SICILY THROUGH THE AGES

Taranaki Daily News, 17 January 1930, Page 11

SICILY THROUGH THE AGES

GREEK ART OF COLONISATION

LECTURE- BY PROFESSOR ADAMS.

Sicily, Ancient and Modern, was the subject of an interesting lecture given by Professor T. D. Adams at the teachers’ summer school at New Plymouth last night. Architecture, sculpture and mosaic work were some of the contributions .of Sicily to the culture of the ancient world, he said.

Speaking first of some of the famous Greek personalities connected with Sicily, Professor Adams mentioned Archimedes, who -was best known as a mathematician. He was also the father of the science of mechanics and discovered the theories of the centre of gravity and specific gravity. Professor Adams gave a short reading from Theocritus of Syracuse, the originator of pastoral poetry, and translated freely into the vernacular the story of the visit of two ladies, Gargo and Proxinias, in the year 271 B.C. to. the court of Ptolemy to see the renowned Adonis. The. lecture was illustrated throughout by lantern slides, the first of a series of which revealed the great beauty of the island, especially at Traormina and Syracuse. The lecturer spoke of the fertility of Sicily and its richness in sulphur and salt rock. It was also geographically and climatically suited for communities of men to develop the art of living to a very high degree. Through Sicily’s productiveness in corn arcse the myth of Persephone, whose loss “cost Ceres all that pain to seek her through the world.” Connected with Syracuse was the myth of the nymph *Arethusa, who was pursued by the river god Alpheus all the way under the sea from Greece to Sicily, till at Syracuse she was turned by Artemus into a fountain, and the fountain was there to this day to confute the sceptics. Innumerable, too, were the references in European literature to the giants buried under Etna'and to the Cyclops Solyphemus. ■ _ From the beginning of historical times Sicily had been so beautiful and so habitable that there had been an unending contest for its possession. The most important of the foreign dominations were the Phoenician, the Greek, the Roman, the Arabic and the Norman. Confining himself to the Greek civi- ' ligation, the lecturer traced the colonis- ; ation of the coastline, except for the i extreme west of the island, which rei mained in the hands of the Carthaginians, along the whole of the east coast and the greater part of the north and south coasts. This began with Naxos in 735 B.C. and ended with Acragas in 599. In Sicily, which was, as it were, the America of Greece proper, everything was on a bigger scale, there was • a greater freedom of movement and i less respect for tradition. Also, where- : as the Greeks in Asia Minor were unde'r ■ Oriental influence, the Sicilians had ; scope for free and untramelled devclopi ment. The first specific contribution Ito civilisation made by the Sicilian i Greeks was their defeat of the Carthai giniars at Himera in 480, on the same day, tradition said, as the Persians from the East suffered disaster at. Salamis. It was an important share in the liberation of Hellas from the barbarian peril. But the most distinctive achievement of the Sicilian Greeks was their engraving of- coins, and. numerous sam-. pies of this work were shown on the screen, illustrating the history of the more important centres such as Syracuse and Acragas. In Sicily, too, both architecture and architectural sculptme showed important development. Different series of metopes from Selimunte, now in the Palermo Museum, were shown to illustrate the rapid development in technique and in sculptural sense achieved by the Sililian plastic artists. It was strange that, even in the great Pereclean age in the middle of tne fifth century, the Athenian politicians did not appreciate the art of rhetoric.. Consequently when, in 427 8.C., Gorgias came to Athens on an embassy from Leontini, in the east of Sicily, he took Athens'by storm. The sudden rise of democracy in Sicily in the sixties of the fifth century had shown the importance of public speaking, and that, the care of the populace could be captivated, by certain tricks in the art of persuasion; consequently the .Sicilian Greeks had elaborated a system --of ', rhetoric.