Sikelos

Sikelos (Latin Siculus) is the legendary eponymous ancestor of the Sicels, the pre-Greek people of eastern Sicily. The classical accounts of the Sicel crossing from the Italian mainland all turn on him: Hellanicus of Lesbos, quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, dated the migration three generations before the Trojan War and named Sikelos as king of the Ausonians who fled the Iapygians; Philistus of Syracuse put the crossing eighty years before the Trojan War and called Sikelos a son of Italos leading Ligurians; Antiochus of Syracuse told instead of a fugitive from Rome named Sikelos who was received by Morges, king of Italy, and whose followers took his name. Thucydides, who records the same migration and the renaming of the island from Sikania to Sikelia, adds that Italy itself was named after Italos, a king of the Sicels. Sikelos is thus an ancestral figure of Greco-Roman ethnographic legend rather than a cult recipient; modern scholarship, above all Roberto Sammartano's study of the origin-traditions of the Sicilian peoples, treats these genealogies as Greek constructions built around a genuine memory of an Italic migration into Sicily late in the second millennium BCE.

Domains

• eponymous ancestry and peoplehood
• migration and land taking

Powers

• to lead his people out of Italy across the strait into Sicily
• to give his name to the Sicel people and to the island of Sicily

Sources

• Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.12.3 and 1.22.3-5 (trans. E. Cary, Loeb Classical Library 319, Harvard University Press, 1937)
• R. Sammartano, Origines gentium Siciliae: Ellanico, Antioco, Tucidide (Supplementi a Kokalos 14; Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1998)
• W. Smith (ed.), 'Siculi', in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (London: Walton & Maberly, 1854-1857), vol. 2