The Invention of Sicily

A Mediterranean History

Jamie Mackay

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786637758
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Sicily is at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, and for over 2000 years has been the gateway between Europe, Africa and the East. It has long been seen as the frontier between Western Civilization and the rest, but never definitively part of either. Despite being conquered by empires - Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Hapsburg Spain - it remains uniquely apart. The island's story maps a mosaic that mixes the story of myth and wars, maritime empires and reckless crusades, and a people who refuse to be ruled.
In this riveting, rich history Jamie Mackay peels away the layers of this most mysterious of islands. This story finds its origins in ancient myth but has been reinventing itself across centuries: in conquest and resistance. Inseparable from these political and social developments are the artefacts of the nation's cultural patrimony - ancient amphitheatres, Arab gardens, Baroque Cathedrals, as well as great literature such as Giuseppe di Lampedusa's masterpiece The Leopard, and the novels and plays of Luigi Pirandello. In its modern era, Sicily has been the site of revolution, Cosa Nostra and, in the twenty-first century, the epicentre of the refugee crisis.
The Invention of Sicily is a dazzling introduction to the island, its history and its people.

PART I: Utopian Fragments

1
The Liquid Continent
(800 BC–826 AD)

The Colonies of Magna
Graecia, Hellenistic Culture,
Roman-Byzantine Occupations

After the fall of Troy, some of the Trojans escaped from the Achaeans, came in ships to Sicily, and settled next to the Sicanians … There were also Phoenicians living all round Sicily, who had occupied promontories upon the seacoasts and the islets.

Thucydides, account of the Greek migrations
across Southern Italy, fifth century BC

Of all foreign nations Sicily was the first who joined herself to the friendship and alliance of the Roman people. She was the first to be called a province; and the provinces are a great ornament to the empire … [It was here] our ancestors made their first strides to dominion over Africa.

Cicero, from his speech ‘Against Verres’, 70 BC

At the dawn of the eighth century BC the Mediterranean was just beginning to recover from a long period of social decline. For centuries, since around 1200 BC, communities across the region that had once been centres of Bronze Age civilisation had been struggling against disease, natural disasters and piracy, which together decimated their populations. By 780 BC, however, many of the territories adjacent to the sea were beginning to recover. This was a time of reawakening. In the east, the Neo-Assyrian empire was beginning to expand its territory from Persia towards Egypt. To the west, the Etruscans were settling in the hills around Rome. Perhaps the most dramatic transformation, though, took place in the Greek-speaking city-states of the Aegean. For thousands of years peoples like the Minoans of Crete had played an important role in developing tools and early trade. But it wasn’t until the eighth century that the most famous poleis, like Athens, Sparta and Corinth, began to develop from collections of villages into single, unified urban centres. New forms of culture emerged in tandem with this consolidation. In 776–72 BC, the first recorded Olympiad took place in the city of Elis, marking a new-found unity among the residents of these cities as well as a new calendar. Around the same time, Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, which are generally recognised as the founding works of Western literature. These dates are frustratingly vague, but together they represent the birth of a new kind of ‘classical’ world which, for our purposes here, marks the beginning of Sicily’s own ancient history.

Scholars sometimes describe Sicily as being ‘colonised’ by Greece. It’s important from the offset to distinguish this statement from the modern implications of that word. Starting from around 750 BC people from the Aegean cities did indeed settle on the island in large numbers. This immigration, though, was not so much a planned mission of territorial expansion – in an imperial model – as a spontaneous movement of peoples. The Greek cities themselves were wealthy but politically volatile. Most were governed as autocracies, and, as such, rivalries among dynasties were fiercely fought, and wars were frequent. The urban areas were overcrowded and under-resourced, and on the islands, where fertile land was limited, famine was rife. As a result, hundreds of farmers, tradespeople, soldiers and priests decided to set out across the Mediterranean in search of fortune elsewhere. The majority headed towards Southern Italy, where they established small settlements across the Gulf of Taranto, in modern-day Puglia, in Calabria and eventually Naples on the Tyrrhenian coast. From the beginning, though, Sicily was one of the most coveted destinations. Its rich volcanic soil made it a good place to farm, and it also offered abundant supplies of alum, sulphur and salt, the last of which was highly valued in the Mediterranean market. Homer dedicated several verses to celebrating Sicily’s natural advantages, describing it as a ‘wooded isle’ with ‘innumerable goats’ and ‘well-watered meadows’ where ‘vines would never fail’.¹ Initially, the Greek presence on Sicily was limited to small conurbations and trading posts, but in 735 BC Thucles of Euboea founded Naxos, the first large-scale colony on the island, near modern-day Messina. This marked the beginning of a sustained programme of city building, which, over the centuries, attracted thousands of immigrants to the island.

