There yet remained room for new settlements between Naxos and Syracuse: and Theoklês, the œkist of Naxos, found himself in a situation to occupy part of this space only five years after the foundation of Syracuse: perhaps he may have been joined by fresh settlers. He attacked and expelled the Sikels[687] from the fertile spot called Leontini, seemingly about half-way down on the eastern coast between Mount Ætna and Syracuse; and also from Katana, immediately adjoining to Mount Ætna, which still retains both its name and its importance. Two new Chalkidic colonies were thus founded,—Theoklês himself becoming œkist of Leontini, and Euarchus chosen by the Katanæan settlers themselves, of Katana.
The city of Megara was not behind Corinth and Chalkis in furnishing emigrants to Sicily. Lamis the Megarian, having now arrived with a body of colonists, took possession first of a new spot called Trotilus, but afterwards joined the recent Chalkidian settlement at Leontini. The two bodies of settlers, however, could not live in harmony, and Lamis, with his companions, was soon expelled; he then occupied Thapsus,[688] at a little distance to the northward of Ortygia or Syracuse, and shortly afterwards died. His followers made an alliance with Hyblôn, king of a neighboring tribe of Sikels, who invited them to settle in his territory; they accepted the proposition, relinquished Thapsus, and founded, in conjunction with Hyblôn, the city called the Hyblæan Megara, between Leontini and Syracuse. This incident is the more worthy of notice, because it is one of the instances which we find of a Grecian colony beginning by amicable fusion with the preëxisting residents: Thucydidês seems to conceive the prince Hyblôn as betraying his people against their wishes to the Greeks.[689]
It was thus that, during the space of five years, several distinct bodies of Greek emigrants had rapidly succeeded each other in Sicily: for the next forty years, we do not hear of any fresh arrivals, which is the more easy to understand as there were during that interval several considerable foundations on the coast of Italy, which probably took off the disposable Greek settlers. At length, forty-five years after the foundation of Syracuse, a fresh body of settlers arrived, partly from Rhodes under Antiphêmus, partly from Krête under Entimus, and founded the city of Gela on the south-western front of the island, between cape Pachynus and Lilybæum (B. C. 690)—still on the territory of the Sikels, though extending ultimately to a portion of that of the Sikans.[690] The name of the city was given from that of the neighboring river Gela.
One other fresh migration from Greece to Sicily remains to be mentioned, though we cannot assign the exact date of it. The town of Zanklê (now Messina), on the strait between Italy and Sicily, was at first occupied by certain privateers or pirates from Cumæ,—the situation being eminently convenient for their operations. But the success of the other Chalkidic settlements imparted to this nest of pirates a more enlarged and honorable character: a body of new settlers joined them from Chalkis and other towns of Eubœa, the land was regularly divided, and two joint œkists were provided to qualify the town as a member of the Hellenic communion—Periêrês from Chalkis, and Kratæmenês from Cumæ. The name Zanklê had been given by the primitive Sikel occupants of the place, meaning in their language a sickle; but it was afterwards changed to Messênê by Anaxilas, despot of Rhegium, who, when he conquered the town, introduced new inhabitants, in a manner hereafter to be noticed.[691]
Besides these emigrations direct from Greece, the Hellenic colonies in Sicily became themselves the founders of sub-colonies. Thus the Syracusans, seventy years after their own settlement (B. C. 664), founded Akræ—Kasmenæ, twenty years afterwards (B. C. 644), and Kamarina forty-five years after Kasmenæ (B. C. 599): Daskôn and Menekôlus were the œkists of the latter, which became in process of time an independent and considerable town, while Akræ and Kasmenæ seem to have remained subject to Syracuse. Kamarina was on the south-western side of the island, forming the boundary of the Syracusan territory towards Gela. Kallipolis was established from Naxos, and Eubœa (a town so called) from Leontini.[692]
Hitherto, the Greeks had colonized altogether on the territory of the Sikels; the three towns which remain to be mentioned were all founded in that of the Sikans,[693]—Agrigentum or Akragas, Selinûs, and Himera. The two former were both on the south-western coast,—Agrigentum bordering upon Gela on the one side, and upon Selinûs on the other. Himera was situated on the westerly portion of the northern coast,—the single Hellenic establishment in the time of Thucydidês which that long line of coast presented. The inhabitants of the Hyblæan Megara were founders of Selinûs, about 630 B. C., a century after their own establishment: the œkist Pamillus, according to the usual Hellenic practice, was invited from their metropolis Megara in Greece proper, but we are not told how many fresh settlers came with him: the language of Thucydidês leads us to suppose that the new town was peopled chiefly from the Hyblæan Megarians themselves. The town of Akragas, or Agrigentum, called after the neighboring river of the former name, was founded from Gela in B. C. 582. Its œkists were Aristonous and Pystilus, and it received the statutes and religious characteristics of Gela. Himera, on the other hand, was founded from Zanklê, under three œkists, Eukleidês, Simus, and Sakôn. The chief part of its inhabitants were of Chalkidic race, and its legal and religious characteristics were Chalkidic; but a portion of the settlers were Syracusan exiles, called Mylêtidæ, who had been expelled from home by a sedition, so that the Himeræan dialect was a mixture of Doric and Chalkidic. Himera was situated not far from the towns of the Elymi,—Eyrx and Egesta.
