Megara Hyblaea

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Megara Hyblaea (perhaps identical with Hybla Major) is the name of an ancient Greek colony in Sicily, situated near Augusta on the east coast, 12 miles NNW of Syracuse, Italy. It was founded in 728 BC by Megarean colonists, who had previously settled successively at Trotilon, Leontini and Thapsos.

A hundred years later it founded Selinus, apparently because it had no room for development (citation needed). It never seems to have been a town of great importance, and had no advantages of position. It is however an exemplary example of town planning in the Greek colonial period. The land was given to the colonists by the Sicel king Hyblon, who they named the polis after, despite it's small size and modest harbour it had very fertile land (Thucydides-6.3). It was destroyed by Gelo about 481 BC, and its walls seem to have been razed to the ground. In the Athenian expedition against Syracuse (415-413) Lamachus proposed (it being then deserted) to make it the Athenian base of operations; but his advice was not taken, and in the next sprint the Syracusans fortified it. In 309 it was still fortified; but after Marcellus captured it, in 214, we hear little more of it.

Excavations carried on in 1891 led to the discovery of the northern portion of the western town wall, which in one section served at the same time as an embankment against floods—it was apparently more conspicuous in the time of Philipp Cluver, (Sicilia antiqua, Leiden, 1619) p. 133— of an extensive necropolis, about 1500 tombs of which have been explored, and of a deposit of votive objects from a temple. The harbour lay to the north of the town.