Sicilia (Roman province)
Sicilia was the first province acquired by the Roman Republic, encompassing the island of Sicily. The western part of the island was brought under Roman control in 241 BC at the conclusion of the First Punic War with Carthage. A praetor was regularly assigned to the island from. The Kingdom of Syracuse under Hieron II remained an independent ally of Rome until its defeat in 212 BC during the Second Punic War. Thereafter the province included the whole of the island of Sicily, the island of Malta, and the smaller island groups.
During the Roman Republic, the island was the main source of grain for the city of Rome. Extraction was heavy, provoking armed uprisings known as the First and Second Servile Wars in the second century BC. In the first century, the Roman governor, Verres, was famously prosecuted for his corruption by Cicero. In the civil wars which brought the Roman Republic to an end, Sicily was controlled by Sextus Pompey in opposition to the Second Triumvirate. When the island finally came under the control of Augustus in 36 BC, it was substantially reorganised, with large Roman colonies being established in several major cities.
For most of the Imperial period, the province was a peaceful, agrarian territory. As a result, it is rarely mentioned in literary sources, but archaeology and epigraphy reveals several thriving cities, such as Lilybaeum and Panormus in the west, and Syracuse and Catania in the east. These communities were organised in a similar way to other cities of the Roman Empire and were largely self-governing. Greek and Latin were the main languages of the island but Punic, Hebrew and probably other languages were also spoken. There were several Jewish communities on the island and from around AD 200 there is also evidence of substantial Christian communities.
The province briefly fell under the control of the Vandal kingdom of North Africa shortly before the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, but was soon returned to the Kingdom of Italy and returned to Roman control under the eastern emperor at Constantinople to which it would remain until the 9th century.
History
First Punic War
, tyrant of Syracuse from 317 and King of Sicily from 307 or 304 BC, died in 289 BC. A group of his Campanian mercenaries, called the Mamertines, were offered compensation in exchange for leaving the city. They took control of Messina, killing and exiling the men, and holding the women in bondage.In response to this, the Syracusan general Hiero, who had reorganised the mercenaries and was able to bring banditry under control in 269 BC, began advancing on Messina. The Carthaginians, always eager to prevent the excessive empowerment of a single force and to keep Sicily divided, offered aid to the Mamertines. Hiero had to return to Syracuse, where he assumed the title of king. Shortly thereafter, the Mamertines decided to expel the Carthaginian garrison and seek aid from the Romans instead.
At Rome, there was a debate on the appropriateness of helping the Mamertines. Previously, Rome had intervened against Campanian mercenaries who had followed the Mamertines' example and taken control of Rhegium. Moreover, it seemed clear that intervention in Sicily would lead to conflict with Carthage. According to the lost historian Philinus of Agrigentum, who was favourable to the Carthaginians, there was a treaty between Rome and Carthage which defined their respective spheres of influence and assigned Sicily to the Carthaginians. This "Philinus Treaty" is known to us from Polybius, who mentions it in order to deny its existence. Polybius also claims that the Romans were encouraged to intervene by economic motivations, on account of the wealth of Sicily in this period. The Senate gave the decision on whether or not to help the Mamertines to the popular assembly, which decided to send help. This was not a formal declaration of war against Carthage, but the intervention in Sicily sufficed as a casus belli and thus marked the beginning of the First Punic War.
This was the first time that Roman forces had campaigned outside the Italian peninsula. Hiero, allied with Carthage against the Mamertines, had to face the legions of Valerius Messalla. The Romans quickly expelled the Syracusans and Carthaginains from Messina. In 263 BC, Hiero changed sides, making a peace treaty with the Romans in exchange for an indemnity of 100 talents, thus ensuring the maintenance of his power. He proved a loyal ally of the Romans until his death in 215 BC, providing aid, specially grain and siege weapons, to the Romans. This assistance was essential for the conquest of the Carthaginian base at Agrigentum in 262 BC. Hiero's loyalty is reflected in the peace treaty imposed on the Carthaginians at the end of the war, in which they were forbidden to attack Hiero or his allies. It seems, however, that pro-Roman sentiment was not universal at Syracuse and that there was a group opposed to Hiero which favoured the Carthaginians.