Such were the chief establishments founded by the Greeks in Sicily during the two centuries after their first settlement in 735 B. C. The few particulars just stated respecting them are worthy of all confidence,—for they come to us from Thucydidês,—but they are unfortunately too few to afford the least satisfaction to our curiosity. It cannot be doubted that these first two centuries were periods of steady increase and prosperity among the Sicilian Greeks, undisturbed by those distractions and calamities which supervened afterwards, and which led indeed to the extraordinary aggrandizement of some of their communities, but also to the ruin of several others: moreover, it seems that the Carthaginians in Sicily gave them no trouble until the time of Gelôn. Their position will indeed seem singularly advantageous, if we consider the extraordinary fertility of the soil in this fine island, especially near the sea,—its capacity for corn, wine, and oil, the species of cultivation to which the Greek husbandman had been accustomed under less favorable circumstances,—its abundant fisheries on the coast, so important in Grecian diet, and continuing undiminished even at the present day, together with sheep, cattle, hides, wool, and timber from the native population in the interior. These natives seem to have been of rude pastoral habits, dispersed either among petty hill-villages, or in caverns hewn out of the rock, like the primitive inhabitants of the Balearic islands and Sardinia; so that Sicily, like New Zealand in our century, was now for the first time approached by organized industry and tillage.[694] Their progress, though very great, during this most prosperous interval (between the foundation of Naxos, in 735 B. C. to the reign of Gelôn at Syracuse in 485 B. C.), is not to be compared to that of the English colonies in America; but it was nevertheless very great, and appears greater from being concentrated as it was in and around a few cities. Individual spreading and separation of residence were rare, nor did they consist either with the security or the social feelings of a Grecian colonist. The city to which he belonged was the central point of his existence, where the produce which he raised was brought home to be stored or sold, and where alone his active life, political, domestic, religious, recreative, etc., was carried on. There were dispersed throughout the territory of the city small fortified places and garrisons,[695] serving as temporary protection to the cultivators in case of sudden inroad; but there was no permanent residence for the free citizen except the town itself. This was, perhaps, even more the case in a colonial settlement, where everything began and spread from one central point, than in Attica, where the separate villages had once nourished a population politically independent. It was in the town, therefore, that the aggregate increase of the colony palpably concentrated itself,—property as well as population,—private comfort and luxury not less than public force and grandeur. Such growth and improvement was of course sustained by the cultivation of the territory, but the evidences of it were manifested in the town; and the large population which we shall have occasion to notice as belonging to Agrigentum, Sybaris, and other cities, will illustrate this position.
There is another point of some importance to mention in regard to the Sicilian and Italian cities. The population of the town itself may have been principally, though not wholly, Greek; but the population of the territory belonging to the town, or of the dependent villages which covered it, must have been in a great measure Sikel or Sikan. The proof of this is found in a circumstance common to all the Sicilian and Italian Greeks,—the peculiarity of their weights, measures, monetary system, and language. The pound and ounce are divisions and denominations belonging altogether to Italy and Sicily, and unknown originally to the Greeks, whose scale consisted of the obolus, the drachma, the mina, and the talent: among the Greeks, too, the metal first and most commonly employed for money was silver, while in Italy and Sicily copper was the primitive metal made use of. Now among all the Italian and Sicilian Greeks, a scale of weight and money arose quite different from that of the Greeks at home, and formed by a combination and adjustment of the one of these systems to the other; it is in many points complex and difficult to understand, but in the final result the native system seems to be predominant, and the Grecian system subordinate.[696] Such a consequence as this could not have ensued, if the Greek settlers in Italy and Sicily had kept themselves apart as communities, and had merely carried on commerce and barter with communities of Sikels: it implies a fusion of the two races in the same community, though doubtless in the relation of superior and subject, and not in that of equals. The Greeks on arriving in the country expelled the natives from the town, perhaps also from the lands immediately round the town; but when they gradually extended their territory, this was probably accomplished, not by the expulsion, but by the subjugation of those Sikel tribes and villages, much subdivided and each individually petty, whom their aggressions successively touched.
