332 Corinne Bonnet
are often heavily freighted with meaning. There where the use of space, the represen-
tation of the divine, ritual practices, and even the distinction between the religious and
the political, all serve to focus our attention on transitions and transactions, accounts
of the past sacrifice empirical fluidity in favor of ideological rigidity, even though cult is
without question the supreme example of mediation. However, for today’s historian, if
“Thucydides is not a colleague” (Loraux 1980), the evidence of historians from antiq-
uity often carries a special weight in the interpretation of phenomena. As far as Sicily
is concerned, there are two “heavyweights”: Thucydides and Diodorus Siculus. Let us
consider how they reconstruct the ethnic landscape of Sicily and recount the subsequent
story of Sicily’s history through it.
The Historiographical Conception of Ethnicity
Thucydides’ account at the beginning of Book 6 constitutes a veritable “archetype”
for subsequent studies of archaic Sicily (Raccuia 2008; Bonnet 2009). Concerned with
explaining the failure of the Athenian’s Sicilian expedition (415BC), the Athenian his-
torian set himself the initial task of offering an account of the population of the island
and its history. After the Cyclopes and Laistrygonians, who are mentioned by the poets,
but not endorsed by Thucydides, come the Sicanians, supposedly indigenous but most
probably from Iberia according to the Athenian historian, then the Elymians, emigrants
from the shores of Troy, and the Sicels, who came from Italy. The Phoenicians followed
them, establishing themselves around the perimeter of the entire island, as merchants,
one foot on the land and the other in the sea, as it were. Arriving in numbers, the Greeks
forced them back into the western parts of the island. Such were the barbarians, con-
cludes Thucydides (6.1.2), who settled on Sicily. He then gives a detailed account of
the Greek foundations and concludes anew, at 6.6.1: “Such are the Greek and barbarian
ethne(tribes) who inhabit Sicily” at the moment when the Athenians begin their attack.
This hodgepodge might make for an easy target, but such proves not to be the case. The
Athenians arrive only to find the island’s medley of inhabitants ready to resist their power,
instead of the land already conquered, as they had imagined. Quite the opposite, Sicily
is great and wealthy, a complex land, characterized by mixed identities and a rich past,
marked by a certain “savagery” that recalls the Cyclopes as much as the Phoenicians. This
ethnographic diversity, with which Thucydides finishes his account, sounds like a warn-
ing of the difficulties that are largely underestimated by the Athenian generals in 415BC.
The debate that took place in the Assembly before the departure of the expedition had
been the occasion for Nikias, who opposed the expedition from the outset, to under-
score the risk that they were running in allying themselves to barbarian populations (the
Segestans) in accordance with the terms of their alliance. The imperial ambitions of the
Athenians, joined to the personal ambitions of Alcibiades, however, produced a policy
aimed at abolishing, in the name ofhomoiotropia(shared custom) (Sammartano 2007),
the boundaries between Greek and barbarian (Thuc. 6.2.18). In the eyes of Thucydides,
however, if one reads between the lines, arguments of this type do not derive from politi-
cal rationality, but are instances of politically correct sentiments, or of the hubris run wild
that resulted in the disastrous failure of the campaign.