“Sicily” was not a a Greek colony, the many Greek cities on the island were. Some of them are very much more ancient than you think - older than the Persian war

“Sicily” was not a a Greek colony, the many Greek cities on the island were. Some of them are very much more ancient than you think - older than the Persian wars, and existing longer than our reliable record of classical Greece exists. The first wave of colonization, in the ~8th century BC, included Syracuse and Himera - about 300 years before the battle discussed in this paper. Syracuse had been part of a pan-Mediterranean Greek culture for longer than the US has so far existed when its tyrant raised a multinational force to defend Himera.