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KASMENAI (Ancient city) SICILY
Casmenae (Kasmene, Herod. Steph. B., Kasmenai, Thuc.: Eth. Kasmenaios,
Steph.), a city of Sicily founded by a colony from Syracuse, 90 years after the
establishment of the parent city, or B.C. 643. (Thuc. vi. 5.) It is afterwards
mentioned by Herodotus as affording shelter to the oligarchical party called the
Gamori, when they were expelled from Syracuse; and it was from thence that they
applied for assistance to Gelon, then ruler of Gela. (Her. vii. 155.) But from
this period Casmenae disappears from history. Thucydides appears to allude to
it as a place still existing in his time, but we find no subsequent trace of its
name. It was probably destroyed by some of the tyrants of Syracuse, according
to their favourite policy of removing the inhabitants from the smaller towns to
the larger ones. Its site is wholly uncertain: Cluverius was disposed to fix it
at Scicli, but Sir R. Hoare mentions the ruins of an ancient city as existing
about 2 miles E. of Sta Croce (a small town 9 miles W. of Scicli), which may very
possibly be those of Casmenae. They are described by him as indicating a place
of considerable magnitude and importance; but do not appear to have ever been
carefully examined. (Cluver. Sicil. p. 358 ; Hoare's Class. Tour, vol. ii. p.
266.)
This text is from: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) (ed. William Smith, LLD). Cited August 2004 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
The remains of an archaic city on the plateau of Monte Casale, ca.
12 km to the W of Palazzolo (ancient Akrai). A colony of Syracuse, it was founded,
according to Thucydides (6.5.3), 90 years after the mother city, ca. 643 B.C.
Herodotos (7.155) reports that ca. 485 B.C. Gelon removed the Syracusan Gamoroi
from this city and brought them back to their home city, from which they had been
expelled by the people in league with the slaves. A fragment of Philistos (Jacoby,
3 B.559, fr. 5), as emended by Pais, affirms that Kasmenai sided with Syracuse
during its struggle against the rebellious Kamarina and its Sikel allies in 553-552
B.C. And in 357 Dion, after landing at Heraklea Minoa, seems to have recruited
troops at Kasmenai on his way to Syracuse (Diod.Sic. 16.9.5). Insiguificant mentions
of the colony occur also in Stephanos of Byzantium and in scholia to Thucydides
(ed. Didot, p. 102).
On a plateau at the edge of Monte Casale are the ruins of a circuit
wall built with enormous blocks only roughly shaped. It was ca. 3400 m in length,
3 m thick, with external rectangular towers. Within the circuit the city comprised
at least 38 parallel streets (ca. 3 m wide), running from NW to SE, with blocks
usually no wider than 25 m. The E-W traffic utilized alleys of irregular width
since the houses were aligned only along their N side. This system appears at
first glance comparable to what is usually called per strigas, but it should be
noted that, although stenopoi are amply attested, this settlement lacked proper
orthogonal streets and especially major traffic axes, the typical plateiai of
the Hippodamian cities. The four plateiai believed to have been identified through
aerial photography have not yet been confirmed by systematic excavation. For the
present the city must be considered, on the basis of the test excavations, pre-Hippodamian
in type, with a plan that can be dated, to the second half of the 7th c. B.C.
The importance of the town's urban system for the studies of Greek
and particularly Sicilian city planning lies in the very fact that it allows us
to pinpoint between the end of the 7th and the first half of the 6th c., the transition,
at least in the W, from the system with parallel streets to the more sophisticated
Hippodamian type, such as we see it at Selinus, Akragas, Metapontion, and Poseidonia.
If in fact the Sicilian Greeks had already known the system per strigas
during the second half of the 7th c., it seems logical that they would have employed
it at Kasmenai, which started as a military colony and was therefore almost "prefabricated,"
thus offering the most favorable conditions for realizing on the ground the ideal
model for urban planning.
The colony was started here on the natural penetration route of Syracuse
toward the interior of the island purely for military reasons, as is amply attested
by the powerful wall circuit already mentioned and by the large quantity of iron
weapons from the temenos of a temple which excavations have brought to light in
the W corner of the plateau. From this early temple, part of the architectural
and sculptural decoration in polychrome terracotta have been recovered and at
least three inscriptions from the 6th c. In the necropolis the cist and chamber
tombs are typically Greek. The city's main function as a military colony ceased
rather early and it apparently ceased to exist at the end of the 4th c. B.C.
A. Di Vita, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Nov 2002 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
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