Sicels
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The Sicels (Latin: Siculi; Greek: Σικελοί) were one of the three main tribes who, before the arrival of Greek colonists, inhabited Sicily, according to the traditional ethnic division of Thucydides (vi:2). The Sicels have given Sicily the name it has held since antiquity, but they rapidly fused into the culture of Magna Graecia.
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[edit] History
The Sicels, who spoke an Indo-European language, occupied eastern Sicily as well as southern Italy[1] whereas the Sicani (Greek: Sikanoi) and Elymi (Greek Elymoi) inhabited central and western Sicily. It is probable that the two latter peoples spoke non-Indo-European languages, although this is not quite certain, particularly with regard to the Elymian language, which some would consider related to Ligurian or to Anatolian. The common assumption is that the Sicels were the more recent arrivals; they introduced the use of iron into Bronze Age Sicily and brought the domesticated horse. Their arrival on the island has been tentatively set around 1400 BC. The Sicel necropolis of Pantàlica, near Syracuse is the best known, but a Sicel necropolis has also been found at Noto; their elite tombs "a forno" or "oven-shaped" take the form of beehives.
Thucydides and other classical writers were aware of the traditions according to which the Sicels had once lived in Central Italy, east and even north of Rome (Servius' commentary on Aeneid VII.795; Dionysius of Halicarnassus i.9.22). Thence they were dislodged by Umbrian and Sabine tribes, and finally crossed into Sicily. Their social organization appears to have been tribal, their economy, agricultural. According to Diodorus Siculus (V.6.3-4), after a series of conflicts with the Sicani, the river Salso was declared the boundary between their respective territories.
The chief Sicel towns were: Agyrium (Agira); Centuripa or Centuripae (Centorbi, but now once again called Centuripe); Henna (later Castrogiovanni, which is a corruption of Castrum Hennae through the Arabic Qasr-janni, but since the 1920s once again called Enna); and three sites named Hybla: Hybla Major, called Geleatis or Gereatis, on the river Symaethus; Hybla Minor, on the east coast north of Syracuse (possibly pre-dating the Dorian colony of Hyblaean Megara); and Hybla Heraea in the south of Sicily.
With the coming of Greek colonist and the growing influence of Greek civilization, the Sicels withdrew by degrees into the interior of Sicily. However, in the first middle of the fifth century BC a sicel leader, Ducetius, was able to create an organised sicel state as a unitary domain, including several cities in the central and south of the island. After a few years of independence, his army was defeated by the Greeks in 450 BC. With the coming of the Greek colonists, the Siceli withdrew by degrees into the interior, and their increasingly Hellenized culture lost its distinctive character.
[edit] Language
Of the Sicel language little is known from glosses of ancient writers and from some inscriptions. It is thought that the Sicels did not employ writing until they were influenced by the Greek colonists. The first inscription was found on a spouted jug found at Centuripe; it uses a Greek alphabet of the 5th or 6th century BCE. Four Sicel inscriptions have been found in recent decades. An important inscription has been found at Centuripe.
[edit] Mythology
Their characteristic cult of the Palici is influenced by Greek myth in the version that has survived, in which the local nymph Talia bore to Adranus, the volcanic god whom the Greeks identified with Hephaestus, twin sons, who were "twice-born (palin "newly"; ikein "to come"), born first of their nymph mother, and then of the earth, because of the "jealousy" of Hera, who urged Mother Earth, Gaia, to swallow up the nymph. Then the soil parted, giving birth to the twins, who were venerated in Sicily as patrons of navigation and of agriculture. In the most archaic level of Greek mythology, a titan, Tityos, grew so large that he split his mother's womb and had to be carried to term by Gaia herself. He came to the attention of later Greek mythographers only when he attempted to waylay Leto near Delphi. If such a mytheme is set into action as ritual, it is usual to see a pair of sacrificial children laid in the earth to encourage the green growth.
In the temple to Adranus, father of the Palici, the Sicels kept an eternal fire. A god Hybla (or goddess Hyblaea), after whom three towns were named, had a sanctuary at Hybla Gereatis. The connection of Demeter and Kore with Henna (the rape of Proserpine) and of the nymph Arethusa with Syracuse is due to Greek influence.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Thucydides reported that there were still Siculi in Italy; he derived "Italia" from an eponymous Italo, a Sicel king. (Histories, vi.4.6),
[edit] Sources
- Thucydydes, vi.2 and vi.4.6
[edit] External links
- Archaic Italy: the Siculi (URL Checked 2006-03-26)
[edit] Further reading
- L. Bernabò Brea, 1966. Sicily Before the Greeks (revised edition; originally published in Italian, 1966)
