The history of Sicily is long and complicated, and much of it has been lost, especially the personal stories of individuals who lived thousands of years ago. However, we can reconstruct a few of these stories from the inscriptions they and their friends left behind. Here, we will look together at a few inscriptions from individuals from Sicily and try to reconstruct their history and tell their story.
For context, we are first told Sicily was inhabited by three groups, the Sikels, the Sicani, and the Elmyrians, according to sources such as Thucydides and Dionysius of Halincarnassus. Starting around 750 BC, these groups were followed by Greek and Phoenician colonizers, mostly settling in Sicily due to poverty, overcrowding, and land shortages back home. The Greeks mostly settled in the East, and the Phoenicians in the West. Large scale conflicts occur over the next five hundred years as various Punic and Greek groups try to gain supremacy over the island. It is until the Roman conquest of Sicily after the First Punic War that the island is unified.
During the time period we are looking at, Sicily is in the crossroad of migrations. Slaves are imported to Sicily from across the Mediterranean to work in the rich mines and grainfields, philosophers such as Plato come to join the courts of the despots of various city states, and merchants and traders use Sicily as a stop over during routes from Spain to Egypt, Turkey to France. We will try to piece together a few of these stories from some epitaphs and grasp an understanding of what life was like on the island.