ZANCLE: A Case-Study in Ethnic Transition and Civic Conflict in Late Archaic and Early Classical Sicily

The conflict between those of Greek and non-Greek ethnicity had a heavy impact on the daily politics of the Hellenic cities of ancient Sicily. The objective in this discussion is to illustrate, however, that simplistic ethnic categorization when applied to the populations of these cities by ancient commentators from Herodotus to Plutarch is essentially a meaningless exercise. Ethnos nonetheless was always a complex and emotional issue. Thus, we can note that by Pericles' law restricting Athenian citizenship to descendants of citizens in both the paternal and maternal line (451 BCE), the great leader of the Hellenic League and architect of the Greek victory over Persia in 480/79 BCE Themistocles would, if he had not been exiled by this time, have lost his status as an Athenian citizen since his mother was a Thracian. Many others hitherto citizens must also have been excluded by this legislation. Yet there was plainly no shortage in the number of Athenian citizens for such a controversial law to be adopted. Other Greek poleis, especially those in Sicily, do not appear to have followed this Athenian lead because they lacked the capacity or the reservoir from which to draw their citizen body. Immigration to the Hellenic cities of Sicily was always encouraged which suggests that citizenship numbers were always a cause for concern. This constant lack of manpower was certainly the underlying cause for the irregular and inconsistent application of the definition of citizenship among the Sicilian cities that far surpassed anything seen in mainland Greece. Yet heterogeneity does not figure in the narrative discourse of Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus or Plutarch which is instead dominated by the single-minded focus on inter-city and even intra-city conflict based on homogeneity. The writers plainly seem to have considered the strict definition of ethnicity the prime mover of political events. And so, the historians and biographers maintain that rivalry occurred from the first foundations of the Greek cities in the eighth century BCE and thereafter between communities of discrete ethnicities. This is exemplified by Syracuse, a foundation of Corinth and Dorian, being at odds with Naxos, Catane and Leontini all founded by Ionian Naxos or Chalcis. Yet they neglect to give any coverage whatsoever to a city such as Messene which clearly had a mixed population of both Dorian and Ionian extraction or Megara a Dorian establishment which was destroyed by neighbouring Dorian Syracuse. In conclusion therefore, it is more than tempting to see that there was little real substance to the factor of ethnicity, that its use by ancient commentators implies a transition in both conceptual and human evolution and that there were rather more mundane issues of political realities that drove inter and intra state conflict in classical Sicily.