Sicilia (Roman province)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sicilia was the first province ever acquired by the Roman Republic, and the story of how Rome came to own it begins not with a grand strategy but with a band of mercenaries who had seized a city and didn't know where to turn. In 241 BC, after more than two decades of brutal war with Carthage, Rome walked away from the First Punic War with the bulk of the island of Sicily in its hands. What followed was an experiment in governance the Romans had never tried before: not annexation on Italian terms, not a generous ally-treaty, but something new that would become the template for empire. Sicily would feed Rome, enrich its governors, spark two of the largest slave rebellions in ancient history, and serve as a stage for some of the Republic's most dramatic moments. What made this island so central to Rome's power? And what happened to the people who already lived there?

• 2. The Mercenaries Who Started a War

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  Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse from 317 BC and King of Sicily from around 307 or 304 BC, died in 289 BC. The Campanian mercenaries he had employed, known as the Mamertines, were offered compensation to leave Syracuse. Instead, they seized the city of Messina, killing and exiling its men and holding the women captive. This act of violent opportunism set off a chain of events that would reshape the Mediterranean world. Hiero, the Syracusan general who had brought banditry under control by 269 BC, began advancing on Messina. Carthage, always wary of any single power growing too strong in Sicily, stepped in to support the Mamertines. Hiero pulled back to Syracuse and took the title of king. Then the Mamertines reversed course entirely, expelling the Carthaginian garrison and appealing to Rome instead. At Rome, the debate was genuine. The Senate was uneasy: Rome had recently punished Campanian mercenaries who had done the same thing at Rhegium. The historian Philinus of Agrigentum, cited by Polybius, claimed there was a treaty between Rome and Carthage assigning Sicily to Carthaginian influence, though Polybius himself denied the treaty existed. Polybius also noted that Roman enthusiasm was sharpened by Sicily's wealth. In the end, the Senate handed the decision to the popular assembly, which voted to send help. It was not technically a declaration of war, but it functioned as one. The First Punic War, lasting from 264 to 241 BC, had begun. Even the scholar Moses Finley observed that the traditional explanation, that Carthage was threatening Rome at the Straits of Messina, looks anachronistic, since Carthage had never shown interest in expanding into Italy. The scale of the conflict surprised everyone.

• 3. Rome's First Province

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  Previous Roman conquests in Italy had produced either direct annexation or asymmetric alliances, in which partner states contributed troops but paid no tribute. Sicily was treated differently from the start, and scholars continue to debate why. One factor was the island's ethnic complexity; another was Rome's need to recover the costs of the war. From around 227 BC, an annual praetor was formally assigned to the island, making Sicily one of the first two Roman provinces, the other being Corsica and Sardinia. Gaius Flaminius was sent to Sicily as the first of these praetores provinciales. The change is recorded by the writer Gaius Julius Solinus, who noted that in 227 BC both islands "were made provinces in the same moment." A grain tribute was introduced by a lex frumentaria in that same year: communities owed a tenth of their harvest, the decuma, contracted out to tax collectors called decumani. This tax, derived according to one theory from the system of the Syracusan king Hiero, was not uniformly applied. Sicilian cities fell into four distinct legal classes. The foederatae civitates, allied communities including Messina and Tauromenium, were largely self-governing and rarely had to pay the grain tax. The civitates sine foedere immunes ac liberae, including Centuripe and Panormus, were exempt from the decuma but owed their rights to Roman grant rather than treaty. The civitates decumanae, the majority of Sicilian cities, had been conquered by force and paid the full tithe under rules known as the lex Hieronica. At the bottom were the civitates censoriae, including Syracuse, whose land was taken as ager publicus, public state property. After the First Servile War, the consul Publius Rupilius formalized this system in 132 BC through a revised code known as the Lex Rupilia.