At the time when Theoklês landed on the hill near Naxos, and Archias in the islet of Ortygia, and when each of them expelled the Sikels from that particular spot, there were Sikel villages or little communities spread through all the neighboring country. By the gradual encroachments of the colony, some of these might be dispossessed and driven out of the plains near the coast into the more mountainous regions of the interior, but many of them doubtless found it convenient to submit, to surrender a portion of their lands, and to hold the rest as subordinate villagers of an Hellenic city-community:[697] and we find even at the time of the Athenian invasion (414 B. C.) villages existing in distinct identity as Sikels, yet subject and tributary to Syracuse. Moreover, the influence which the Greeks exercised, though in the first instance essentially compulsory, became also in part self-operating,—the ascendency of a higher over a lower civilization. It was the working of concentrated townsmen, safe among one another by their walls and by mutual confidence, and surrounded by more or less of ornament, public as well as private,—upon dispersed, unprotected, artless villagers, who could not be insensible to the charm of that superior intellect, imagination, and organization, which wrought so powerfully upon the whole contemporaneous world. To understand the action of these superior emigrants upon the native but inferior Sikels, during those three earliest centuries (730-430 B. C.) which followed the arrival of Archias and Theoklês, we have only to study the continuance of the same action during the three succeeding centuries which preceded the age of Cicero. At the period when Athens undertook the siege of Syracuse (B. C. 415), the interior of the island was occupied by Sikel and Sikan communities, autonomous, and retaining their native customs and language;[698] but in the time of Verres and Cicero (three centuries and a half afterwards) the interior of the island, as well as the maritime regions had become Hellenized: the towns in the interior were then hardly less Greek than those on the coast. Cicero contrasts favorably the character of the Sicilians with that of the Greeks generally (i. e. the Greeks out of Sicily), but he nowhere distinguishes Greeks in Sicily from native Sikels;[699] nor Enna and Centuripi from Katana and Agrigentum. The little Sikel villages became gradually semi-Hellenized and merged into subjects of a Grecian town during the first three centuries, this change took place in the regions of the coast,—during the following three centuries, in the regions of the interior; and probably with greater rapidity and effect in the earlier period, not only because the action of the Grecian communities was then closer, more concentrated, and more compulsory, but because also the obstinate tribes could then retire into the interior.
The Greeks in Sicily are thus not to be considered as purely Greeks, but as modified by a mixture of Sikel and Sikan language, customs, and character. Each town included in its non-privileged population a number of semi-Hellenized Sikels (or Sikans, as the case might be), who, though in a state of dependence, contributed to mix the breed and influence the entire mass. We have no reason to suppose that the Sikel or Œnotrian language ever became written, like Latin, Oscan, or Umbrian:[700] the inscriptions of Segesta and Halesus are all in Doric Greek, which supplanted the native tongue for public purposes as a separate language, but not without becoming itself modified in the confluence. In following the ever-renewed succession of violent political changes, the inferior capacity of regulated and pacific popular government, and the more unrestrained and voluptuous license, which the Sicilian and Italian Greeks[701] exhibit as compared with Athens and the cities of Greece proper,—we must call to mind that we are not dealing with pure Hellenism; and that the native element, though not unfavorable to activity or increase of wealth, prevented the Grecian colonist from partaking fully in that improved organization which we so distinctly trace in Athens from Solon downwards. How much the taste, habits, ideas, religion, and local mythes, of the native Sikels passed into the minds of the Sikeliots or Sicilian Greeks, is shown by the character of their literature and poetry. Sicily was the native country of that rustic mirth and village buffoonery which gave birth to the primitive comedy,—politicized and altered at Athens so as to suit men of the market-place, the ekklesia, and the dikastery,—blending, in the comedies of the Syracusan Epicharmus, copious details about the indulgences of the table (for which the ancient Sicilians were renowned) with Pythagorean philosophy and moral maxims,—but given with all the naked simplicity of common life, in a sort of rhythmical prose, without even the restraint of a fixed metre, by the Syracusan Sophrôn in his lost Mimes, and afterwards polished as well as idealized in the Bucolic poetry of Theokritus.[702] That which is commonly termed the Doric comedy was in great part at least, the Sikel comedy taken up by Dorian composers,—the Doric race and dialect being decidedly predominant in Sicily: the manners thus dramatized belonged to that coarser vein of humor which the Doric Greeks of the town had in common with the semi-Hellenized Sikels of the circumjacent villages. Moreover, it seems probable that this rustic population enabled the despots of the Greco-Sicilian towns to form easily and cheaply those bodies of mercenary troops, by whom their power was sustained,[703] and whose presence rendered the continuance of popular government, even supposing it begun, all but impossible.