Arthur Stanley Riggs

Vistas in Sicily Arthur Stanley Riggs

The real history of Sicily, as a land playing a considerable part in the affairs of the world, begins with this coming of the Greek, and it is to his presence that the story owes its peculiar and immutable charm. As early as the times of the Odyssey the Greeks had some vague notion of Sicily. Everyone who has read that marvelous poem remembers that the suitors of Penelope threatened to sell the disguised Odysseus to the Sikels; and old Lærtes had a Sikelian slave woman. But no doubt the wily Phoenician traders told stories calculated to frighten away adventurous explorers; so it was quite by accident that the news which brought about the initial settlement reached Greece. Driven by storms upon Sicilian shores Theocles, an Ionian Greek, found himself late in the eighth century gazing from the deck of his tiny craft upon a strange land.