The Carthaginian blood in Sicily was certainly foreign, and the Elymæan was probably so. That of the Sikels was allied to the older Sikanian; perhaps, as the Danish of the Northmen in England was to that of the Anglo-Saxons. Such were the elements that came into the island. But, according to our hypothesis, there was an efflux out of it, to Æolian and Ionian Greece, and, perhaps, to some of those parts of Asia and the Ægean sea-board, which are claimed by the Hellenes as colonies from their own shores. Subsequent to this there went on the contest between the Sikani and Sikeli, even as the struggle between the Danes and Saxons went on in Alfred’s time; whilst Sikeliot Greeks and Phœnicians were making settlements on the coasts, and meditating a contest for the supremacy over both. First from Sicily and Southern Italy to Greece; then from Greece to Sicily and Southern Italy—such is the hypothetic line of migration, analogies to which may be found elsewhere. Sumatra, for instance, and the Malaccan Peninsula are considered to stand in the same relation. The island (Sumatra) is first peopled from the Peninsula, the tribes then occupying it being comparatively rude and savage. But, in the island, civilization increases, just as the South Italians are supposed to advance in their social condition when transplanted to Hellenic soil. Thirdly, the islanders (the Sumatrans), after the development of a powerful kingdom, make settlements on the mother-country (the Peninsula of Malacca), and (an important circumstance in our criticism) partly from the effect of changes upon themselves, and partly from changes in the parent stock, no recognition of the original affinity takes place. The aborigines of Malaya look upon their sovereigns of the sea-coast as strangers, themselves being considered what a Greek would call barbarians. The true affinity is only known to the European ethnologists. So far, then, is the present hypothesis from being deficient in analogies to support it.
The historical period begins with the contest between the Greeks and the Carthaginians as to who should hold in vassalage the Sikeli and Sikani; with a subordinate series of jealousies between the Doric and Ionic branches of the Greeks. Until about 300 B.C., the struggle is, comparatively, uncomplicated. Afterwards, however, the free introduction of mercenaries from Southern Italy, of Opican, Samnite, and Lucanian origin, engenders new elements of admixture. The Carthaginian power attains its height about this time. Then the island becomes the battle-field between the two republics, and from 250 B.C., to 450 A.D. (in round numbers), a period of 700 years, Sicily is a Roman province.
That the legionaries and officials were Roman in their political relations only, is nearly certain. Ethnologically they must have been chiefly South Italian. And the female part must have been native Sicilian. What does this mean—Greek, Carthaginian, Sikanian, or Sikelian? Any one in particular, or a little of each? The paramount fact for this question is the evidence to the existence of Sikeli and Sikani up to the reduction of the island. From then we hear no more of them: not, however, because they are known to have become extinct, but because their relations to Greece have ceased, and the historians who might mention them are wanting. Rome had no contemporary literature; and when it had, the Sicilian was known only as opposed to the Roman; for the writers use the word Siculi, in a general sense, making no distinction between the Sikel, the Sikan, and the Sikeliot. They were treated, however, as Greeks, not as barbarians; and the Latin language was not forced upon them. This is an inference from more than one expression in Cicero’s Oration against Verres, where they are spoken of as Greek.—“Novum est in Siculis, quidem, et in omnibus Græcis monstri simile.”—ii. 11. 65. Again, “Itaque eum non solum patronum istius insulæ sed etiam sotera inscriptum vidi Syracusis.”—Ibid. 63.
If the Romans disturbed the ethnology but little, the question is reduced to the extent to which the Greek colonies either displaced the earlier inhabitants, or effected an intermixture. Of Ducetius, a Sikel king, powerful in the middle of the island, we hear in the times between Gelon and the Athenian invasion; and of other less important chiefs (some with Greek names), we hear until the first Punic war. They are always, however, Sikel. Of the Sikanians, Elymæans, and the so-called Phocian Greeks, little or nothing is said. At the downfall of the Roman Empire, Sicily seems to have been Greek in speech, and Sikelo-Sikanian, strongly crossed with Greek, in blood. Then came the piracies of Genseric and his Vandals; then the invasion of the Goths of Theodoric; then the island is reconquered by Belisarius as a general of the Eastern empire; none of which events were of much ethnological importance. Not so the events of the ninth century. The Arab conquest was a physical as well as a moral influence.
A.D. 827-878.
“With a fleet of one hundred ships and an army of seven hundred horse, and ten thousand foot, the Arabs landed at Mazara, but after some partial victories, Syracuse was delivered by the Greeks, and the invaders reduced to the necessity of feeding on the flesh of their own horses; in their turn they were relieved by a powerful reinforcement of their brethren of Andalusia: the largest and western part of the island was gradually reduced, and the commodious harbour of Palermo was chosen for the seat of the naval and military power of the Saracens. Syracuse preserved about fifty years the faith which she had sworn to Christ and to Cæsar. In the last and fatal siege, her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood above twenty days against the battering-rams and catapultæ, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers; and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners of the imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin Mary. The deacon, Theodosius, with the bishop and clergy, was dragged in chains from the altar to Palermo, cast into a subterranean dungeon, and exposed to the hourly peril of death or apostasy; his pathetic, and not inelegant complaint, may be read as the epitaph of his country. From the Roman conquest to this final calamity, Syracuse, now dwindled to the primitive isle of Ortygia, had insensibly declined; yet the relics were still precious; the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one million of pieces of gold (about four hundred thousand pounds sterling), and the captives must have out-numbered the seventeen thousand Christians who were transported from the sack of Tauromenium into African servitude. In Sicily, the religion and language of the Greeks were eradicated; and such was the docility of the rising generation, that fifteen thousand boys were circumcised and clothed on the same day with the son of the Fatimite caliph. The Arabian squadrons issued from the harbours of Palermo, Biserta, and Tunis; a hundred and fifty towns of Calabria and Campania were attacked and pillaged; nor could the suburbs of Rome be defended by the name of the Cæsars and apostles. Had the Mahometans been united, Italy must have fallen an easy and glorious accession to the empire of the prophet; but the caliphs of Bagdad had lost their authority in the west; the Aglabites and Fatimites usurped the provinces of Africa; their emirs of Sicily aspired to independence, and the design of conquest and dominion was degraded to a repetition of predatory inroads.”[9]
A.D. 1029, Aversa was founded; a fact common to the history of both Sicily and Southern Italy; from which the rule of the Normans in Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria dates. Its details are those of a romance; the deeds of a small but unscrupulous body of adventurers, too few to impress any new character on the stock with which they came in contact. Still they require mention, though but a handful of men. They were of mixed blood themselves; Scandinavian on the fathers’, French on the mothers’, side; French, too, in speech. They were recruited by heterogeneous accessions from Southern Italy.
“Si vicinorum quis perniciosus ad illos
Confugiebat, eum gratanter suscipiebant:
Moribus et linguâ quoscunque venire videbant
Informant propriâ, gens efficiatur ut una.”[10]
A.D. 1204.
The beginning of the thirteenth century sees the break-up of the Norman power, and Sicily transferred to the empire; one of the more notable facts of this transfer being the removal of sixty thousand Saracens to Nocera, in the south of Italy. Saracen, however, though it means Mahometan, by no means, necessarily, means Arab. Then we have the dominion of the French, ending with the Sicilian Vespers, and the death of eight thousand of them. Catalonians, Genoese, Modern Greeks, and Albanians (?) complete the list of the elements of intermixture in Sicily; notwithstanding which, and notwithstanding all the previous immigrations, I believe the basis of the stock to be Sikel chiefly, and next to Sikel, Greek.