336 Corinne Bonnet
Even if this seems ambitious, it does not seem to me to be pointless to consider at
this stage, under the heading of “material culture,” the question of landscape. A com-
plex reality, alive, moving, and fashioned from the conjunction of natural elements and
human interventions, landscape situates societies in a setting, in a certain sense, already
fixed. It allows power relations to be inscribed on space, and, further, from the moment
it is given narrative shape in texts, it relates to the field of cultural representation. How-
ever, as we saw in the preceding text, when Thucydides evokes the Phoenician and Greek
colonizations of Sicily, he inscribes them on a landscape polarized between East (Greek)
and West (Phoenician), between marginal sites (the small islands and coastal areas occu-
pied by the Phoenicians) and integrated sites (the Greek colonies). Diodorus Siculus, for
his part, in Book 5 of theUniversal History, describes Sicily as an island situated at the
heart of a region of strategic importance in relation to the other islands and neighboring
zones on the mainland. As the site of contacts, traces of which are memorialized in its
very topography, Sicily is placed under the double sign of Demeter and Persephone, and
Herakles as well, two Greek myths that leave their original imprint on the landscape and
local topography. Associated with Etna, the rape of Persephone supplies a sort of mythic
omphalos(navel of the earth), and proposes a journey that signposts all of Sicilian terri-
tory, coast and hinterland, city and country, this world and beyond, connected in this way
in a world at once harmonious and prosperous, protected by the gods and perpetuated
thanks to the rituals enacted in honor of the goddesses (Diod. Sic. 5.2–4). On the other
hand, the presence of the Carthaginians is described as an intrusion, its hallmark impi-
ety and violence. Diodorus describes, for example, a small island off the coast of Sicily,
“the Island of Bones,” where, in the course of the confrontations between Carthage and
Syracuse, the Carthaginians abandoned some rebel soldiers to their sad fate: they starved
to death. Their dead bodies transformed the island into a collection of bones, and hence
the toponym (Diod. Sic. 5.8). As a symbol inscribed on the landscape of the violence
of Carthage against its own soldiers, the island–cemetery expresses sterility and death,
as opposed to the landscape made verdant by the presence of the Greeks. Accordingly,
an extremely strong bond exists between the landscape and the cultural identity of those
who forge it (Cardete del Olmo 2010), whether this may be a matter of natural landscape
or of a constructed landscape.
Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between the historiographical
construction of theGreeksources, in particular Diodorus, who came from Sicily, there-
fore powerfully hostile to the Phoenicians and the Punic people, and the realities on
the ground. Thus, if the myth, notably recounted by Diodorus (4.23.2), makes Eryx an
indigenous prince, son of Aphrodite, conquered by Herakles whom he had unfortunately
opposed, the facts on the ground, so to speak, show that Eryx exhibited a deep interpen-
etration of layers: indigenous, Greek, Punic, and later Roman. It is, therefore, a totally
mixed landscape. In general, however, the myth of Herakles, with its countless heraclid
affiliations, in Syracuse, Herakleia, Eryx, but also Mozia, serves to support discourses of
legitimation that, even as it put them into hierarchical order, nevertheless closely asso-
ciated both the indigenousethne(ethnic groups) and the colonialethneinstalled on the
island (Anello, Martorana, and Sammartano 2006). As far as the construction or per-
ception of identity is concerned, one could say that the Greek sources have privileged a