• 4. War, Servile Uprisings, and Verres

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  The conquest of Syracuse in 212 BC during the Second Punic War was a turning point. The city's fall to Marcellus came about either through betrayal by members of the Syracusan aristocracy or by Moericus, a Spanish mercenary in the Carthaginian camp. The topography of Syracuse, the defensive machines of Archimedes, and the Euryalus fortress, originally built by the tyrant Dionysius I between 404 and 367 BC, made the siege costly. Archimedes himself was killed in the sack. Marcellus shipped vast quantities of Greek art to Rome; the historian Livy claimed this was the moment that first stirred Roman enthusiasm for Greek art, though Polybius criticized Marcellus for plundering temples. With Sicily entirely under Roman control, the island became, as one Roman expressed it, the main source of grain for the city of Rome. The human cost of this extraction was severe. The First Servile War, running roughly from 138 to 132 BC, was led by a man named Antiochus Eunus, who established his capital at Enna and captured Tauromenium. He defeated Roman forces multiple times before being overcome by the consul Publius Rupilius near Messina. The war ended with the capture of Tauromenium and Enna, and approximately 20,000 of the defeated slaves were crucified. The Second Servile War, from 104 to 101 BC, was fought on two fronts: Athenion of Cilicia led the uprising in the west, Salvius Tryphon in the east. It was suppressed by Manius Aquillius. Then, from 73 to 71 BC, the praetor Gaius Verres extracted wealth from the province through extortion, theft of artworks, and harsh enforcement of the grain tax for personal profit rather than the state's. Cicero's prosecution speeches against Verres, the Verrines, still survive. After Cicero's first speech proved so effective, Verres fled into exile rather than face a verdict.

• 5. Sextus Pompey and the Battle for Sicily

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  In 44 BC, the assassination of Julius Caesar set the Roman world into chaos, and Sicily became the pivot around which the struggle for Rome's future turned. In 42 BC, Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey Magnus, was appointed commander of the Roman fleet at Massalia by the Senate. He was subsequently proscribed by the Second Triumvirate, consisting of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus, under the lex Pedia. He seized Messina, then forced all of Sicily to submit. He killed the praetor Aulus Pompeius Bithynicus and defeated Octavian's legatus Quintus Salvidienus Rufus in a naval battle off Rhegium in 40 BC. By blocking grain shipments from Sicily to Rome, Sextus Pompey threatened the city's food supply. Popular pressure forced a deal: in 39 BC, the Pact of Misenum recognised Sextus' control of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and freed the slaves in his custody. He promised to end the blockade. The agreement collapsed. The ensuing conflict involved perhaps 200,000 men and 1,000 warships, and the territory around Tyndaris and Messina suffered the heaviest damage. Octavian was defeated at sea at the Battle of Messina in 37 BC and again in August 36 BC. His lieutenant Agrippa destroyed Sextus Pompey's fleet at the Battle of Naulochus in September 36 BC. Octavian then imposed a penalty of 1,600 talents on Sicily. Thirty thousand slaves who had served Sextus were captured; most were returned to their masters, but about 6,000 who could claim no master were impaled.

• 6. Augustus and the Reshaping of Sicily

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  When the fighting ended, Sicily was in a desperate condition: cities and countryside had been damaged, much land was uncultivated, and proprietors were dead, fled, or dispossessed. Octavian confiscated large areas as punishment; a portion stayed as imperial property. Large tracts in what was probably the Plain of Catania went to Agrippa. When Agrippa died, most of his property passed to Augustus. Other farmland, especially on the eastern and northern coasts, was distributed to veterans of Augustus' legions. Augustus then reorganised the province systematically. Six Sicilian cities were elevated to the status of coloniae: Syracuse, Tauromenium, Panormus, Catania, Tyndaris, and Thermae Himerenses. Tauromenium was the first, converted to a colonia in 36 BC. Augustus visited Sicily in 22 or 21 BC as the first stop on a tour of the empire. Three further cities, Messina, Lipara, and perhaps Lilybaeum, Agrigentum, and Halaesa, were made into municipia, a rank below colonia. Centuripa, Notum, and Segesta received the status of Latin cities. The grain tithe that had defined the provincial tax regime since 227 BC was replaced by the stipendium, a property tax. This reform may have reflected Egypt's new role as Rome's primary grain supplier, though the produce of the emperor's own Sicilian farms continued to be sent to Rome. Pliny the Elder listed Catania, which the Romans called Catina, among the cities Augustus promoted to the rank of Colonia Romana in 21 BC, alongside Syracuse and Thermae. The influx of Latin-speaking veterans who arrived with these foundations played a decisive role in spreading the Latin language across an island that had previously been predominantly Greek-speaking.

