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The Sicels (Latin ラテン語:''Siculi''; Greek ''Sikeloi'') were an Italic tribe who inhabited eastern Sicily during the Iron Age. Their neighbours to the west were the Sicani. The Sicels gave Sicily the name it has held since antiquity, but they rapidly fused into the culture of Magna Graecia. ==History== Archaeological excavation has shown some Mycenean influence on Bronze Age Sicily. The earliest literary mention of Sicels is in the ''Odyssey''. Homer also mentions Sicania, but makes no distinctions: "they were (from) a faraway place and a faraway people and apparently they were one and the same" for Homer, Robin Lane Fox notes.〔Fox, ''Travelling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer'', 2008:115; Homer's references are in ''Odyssey'' 20,383; 24.207-13, 366, 387-90.〕 There are four incidental mentions of Sicels or Sicania, as a source for a devoted household slave or a likely place to sell a slave. It is possible that the Sicels and the Sicani of the Iron Age had consisted of an Illyrian population who (as with the Messapians) had imposed themselves on a native, Pre-Indo-European ("Mediterranean") population. Thucydides〔The concern of Thucydides is to acquaint his Athenian audience with the cultural and historical background to Athenian invention in Sicilians affairs, beginning in 415 BC, in his book vi, sections 2.4-6.〕 and other classical writers were aware of the traditions according to which the Sicels had once lived in Central Italy, east and even north of Rome.〔Servius' commentary on ''Aeneid'' VII.795; Dionysius of Halicarnassus i.9.22.〕 Thence they were dislodged by Umbrian and Sabine tribes, and finally crossed into Sicily. Their social organization appears to have been tribal, their economy, agricultural. According to Diodorus Siculus,〔Diodorus Siculus V.6.3-4.〕 after a series of conflicts with the Sicani, the river Salso was declared the boundary between their respective territories. The common assumption is that the Sicels were the more recent arrivals; that they had introduced the use of iron into Bronze Age Sicily and brought the domesticated horse. This would date their arrival on the island to the early first millennium BC. But there is some evidence that the ethnonym may predate the Iron Age, based on the name ''Shekelesh'' given to one of the Sea Peoples in the Great Karnak Inscription (late 13th century BC). The Sicel necropolis of Pantalica, near Syracuse, is the best known, and the second largest one is the Necropolis of Cassibile, near Noto; their elite tombs ''"a forno"'' or "oven-shaped" take the form of beehives. The chief Sicel towns were: Agyrium (Agira); Centuripa or Centuripae (Centorbi, but now once again called Centuripe); Henna (later Castrogiovanni, which is a corruption of ''Castrum Hennae'' through the Arabic ''Qasr-janni'', but since the 1920s once again called Enna); and three sites named Hybla: Hybla Major, called Geleatis or Gereatis, on the river Symaethus; Hybla Minor, on the east coast north of Syracuse (possibly pre-dating the Dorian colony of Hyblaean Megara); and Hybla Heraea in the south of Sicily. With the coming of Greek colonists— both Chalcidians, who maintained good relations with the Sicels, and Dorians, who did not—〔Erik Sjoqvist, ''Sicily and the Greeks: Studies in the Interrelationship between the Indigenous Populations and the Greek Colonists'' (Jerome Lectures, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) 1973.〕 and the growing influence of Greek civilization, the Sicels were forced out of most of the advantageous port sites and withdrew by degrees into the hinterland. Sixty kilometres (forty miles) from the coast of the Ionian Sea, Sicels and Greeks exceptionally lived side by side in Morgantina to the extent that historians argue whether it was a Greek ''polis'' or a Sicel city. Greek goods, especially pottery, moved along natural routes, and eventually Hellenistic influences can be observed in regularised Sicel town planning. However, in the middle of the fifth century BC a Sicel leader, Ducetius, was able to create an organised Sicel state as a unitary domain in opposition to Greek Syracusa, including several cities in the central and south of the island. After a few years of independence, his army was defeated by the Greeks in 450 BC, and he died ten years later. Without his charisma, the movement collapsed and the increasingly Hellenized culture of the Sicels lost its distinctive character. But in the winter of 426/5 Thucydides noted the presence among the allies of Athens in the siege of Syracuse of Sicels who had "previously been allies of Syracuse, but had been harshly governed by the Syracusans and had now revolted" (Thucydides 3.103.1) Aside from Thucydides, the Greek literary sources on Sicels and other pre-Hellenic peoples of Sicily are to be found in fragmentary scattered quotes from the lost material of Hellanicus of Lesbos and Antiochus of Syracuse. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sicels」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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