The Greeks were the largest group to populate ancient Sicily, but they were not the island’s only inhabitants. As early as the ninth century BC, long before Thucles and his followers were establishing themselves, the Phoenicians, a seafaring people from Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, had set up trading posts on the island’s west coast, just across the water from what is now Tunisia. By the time the Greek presence was developing in a serious way, their own cities, the most important of which was named Motya, were already thriving thanks to a strong trade in silver, tin and luxury purple dyes. Sicily was also home to numerous smaller groups that historians sometimes call ‘indigenous’ peoples: namely the Sicanians, Sicels and Elymians. Some ancient Greek historians described these tribes as if they were primitive savages. In fact, they were well-organised agricultural societies, capable of producing metal weapons and other tools. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about their values, culture or religion, though there is some evidence to suggest that they lived in large groups. The Roman Temple of Diana, for example, which is still accessible to visitors in the popular seaside resort of Cefalù in the north of Sicily, has Sicanian foundations, which, if nothing else, demonstrates that the island’s inhabitants had developed sufficient scientific literacy to build monuments. Vast tombs in the south, like the rocky necropolis at Pantalica, likewise suggest that the island had a sizeable population dating back to the thirteenth century BC.² It’s unlikely, though, that the arriving migrants were particularly concerned with these older pre-classical constructions. Their priority was to understand their immediate cohabitants, and it was indeed their encounters with these peoples that prompted them to give the island one of its first recorded names: Sikania.

At a glance, settlement building in Sicily seems to have developed along quite strict territorial lines. The Greeks occupied the island’s south-east, while the Phoenicians established themselves in the north and west. In reality these divisions are crude at best and serve in some respects to obscure a great blurring of beliefs and cultural practices. In Lentini, one of the richest inland Greek colonies, the Sicel population integrated so closely with the migrants that they too must have played some role in the development of so-called ‘Greek culture’ in the centuries to come. Across the island, the Phoenician alphabet provided a means for the native people to express their cultures in a new manner, and this, ultimately, had an influence on the development of the Greek letter system. There were tensions of course. The Elymians were particularly persistent in challenging the military and economic expansion of the new migrants. Their main city, Segesta, was almost constantly at war with the Greek city of Selinunte until well into the fourth century BC. Yet even in this case, there is ample evidence that the cultures continued to weave in and out of one another. Segesta is still home to one of the island’s best-preserved Greek-style theatres, as well as an impressive Doric temple thought to have been constructed by an Athenian architect. If war was common in ancient Sicily, this was largely a question of economic and political jostling, and did not necessarily preclude cooperation, dialogue and trade.

Sicily’s ancient inhabitants were remarkably diverse in terms of their ethnicities, customs and political beliefs. This was by no means a ‘white’ culture. Nevertheless, starting in the seventh century, the islanders gradually began to develop some unified characteristics, particularly in the sphere of religion. Over hundreds of years all of the communities began to venerate what we now usually refer to as ‘Greek’ mythological figures.³ It was Sicily that Daedalus and Icarus were trying to reach when they planned their escape from imprisonment in Crete using flying machines. We could, in this sense, interpret Icarus’s own perishing, by ‘flying too close to the sun’, as a warning on the part of Aegean Greeks to any prospective emigrants thinking of embarking on the dangerous journey towards Sicily. The island was also home to Polyphemus, the Cyclops, who some historians have read as a symbol of the apparently ‘blind’ Sicels, Sicanians and Elymians. While some of the colonisers did feel a sense of superiority over the native islanders, the fact is that the vast majority of Sicilians, regardless of their ethnicity, would have turned to ‘Greek’ myths to name and explain the natural phenomena around them. The Strait of Messina – the main crossing between Sicily and Italy – was known as the home of the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis; embodiments, one imagines, of the whirlpools and jagged rocks that cause difficulties for ships to this day. Similarly, the Aeolian islands, with their gusty breezes, were the domain to the kind and hospitable demigod, Aeolus, ‘the keeper of winds’.