• 7. Languages, Cities, and Later Empire

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  Even in the time of Cicero, Greek remained the dominant language of Sicily's elite, and almost all the Sicilians mentioned in the Verrine Orations carry Greek names. Cicero also references the Greek calendar, Greek festivals, Sicilian victors of the Olympic Games, and relations between Sicilian cities and panhellenic sanctuaries such as Delphi. The older non-Greek languages of the island, including Sican, Sicel, Elymian, and Punic, probably survived in rural areas and traditional religious contexts but largely disappeared from elite and written records. A brief Punic inscription from Aegusa, dating to the 2nd or 1st century BC, offers one of the last glimpses of that language on the island. By the imperial period, Latin had become firmly established as the language of power, though Greek retained its historic prestige. Writers such as Calpurnius Siculus and Julius Firmicus Maternus produced literary works in Latin, while authors including Pantaenus and Aristocles of Messene continued to write in Greek. In the 4th century AD, rural Sicily entered a new period of prosperity, driven partly by renewed commercial links with North Africa and partly by the shift of Egyptian grain production toward Constantinople after the city was founded in 330 AD. Wealthy senatorial families retreated to vast country estates called latifundia, spending considerable sums on their villas. The most remarkable archaeological remains from this period are the Villa Romana del Casale, the Villa Romana del Tellaro, and the Villa Romana di Patti. In the same century, the governor's title was elevated from corrector to consularis, a sign of Sicily's growing importance. Aristocratic families including the Symmachi, the Nichomachi, and the Caeionii made the island a favored retreat. Genseric's Vandals began raiding the Sicilian coast in 437 and, after seizing part of the Western Roman fleet at Carthage in October 439, launched sustained attacks on Sicily and Sardinia. The province passed briefly to Vandal control in 469 before being reunited with Italy in 476 under Odoacer, and eventually returning to eastern Roman control, where it remained until the 9th century Arab conquest.

• 8. Christianity Arrives

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  The first reference to a Christian presence on Sicily appears in the Acts of the Apostles, at chapter 28 verses 12 to 13: Paul of Tarsus, travelling from the Levant to Rome after being shipwrecked and forced ashore at Malta, stopped at Syracuse for three days before continuing along the coast. The text does not explain why he paused there, but Syracuse was a regular stopping point on commercial sea routes. Paul may have been hosted by a Jewish community; the Jewish community at Catania is well documented through inscriptions. After Paul's visit, no source explicitly mentions Christians in Sicily before the 3rd century AD. The first certain evidence for an organised Sicilian church is a letter sent from Rome to Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, between 250 and 251 during the Decian persecution. The letter refers to a parallel letter dispatched to Sicily about the lapsi, Christians who had performed pagan rites under pressure. This implies the Sicilian Christian community was already large enough to have a formal relationship with Rome. Two Sicilian martyrs, Saint Agatha of Catania and Saint Lucy of Syracuse, are associated with the Decian persecution of 250 and the Diocletianic persecution of 304. The hagiographies about them were written roughly two centuries after the events and represent them as young women persecuted by figures named Quintianus and Pascasius. Scholars note that the pairing may have been intended to link the two most important cities of eastern Sicily. The pattern of female saints in Sicilian Christianity, which also includes the Palermitan martyrs Ninfa, Olivia, and Christina, may reflect the earlier prominence of female deities in pre-Christian Sicilian religion, among them Venus of Eryx, Isis, Demeter, and Kore. A funerary inscription discovered in 1730 in Catania, now in the Louvre, records the death of a child barely more than a year old, buried near what the text calls the "Christian martyrs." Dating to at least the end of the 3rd century AD, it is the first direct archaeological evidence for Christianity on the island. The Bishop of Syracuse, Cresto, was specifically invited by the Emperor Constantine to participate in the Council of Arles in 314, and was given an important organisational role there, which reflects the stature the Sicilian church had already achieved.