Siculi

Before the arrival of Greek colonists, the Siculi were one of the three tribes, according to Thucydides (vi:2), who inhabited Sicily: the Siculi in eastern Sicily (and in southern Italy), who spoke an Indo-European language, and the Sicani (Greek Sikanoi) and Elymi in central and western Sicily, who spoke non-Indo-European languages. The Siculi have given Sicily the name it has held since Antiquity, but they swere rapidly absorbed into the culture of Magna Graecia.

The Siculi did not employ writing.

Their characteristic cult of the Palici is influenced by Greek myth in the version that has survived, in which the local nymph Talia bore to father Zeus twin sons, who were "twice-born (palin "newly"; ikein "to come"), born first of their nymph mother, and then, because of the "jealousy" of Hera who urged Mother Earth, Gaia, to swallow up the nymph. But then the soil parted, giving birth to the twin babes, who were venerated in Sicily as patrons of navigation and of agriculture.

External link

• Archaic Italy: the Siculi