Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/386

 370 HISTORY OF GREECE. quence as this could not have ensued, if the Greek settlers ia Italy and Sicily had kept themselves apart as communities, and had merely canied on commerce and barter with communities of Sikels : it implies a fusion of the two races in the same commu nity, though doubtless in the relation of superior and subject, and not in that of equals. The Greeks on arriving in the country expelled the natives from the town, perhaps also from the lands immediately round the town ; but when they gradually extended their territory, this was probably accomplished, not by the expul- sion, but by the subjugation of those Sikel tribes and villages, much subdivided and each individually petty, whom their aggres- sions successively touched. At the time when Theokles landed on the hill near Naxos, and Archias in the islet of Ortygia, and when each of them ex- pelled the Sikels from that particular spot, there were Sikel vil- lages or little communities spread through all the neighboring country. By the gradual encroachments of the colony, some of these might be dispossessed and driven out of the plains near the coast into the more mountainous regions of the interior, but many of them doubtless found it convenient to submit, to surrender a portion of their lands, and to hold the rest as subordinate villagers of an Hellenic city-community: 1 and we find even at the time of the Athenian invasion (414 B. c.) villages existing in distinct identity as Sikels, yet subject and tributary to Syracuse. More- over, the influence which the Greeks exercised, though in the first instance essentially compulsory, became also in part self- operating, the ascendency of a higher over a lower civilization. It was the working of concentrated townsmen, safe among one another by their walls and by mutual confidence, and surrounded by more or less of ornament, public as well as private, upon dispersed, unprotected, artless villagers, who could not be insen- sible to the charm of that superior intellect, imagination, and or- of the talent, the meaning of which was altered while the word w;is retained seem to have been all borrowed by the Italian and Sicilian Greeks from the Sikel or Italic scale, not from the Grecian, vov/j.fj.0^, Mrpa, Je/Urpov, irevTT/KovruXtTpov, irevTovyiciov, <^uf, rerpuf, rptuf, fyftiva, {//jti^irptov (sefc Fragments of Epicharmus and Sophron, ap. Ahrcns dc Dialecto Doric.!, Appendix, pp 435, 471, 472, and Athena, xi, p. 479). 1 Thucyd vi. 88.