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Sicily and South Italy: the Background to Thucydides Books 6 and 7

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Keith Rutter
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Extract

The story of the Greek settlements in Sicily and southern Italy is not commonly regarded as one of the 'central themes' of Greek history. For long periods, the paucity of documentary evidence means that there is little story to tell anyway, and when a history of events is possible, it is often because those events are closely linked with the more fully documented history of Greece itself. Such an occasion occurred in 415, when the Athenians decided to send a fleet to western waters, and subsequently to undertake the siege of Syracuse. These events, so vividly narrated by Thucydides in the polished narrative of Books 6 and 7, are often studied today, but many modern readers start with a disadvantage shared, as Thucydides would have us believe, with the majority of Athenians of his own day - ignorance of Sicily and its inhabitants. Thucydides responded by giving his readers an account of the various peoples who inhabited Sicily, to impress upon them the number and power of the cities and settlements on the island (6.2-6). This article offers a short introduction to the political situation the Athenians encountered in South Italy and Sicily. It is written with a minimum of documentation, apart from references to the text of Thucydides. (The spelling of proper names follows that used in the Penguin translation, from which quotations are also taken; some suggestions for further reading are given at the end.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , October 1986 , pp. 142 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1986

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References

Notes

For detailed discussion of the text and interpretation of Thucydides 6 and 7, Gomme, A. W., Andrewes, A., Dover, K. J., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. iv (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, is indispensable. Among books on the Greek settlements in Italy and Sicily, J. Boardman, The Greeks Overseas (new and enlarged edition, 1980)Google Scholar, chapter 5, concentrates on the material remains; Woodhead, A. G., The Greeks in the West (London, 1962)Google Scholar, is a wide-ranging introduction; Dunbabin, T. J., The Western Greeks (Oxford, 1948)Google Scholar, reviews in detail the evidence for the foundation and early development of the colonies (down to 480 B.C.). Many individual sites are discussed and illustrated in Margaret Guido's two books (both published by Faber and Faber): Sicily: An Archaeological Guide (1967), Southern Italy: An Archaeological Guide (1972). On Sicily, the first five chapters of Finley, M. I., Ancient Sicily to the Arab Conquest (2nd ed., London, 1979)Google Scholar are particularly useful, and Greek relations with the indigenous populations are clearly discussed and illustrated in Sjoqvist, Erik, Sicily and the Greeks (Ann Arbor, 1973)Google Scholar.