from the Italian mainland across the channel now called the Strait of Messina, about 1100 B. C. They were permanent and important enough to give the island the name Sikelia, which is still current in our modified form, Sicily.

The first of the historic foreigners to enter were the Phœnicians, the Canaanites of the Old Testament, who lived in Tyre and Sidon and the other cities that lay in the narrow strip of lowland between Mt. Lebanon and the Mediterranean. They spoke Hebrew, as the Israelites did, but their worship was the foul and bloody service of Baal and Ashtaroth. They were the boldest seafaring men in the world; the most cunning traders,—who came to barter the Tyrian purple, the glass, the gold jewelry, and the little images of their own manufacture with the rude and primitive peoples already in possession. The Mediterranean had no terrors for their little barques, and they established trading posts and even actual colonies all along its coasts; one even, Gades of Tarshish—the present Cádiz—faced the ocean itself, beyond the strait now called Gibraltar, where the Pillars of Hercules guard the entrance to the Mediterranean. Phœnicia has left us no means of dating her settlements in Sicily, but we know that they were founded sometime between the coming of the Sikels in the twelfth century and the coming of the Greeks in the eighth.

The Greeks called these only rivals of theirs “barbarians,” a name they applied to all who did not speak Greek. Yet this proved nothing as to their civilization, for at this early date the Phœnicians were far advanced in the material arts over all Europeans, including the Greeks themselves, who learned of them. The most precious acquisition of all was the alphabet, from which every one of the forms of written speech now used in Europe has evolved. The Phœnicians may not have invented it; they may merely have taken it from farther East along with their other material arts. But they were the distributors, the teachers, the popularizers, and as such we owe them an unpayable debt.

The real history of Sicily, as a land playing a considerable part in the affairs of the world, begins with this coming of the Greek, and it is to his presence that the story owes its peculiar and immutable charm. As early as the times of the Odyssey the Greeks had some vague notion of Sicily. Everyone who has read that marvelous poem remembers that the suitors of Penelope threatened to sell the disguised Odysseus to the Sikels; and old Lærtes had a Sikelian slave woman. But no doubt the wily Phœnician traders told stories calculated to frighten away adventurous explorers; so it was quite by accident that the news which brought about the initial settlement reached Greece.

Driven by storms upon Sicilian shores Theocles, an Ionian Greek, found himself late in the eighth century gazing from the deck of his tiny craft upon a strange land. This he explored a little before returning home and there reported it as a good country, with inhabitants it would be easy to conquer. The prospect tempted his fellow-countrymen. They were colonizers, not traders, and in the next hundred and forty years they occupied most of the coast of Sicily—Trinakria, Three Promontories, they called it—making of the island a second Greek world. Indeed, the city of Syracuse, founded in 734 B. C. by Dorians from Corinth, eventually became the rival and peer of Athens in wisdom, beauty and strength.

Though the various independent cities of Sicily fought bitterly and continuously, their strife seemed only to develop genius and bring forth wonders in architecture, art and letters. The lofty purity of Greek civilization found its highest expression in magnificent temples which for grandeur and simplicity have never been excelled. To-day there are ruins of no less than twenty of these imposing houses of worship in Sicily, all of them of the same style, and many of colossal proportions. The arts of the sculptor and of the numismatist are represented in the museums by metopes which tell graphically of the evolution of the Greek ideal in temple decoration, and by coins which for pure beauty and delicacy have no equals in even Greece itself.

A record of the illustrious Greek litterateurs who came to Sicily as visitors, or to spend the rest of their lives, is a list of immortals: Simonides, Sappho, whom an enthusiastic contemporary called the “violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho”; Pindar, whose quaint lyrics give us much of our early Sicilian history; and Æschylus, immortal poet and playwright. Small wonder if with such inspiring examples in their midst native geniuses should have risen to great heights. Tisias of Himera is said to have set in order the lyric chorus, and so to have gained his name of Stesichorus. Epicharmus was the inventor of comedy, at least of the special Sicilian type. Some of his plays deal with mythology, many with cookery, and his comedy, “The Wedding of Hebe,” furnishes epicures with a list of the Sicilian dainties of his day. Empedocles of Akragas, the most distinguished of Sicilian thinkers, became prominent as a physician and poet. Philistus, and the later Diodorus of Agyrium, were historians of the first rank. The fame of Archimedes the mathematician is imperishable; and Theocritus, also of Syracuse, gave to the world the first bucolics and pastorals ever written—strains so sweet that the very ditties the wandering shepherds on the hills to this day pipe to their flocks are but parodies of the lilting songs he made centuries ago.

The commercially minded Phœnicians gave the Greek colonists little trouble, but when Phœnicia’s mighty African daughter—Carthage—grew up, she struggled long and hard for a permanent foothold upon the coveted isle. The crafty Carthaginians chose as the moment for their great effort the time when Xerxes the Persian, with forty-six Nations, was marching against Greece the mother-country, and Sicily could expect no assistance. But “Zeus was too strong for Baal,” and both barbarian hosts went down to crushing defeat—some say on the same day—the Carthaginians at Sicilian Himera, the Persians at Salamis. Had it been otherwise, the very civilization of Europe would have been overthrown. The Carthaginians, though defeated, were not beaten. They kept coming; and two hundred years later King Pyrrhus of Epirus had to come over from Greece to rescue Greek Sicily. As he left the island he remarked prophetically: “What a wrestling ground I leave for Rome and Carthage!”

Pyrrhus was right—the wrestling soon began in the first of the great Punic Wars, which ended with the utter defeat of Carthage. But while she was driven out, Rome came in to stay, and by 214 B. C. had swallowed up the whole island. Sicily was made the first Roman province, and experienced all the misfortunes of a “carpet-bag government.” For centuries the peace made stable by Rome prevailed throughout the island, and the cities could no longer fly at each other’s throats. But as the price of this enforced tranquillity, former great ruling centers like Arkagas and Syracuse began to dry up into almost nothing as provincial towns, intellectual advancement ceased, and during the whole thousand years of Roman administration, Sicily kept the downward path in every field of endeavor.

In this relaxed and enervated condition, the island fell an easy prey to the marauding Saracens; the condition of the Sicilians, worn down by oppression, explains their feeble resistance. Nothing could kindle a National feeling, and the conquest was marked by only a desultory struggle, in which the fervor of a few Christian devotees dared oppose the Muslim spirit of proselytism. In 965 it was all over. The Saracen had driven out the decadent Roman in the names of Allah and the Prophet, and established his own brilliant exotic civilization. Intellectual activity and agricultural development were fostered, and the Muslim régime, though it was not to