various civilizations to this part of the world. It is the meeting of so varied elements in the same place which makes the history of Lower Italy and Sicily more involved, and at the same time more romantic, than that of any country we know. But always beneath the invasions of such different races we must conceive the old Greek or hellenized population and the Greek language as (practically) the lowest stratum.
First came the Romans. Rome spread her power over the whole peninsula by the third century B.C.; she was mistress of all Sicily at the end of the first Punic war (241 B.C.). From this time till far into the Middle Ages these lands formed part of the Roman Empire. But that does not mean that all their inhabitants became Romans. The Empire included men of every kind of race; as a rule, Rome left them to continue their own civilizations with the use of their own languages. Undoubtedly now the Latin element enters Southern Italy, but only so far as that Roman governors were appointed and Latin was the language of the Government. In some cases we know of deliberate Latin colonization, though it was not the common practice. Augustus (31 B.C. to A.D. 14) sent Roman colonists to Sicily; then for the first time Latin was spoken in the island. But these Latin colonies were minorities. There were such at Syracuse, Panormus (Palermo), and Messana. Only in the case of Tauromenium (Taormina) do we read that all Greeks were expelled to make room for a Latin colony.[1] But we know that long after the Roman power was firmly established here the people remained Greek. Diodore says of Sicilians that the Greek language was commonly spoken among them.[2] In Cicero's time the Syracusan Senate spoke and even wrote to Rome in Greek.[3]
Both the Greek and Latin of Sicily were looked upon as provincial, less elegant than the languages of Athens and Rome. So Cicero again says that Q. Cæcilius would have done better if he had learned "Greek letters at Athens, not at Lilybæum, Roman letters at Rome, not in Sicily."[4] During the first Christian centuries the chief writers of Sicily and Southern
- ↑ Augustus colonized Syracuse, Panormus, Messana, Tauromenium. From Tauromenium (Ταυρομένιον, Taormina) he expelled the Greeks to make room for his Roman colonists (Diodor. Sic., "Bibl. Hist.," Lib. xvi, § 7; ed. Teubner, vol. iv, p. 14).
- ↑ Diodor. Sic., v, 6 (Teubner, vol. ii, pp. 11-12).
- ↑ Cicero, "In C. Verrem," Act. ii, L. v, cap. 57 (=§§ 148-149): "ἐδικαιώθησαν, hoc est, ut Siculi locuntur, supplicio adfecti ac necati sunt."
- ↑ Cicero, Orat. "In Q. Cæcilium Diuinatio," cap. 12 (=§ 39).
