven, the Rock and the Island. Panormus or “All-haven” in a fertile plain is protected on the north by Mount Hercte, now the Pilgrim Mount, and on the east by Solus. Motya is on an island in a small bay on the west coast The Elymian country lay between Motya and Panormus. The chief town of the Elymians, Segesta (which in Greek mouths became Egesta), was essentially a city, while Eryx farther west, high above the sea but not actually on it, was their outpost of defence. On Eryx they worshipped some goddess of nature, soon to be identified with the Greek Aphrodite. The Elymians were on good terms with the Phoenicians, and western Sicily became a Phoenician corner. While the inland country was left to Sicel and Sican, the coasts were to be the scene of struggles between Phoenician and Greek. And here the natural position of the combatants was reversed, for the Asiatic power was in the west and the European in the east. In the seventh century this struggle was still a long way off, Sicily was still large enough to hold both the Greek and the Canaanite in peace.
The name by which we know the central of the three great peninsulas of the Mediterranean did not extend as far north as the Po in the time of Julius Caesar, and originally it covered a very small area indeed. In the fifth century Thucydides applies the name Italy to the modern Calabria—the western of the two extremities into which the peninsula divides. This extremity was inhabited, when the Greeks first visited it, by