Several of the early myths about Sicily are concerned with refugees. Perhaps the best example is the tale of Arethusa, a naiad who is said to have fled to the island to escape the unwelcome advances of the river god Alpheios. According to this story, Artemis, the goddess of hunting, transformed the nymph into a fast-flowing stream, which is said to have surfaced in south-east Sicily, and as such provided an escape from the violence she faced in her homeland. Unfortunately for Arethusa, Alpheios was so determined to possess his beloved that he followed her to the island, and, surfacing in the same stream, forced himself on her. Other female deities, like Astarte, an African goddess of war and ‘sacred prostitution’, fought back against the patriarchal norms of classical culture. For the Sicanian and Phoenician population that worshipped her in the island’s west, Astarte was not an object to be pursued, but a figure of dominant sexuality who combined the life-giving imagery usually associated with female gods, with notions of self-defence and conquest. The cult of Astarte gradually declined as Greek religion spread across the island, and the local population eventually repurposed her temple in Erice, a hill-town above the western port of Trapani, as a shrine to the love god Aphrodite, and later the Madonna. The fact that her temple existed at all, though, is an important and often overlooked indicator of how African traditions helped feed Sicily’s mythological imagination.

Of all the Greek deities it was Persephone, the goddess of grain, who came to be most closely associated with Sicily. Some local cults considered the fertile fields around Enna, in the centre of the island, as the location where Hades abducted the young girl and confined her to the underworld to serve as his queen. In the Sicilian version of the story Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and Persephone’s mother, rendered the island barren in protest against Zeus, her father, who had failed to intervene against her kidnapper. In an attempt to restore fertility to the land, and to pacify Demeter, Zeus ordered Hades to release Persephone. Below ground, though, circumstances had changed. During her time in the underworld, Persephone went on a hunger strike against her captor. Famished, she eventually gave in and consumed food from the world of the dead. This acceptance of hospitality, Hades argued, allowed him at least some ‘legitimate’ possession of the girl. Zeus and Hades debated the point, and finally reached a compromise. For half the year Persephone would be allowed back to the surface of the earth, to see her mother. The rest of the time she would be required to spend at Hades’s side in the underworld. For Sicilians, Persephone’s annual ascension to the world of the living, and reunion with Demeter, came to represent spring, her return to the underworld, and Hades’s embrace, winter. To this day, some Sicilian farmers speak of two seasons rather than four in accordance with this ancient conception of nature.

One final tale about Sicily gives a rather different insight into the way ancient peoples made sense of their geographical surroundings. Mount Etna, the volcano to the island’s east, was and still is Sicily’s most magical place. Some local cults considered its snowy peak a pillar of heaven, the site of the fire god Hephaestus’s divine smithy where he would forge weapons for the Olympians. The Greeks, though, were particularly afraid of what lay underground: Etna was also known as the domain of Typhon, one of ancient mythology’s most terrifying monsters. There are countless chronicles of this grotesque figure. Hesiod offers a particularly extensive description in his Theogony, in which, in addition to a dragon-like appearance, he describes the beast as having a hundred fire-breathing snake heads, a strange, grotesque assortment of wings, claws and tails, and fire in the place of eyelashes.⁴ Later poets describe him as having multiple arms and an array of features, including those of wolves, bears and lions, and specify that he can be recognised by his terrible roar which is comprised of howls, screams and barks.⁵ In most versions, Typhon is the father of all monsters, and, together with his lover Echidna, is responsible for spawning a whole range of other creatures including the Chimera, Cerberus and the Sphinx. In addition to his grotesque physical appearance, Typhon was, above all else, an outlaw, a revolutionary and an enemy of the gods. The mythological tradition maintains that he attempted to overthrow Zeus in one of the most significant coups among the Olympians. When the attempt failed, the chief deity banished him to Sicily, imprisoning him there beneath the volcano where, in anguish, he would ‘belch forth holiest springs of unapproachable fire’.⁶

