CULTURES AND CULTURE IN SIXTH-CENTURY SICILY

It is possible to write something like a factual history of ancient Sicily from the end of the sixth century B.C. on, based mainly on Herodotus, Sicilian historians from Antiochus of Syracuse to Timaeus of Tauro-menium, and their better preserved successors, such as Diodorus of Sicily. From earlier decades, however, few events are known, so that we are limited to a general outline of cultural development, such as hellenization, town planning, social, ethnic, and cultural intercourse among different elements of the population, and changes in manufacture, art, architecture and trade. Fortunately, a great number of archaeological data have been amassed in recent decades enabling us to fill in some of the details of this general picture.

Three peoples of pre-Greek, pre-Punic Sicily were known to the ancients: Sicels east of the Halycus (Platani) river, Sicans to the west of it, and Elymians on the extreme north-western corner of the island. Modern archaeologists, however, though unable to differentiate culturally between Sicels and Sicans, have discovered two further cultural enclaves in eastern Sicily, one around Mylae (Milazzo) and the other at Morgantina (Serra Orlando), both showing clear traces of Italic, ‘Apennine’, origin; they are nowadays conventionally identified as ‘Ausonian’ and ‘Morgete’, respectively. In the sixth century B.C. all Sicilian cultures were already in a well-advanced phase of hellenization. Chalcidian influence, spreading from Zancle, Naxus, Catana and Leontini, affected the whole north-eastern belt of the island as far as Milazzo, Adrano and Caltagirone, with an advanced post at Serra Orlando.