Listed 3 sub titles with search on: History for destination: "SIKELIA Ancient Hellenic lands ITALY".
Large island at the tip of Italy.
Greek settlers started arriving in Sicily during the VIIIth century
B. C. from various cities of Greece.
Naxos was founded in 734
B. C. by settlers from Chalcis,
also responsible for the foundation of Leontini
(around 729), Zancle (between
750 and 725) and Catania.
Syracuse was a colony of
Corinth established in 733,
while a little further north, settlers from Megaris
founded a city to which they gave the same name as their mother city.
More Greek cities were founded during the VIIth century B. C., including
Gela by settlers from Crete
and Rhodes (around 680),
which was itself at the origin of Acragas
(around 580), Selinous, a
colony of Sicilian Megara
and Himera, founded by citizens
from Zancle and Syracuse
(around 625).
Meanwhile, Phoenicians from Carthage
were settling the western part of Sicily, which eventually led to the battle of
Himera in 480, won by Theron,
tyrant of Acragas, allied
to Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse,
over the Carthaginian general Amilcar.
Sicily played a major role in the eventual defeat of Athens
in the Peloponnesian war, through the doomed expedition against it suggested by
Alcibiades in 415, that ended in the massacre of several thousand Athenians troops
and their general Nicias after Alcibiades had gone over to Sparta
in the wake of the affairs of the Herms and of the parodies of mysteries in which
he was accused of being implicated.
Sicily was the birthplace of rhetoric, through people such as Tisias
of Syracuse, Corax and later
Gorgias of Leontini and Lysias,
whose father Cephalus (staged in Plato's Republic) was of Sicilian origin.
Bernard Suzanne (page last updated 1998), ed.
This text is cited July 2003 from the Plato and his dialogues URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks.
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