The story of Typhon captures the dual character that Sicily held in the ancient Greek imagination. On the one hand the settlers saw it as a rich and fertile place. On the other, it was dangerous and unpredictable. While it offered sanctuary, it was also associated with exile, banishment and imprisonment. Some historians have read Typhon as a symbol of the anxiety mainland Greek poets may have felt when confronted with stories about the mysterious new colonies. Whatever the truth of the matter, this sense of the island being both blessed and cursed is a fundamental premise of what will later become ‘Sicilian culture’. As we shall see throughout this book, the idea of the island as a particularly polarised place – characterised by extreme contrasts of bounty and scarcity, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness – will obsess writers, artists and intellectuals for centuries to come. Sticking to the immediate context of Greek mythology, however, it remains more fruitful to understand the island in terms of its fundamental strangeness. Sicily was Greek, yet it was somehow Other; a land of migrants and mystery. It was a tabula rasa, where the tensions and contradictions of the Peloponnese world could be contained, but also let loose.

As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, it was the expansion of cities that enabled the spread of mythology across Sicily. Throughout the classical period, Syracuse stood above all others. Today, this sprawling traffic-choked conurbation on the eastern edge of the island looks rather worse for wear. In the fifth century BC, however, it was one of the most important cultural centres in the world; a rival to Athens in terms of its wealth and influence. Natural conditions played a major role in its early success. When Corinthian settlers founded the city in 733 BC they chose an ideal site. The urban area was unique among Sicilian settlements in that it was comprised of both a long stretch of coast and a small island just a few metres off the shore, known as Ortygia, which was blessed with a fresh water supply.⁷ This island-within-an-island served as a natural fortress, but it also provided the city with two protected harbours, one of which was used for trade, the other as a dock for what would, over time, become a sizeable navy. In the context of the initial scramble to find territory, these were significant advantages and helped set the city apart from other, less well-positioned, settlements.

Syracuse’s rise began in earnest in 485 BC when the city’s aristocratic rulers conceded power to a renowned mercenary captain. Like most Greek city-states at the time, Syracuse was controlled by noble families, called the gamori, who passed power down through hereditary means. In the first decades of the fifth century BC, however, this ruling class was consumed by an interfactional conflict which resulted in several of the most important historic families being banished. Eager to win back their positions of influence, a group of these exiled nobles turned to Gelon, a common-born warrior, for assistance. Gelon was a skilled horseman who had amassed a large army made up of volunteers from small Greek towns and Sicel villages. Thanks in part to this large-scale public support, he had obtained control of much of Sicily’s southernmost coast. The rebel gamori proposed him a deal. They would facilitate his rise to power in Syracuse, on the sole proviso that he would reinstate them into key administrative positions. Gelon agreed, and marched his army to the city, expecting a long-term siege. Faced with such a large military presence at the gates, however, the incumbent nobles quickly surrendered. The mercenary captain was therefore free to proceed, virtually unopposed, towards Ortygia, where he took power as the city’s first tyrant.⁸

Under Gelon’s rule Syracuse automatically took possession of all the Greek-speaking settlements along Sicily’s south-east coast that had pledged allegiance to the warrior. This in itself was a significant gain for the city. In the months to come, however, the tyrant continued to embark on a number of small military campaigns during which he took control of other towns and villages further north, around Etna. By 480 BC Syracuse was more than just a city; it was a small-scale colonial state in its own right. Elsewhere on the island, neighbouring powers were understandably concerned by this development. That year Carthage, a Phoenician colony in what is now Tunisia, sent a large army comprised of troops from western Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, to block Gelon’s ascension. They met the Greek forces at Himera, a town just outside what is now Palermo, but were unable to break through Syracuse’s well-trained lines of cavalry, archers and warriors. When Gelon’s navy arrived, outflanking the Phoenician boats, the aggressors were forced to retreat back towards the North African coast. The victory was a triumph for the defending Greek forces and it had long-term consequences. For decades following their failed offensive the Carthaginians were forced to pay huge reparations and, as a result, their grip over the west of the island began to slowly decline.

Back in Syracuse the spoils of war provided the funds for a cultural revolution. Gelon had secured his city’s status largely thanks to his skills on the battlefield. Between 478 and 467 BC, however, his brother Hieron I l...