Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/388

 372 IIISTOR* OF GREECE. more compulsory, but because also the obstinate tribes could then retire into the interior. The Greeks in Sicily are thus not to be considered as purely Greeks, but as modified by a mixture of Sikel and Sikan lan- guage, customs, and character. Each town included in its non- privileged population a number of semi-Hellenized Sikels (or Si- kans, as the case might be), who, though in a state of dependence, contributed to mix the breed and influence the entire mass. We have no reason to suppose that the Sikel or CEnotrian language ever became written, like Latin, Oscan, or Umbrian : J the in- scriptions of Segesta and Halesus are all in Doric Greek, which supplanted the native tongue for public purposes as a separate language, but not without becoming itself modified in the con- fluence. In following the ever-renewed succession of violent political changes, the inferior capacity of regulated and pacific popular government, and the more unrestrained and voluptuous license, which the Sicilian and Italian Greeks 2 exhibit as compared with Athens and the cities of Greece proper, we must call to mind that we are not dealing with pure Hellenism ; and that the native element, though not unfavorable to activity or increase of wealth, prevented the Grecian colonist from partaking fully in that improved organization which we so distinctly trace in Athens from Solon downwards. How much the taste, habits, ideas, reli- gion, and local mythes, of the native Sikels passed into the minds of the Sikeliots or Sicilian Greeks, is shown by the character of their literature and poetry. Sicily was the native country of that rustic mirth and village buffoonery which gave birth to the prim- itive comedy, politicized and altered at Athens so as to suit men of the market-place, the ekklesia, and the dikastery, blending, in the comedies of the Syracusan Epicharmus, copious details about the indulgences of the table (for which the ancient Sicilians were renowned) with Pythagorean philosophy and moral maxims, but given with all the naked simplicity of common life, in a sort of rhythmical prose, without even the restraint of a fixed metre, by the Syracusan Sophron in his lost Mimes, and after- Ahrens, De Dialecto DoricA, sect. 1, p. 3. 6,58
 * Plato, Epistol. vii, p. 326 ; Plautus, Rudens, Act i, Sc. 1, f>6; Act ii. So