History of the Peloponnesian War

The Athenians thereupon slew all the adult males whom they had taken and made slaves of the children and women. But the place they then peopled with new settlers from Athens, sending thither at a later time five hundred colonists.

During the same winter the Athenians wished to[*](416 B.C.) sail again to Sicily with a larger armament than that conducted by Laches and Eurymedon,[*](Two separate earlier expeditions, one under Laches and Charoeades, 427 B.C. (3.86.1), the other under Pythodorus. Sophocles and Eurymedon, 424 B.C. (4.2.), are here comprised under the one formula.) and subdue it, if they could, most of them being ignorant of the great size of the island and of the large number of its inhabitants, Hellenic as well as Barbarian, and that they were undertaking a war not very much inferior to that against

the Peloponnesians. For the voyage round Sicily, for a merchantman, is one of not much less than eight days; and although it is so large only a distance of about twenty stadia of the sea divides the island from the mainland.

Sicily was settled originally in the following manner, and the whole number of the nations that occupied it were these. Most ancient of all those who are reported to have settled in any part of the island were the Cyclopes and Laestrygonians, as to whom, however, I am able to tell neither their stock nor whence they came nor whither they went;

let it suffice as the story has been told by the poets,[*](Homer, no doubt, especially, as also in 1.10.1; 1.11.3; 1.20.1) and as each man has formed his opinion about them. The Sicanians appear to have been the first to settle there after them, indeed, as they themselves assert, even before them, as being indigenous, but as the truth is found to be, they were Iberians and were driven by the Ligurians from the River Sicanus in Iberia. From them the island was then called Sicania, having been called Trinacria before;

and they still inhabit the western parts of Sicily. But on the capture of Ilium some of the Trojans, who had escaped the Achaeans, came in boats to Sicily, and settling on the borders of the Sicanians were called, as a people, Elymi, while their cities were named Eryx and Egesta. And there settled with them also some of the Phocians, who on their return at that time from Troy were driven by a storm first to Libya and thence to Sicily.