Carthaginian. In Sicily, the temple of Zeus Olympius at Acragas had a famous
Gigantomachy on its eastern pediment, and it has long been suggested that this
representation motivated the description we find in Naevius’s first book of a relief
of a Gigantomachy.^76 Whether Naevius’s description explicitly referred to this par-
ticular monument or not, his use of such a potent image at the beginning of the war
between Rome and Carthage in Sicily cannot have been gratuitous and may well
have depended on Sicilian configurations of order against barbarism, which he
continued into the present, with different protagonists.
FROM SICILY TO THE OECUMENE
If the Romans can inveigle themselves into the Syracusan half of the paradigm in
Sicily as they fight the Carthaginians, they still face the problem of what to do with
the other half of what Purcell calls “the Greek conceptual division of the
Mediterranean into two domains.”^77 In other words, they face the problem of what
to do with the Sicilian paradigm of inferiority and competition in relation to the
Greeks of the homeland, “Greece proper,” germana Graecia,as Plautus calls it
(Rud.737). The Romans were, after all, aligning themselves with that part of the
Sicilian tradition that saw mainland Hellas, and Athens in particular, as the real
focus of concentration. Rawson has clearly brought the main issues into focus in
her important analysis of Roman Hellenization in the second century b.c.e.^78 In the
early stages of overseas expansion Sicily is central for the formation of Roman atti-
tudes to Hellenism, but Sicily gets sidelined as the Romans turn themselves, as it
were, into the new Sicilians, occupying the Western part of the paradigm: now
they find their attention focusing more and more on mainland Greece, with Athens
above all becoming the principal comparandum. Sicily and the provinces lose sta-
tus as cultural models as the “real” Greek world looms larger on the Roman hori-
zon.^79 The momentum led Rome eventually to be the only state of the western
Mediterranean to attain “true modernity, the latest in state management, going fur-
ther even than Syracuse and Carthage in bringing to the west the new methods of
the hellenistic age.”^80
The sidelining of Sicily did not happen overnight. Ennius’s “minor” works,
from around 200 – 180 b.c.e., are still all based on Sicilian models — Epicharmus,
Archestratus, Euhemerus;^81 and when Scipio Africanus Maior was asked whom he
thought to be the most accomplished men of affairs in terms of wisdom and
courage, he replied, “Dionysius and Agathocles, the Sicilians.”^82 But the tendency
is clear, and the tendency of Athens to become the center of gravity in the synkri-
From Sicily to the Oecumene. 57