Siceliotes

Greek colonies of Magna Graecia

Philistus, Siceliote historian

Archimedes Thoughtful by Domenico Fetti (1620)

Syracusan Arethusa Tetradrachm Coin

The Siceliot people (pl. Siceliots or Siceliotes, Σικελιῶται in Ancient Greek) formed a distinct ethno-cultural group in Sicily from about the 8th century BC until their assimilation into the general Sicilian population.^[1] As Hellenic colonists (often reputedly of Doric origin) and descendants of colonists from Greece, they spoke Greek and participated in the wider cultural and political activities of Greek Sicily and of the Hellenic world as a whole.^[2] The Athenian historian Thucydides mentions them in various places in his "History of the Peloponnesian War".^[3]

The Roman Republic and the Roman Empire continued to see a distinction between the Siceliotes (the descendants of Greek settlers) and the non-Greek inhabitants of Sicily.

Siceliotes are a distinguishable subethnicity of the broader Italiote ethno-cultural group.

During the Congress of Gela, according to the testimony of Thucydides, Hermocrates, declaring the independence of the Sicelian people, said:

«"It is no disgrace that fellow countrymen make concessions to fellow countrymen: Dorians to other Dorians and Chalcidians to others of the same race; and that in general concessions are made to neighboring peoples who inhabit the same identical land surrounded by the sea, and who by one name are called Siceliots.[...]» (Thucydides IV, 64.3, Italian translation by Luciano Canfora - English translation)^[4]

The idyllic image that ancient historiography has given of the arrival of the Greeks on the island is far from what was in truth a coexistence that was anything but peaceful, characterized by the oppression of the natives, by the "economic and political, but also cultural and ideological pressure exerted by the colonizers, and the consequent dismantling of the parameters of self-identification of the indigenous world"^[5]