The Palici
The Palici (Greek Palikoi) are the most distinctly indigenous gods of pre-Greek Sicily: twin chthonic brothers manifest in the boiling, sulphur-smelling geysers of the small Lake Naftia in the Palagonia plain (the Valle del Margi), near Mount Etna. They presided over the most binding form of oath: a litigant wrote his oath on a tablet and cast it into the steaming pool, where it was believed to float if true and to sink if false, perjury being punished at once by blindness or death. Their precinct was a famous asylum where ill-used slaves could take refuge. Greek tradition gave them divine parents (Zeus and the nymph Thaleia, or Zeus and the mountain-goddess Aetna), while an indigenous account made them sons of the Sikel fire-god Adranus. Their sanctuary at Palike on the Rocchicella di Mineo became the political and religious centre of the Sikel league founded by Ducetius around 453 BCE; modern excavations directed by Laura Maniscalco have recovered the shrine and its 'boiling waters'.
Parentage
Domains
- geysers and thermal springs
- sworn oaths and ordeal
- asylum and sanctuary of the oppressed
Powers
- to judge the truth of a sworn oath by ordeal
- to grant inviolable refuge to suppliants and runaway slaves
Epithets
- θεοὶ Παλικοί
Relations
- twin sibling: The Palici
Sources
- Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 11.88.6-90.2 (trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library 375, Harvard University Press, 1946)
- J. H. Croon, 'The Palici: An Autochthonous Cult in Ancient Sicily', Mnemosyne 5.2 (1952), pp. 116-129
- L. Maniscalco (ed.), Il santuario dei Palici: un centro di culto nella Valle del Margi (Palermo: Regione Siciliana, 2008); reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.03.26