At the end of the First Punic War, Rome had conquered the majority of the island, except for Syracuse, which retained a broad autonomy. In addition to Syracuse, the kingdom of Hiero was granted a number of centres in the eastern part of the island, such as Akrai, Leontini, Megara, Eloro, Netum and Tauromenium, and probably also Morgantina and Camarina.
In addition to the aforementioned Philinus, there were other accounts of the First Punic War written by authors opposed to Rome, such as Sosilus of Sparta. The work of Philinus was analysed and criticised by Polybius, while that of Sosilus was entirely rejected by him as the "vulgar gossip of a barber's shop." A pro-Roman account was written by the historian Fabius Pictor, which is criticised by Polybius as well. The resulting representation of the war in the ancient source material is very partial: the motivations of the Mamertines are left opaque and by the time of Polybius there were different opinions even at Rome. The ancient accounts' impression that a war between Carthage and Rome was inevitable also seems questionable. Even the traditional explanation that Carthage was threatening Rome at the Straits of Messina seems anachronistic according to Moses Finley, since Carthage had never shown any inclination to expand into Italy. Probably no one at Rome foresaw that intervention at Messina would lead to a conflict on such a scale. According to the account of Polybius, this changed only after the conquest of Agrigentum. Finley says "this argument appears too simple and schematic, but it is correct in the sense that only then did Rome take the essential decision of creating a fleet, without which there was no hope of fighting the Carthaginians on equal terms.". The reaction of the Carthaginians to Roman intervention, however, is easily explained: Sicily had always been fundamental for Carthaginian control of the seas.
In any case, the fact that the Romans ultimately conquered the island makes it difficult to produce a balance reconstruction of conditions on Sicily in this period. What is certain is that the First Punic War had a disastrous effect on the territory. Both Rome and Carthage carried out atrocities: 250,000 inhabitants of Agrigentum were sold as slaves in 262 BC and seven years later the Carthaginians demolished the walls of the same city and set it on fire. In 258 BC, the Roman conquest of Camarina saw the majority of the inhabitants sold into slavery and 27,000 inhabitant of Panormus suffered the same fate. In 250 BC, Selinus was razed to the ground by the Romans and it was not inhabited again until Late Antiquity. Lilybaeum resisted a Roman siege for ten years, until the conclusion of the war after the Battle of the Aegates.
The first Roman province
The Roman victory in the First Punic War placed the entire island of Sicily in Roman hands. Previous Roman conquests in Italy had resulted in direct annexation or asymmetric treaties with Rome as hegemonic power. These treaties guaranteed substantial internal autonomy to the socii: they were required to contribute troops when requested but not to pay any form of tribute. Probably because of the island's complex mixture of ethnicities and perhaps also in order to recoup the expenses sustained during the war through a system of fiscal control, which excluded the concession of broad autonomy, Sicily came to be defined by a different institutional system.File:Syracuse Philistis Tetradrachm 218 BC 80000114.jpg|thumb|Philistis, wife of Hiero II, depicted on a tetradrachm minted between 218 and 214 BC
Eventually, the provincial structure would consist of a praetor, assisted in financial matters by two quaestores, one based at Lilybaeum and one based at Syracuse. But it is not clear how this system took form. It has been suggested that from 240 BC the government of western Sicily was entrusted to a quaestor sent annually to Lilybaeum. Scholars like Filippo Coarelli and Michael Crawford consider it possible that the government of Sicily was entrusted to a privatus cum imperio, that is an aristocrat with no official post and with a military command conferred on a personal basis, sent annually with administrative and judicial competence. Extraordinary governors of this kind were seen already during the First Punic War and occur again during the Second Punic War. Assuming that there was a quaestor at Lilybaeum, it is unclear whether this position was created immediately after the end of the war or sometime later, or if it was one of the quaestores which already existed, that is one of the quaestores classici, that had first been created in 267 BC, when the number of quaestores was increased from four to eight. Nor is it clear if there were two quaestores in the province from the beginning, since in all the provinces that were subsequently established, there was only one quaestor. According to Antonino Pinzone this difference is explained by the fact that Sicily "came under the control of Rome in two stages," so that "the position of the quaestor of Lilybaeum is to be considered a kind of fossil and his influence is to be imputed to the financial and military arrangements inherited from the quaestor.".
Subsequently, in 227 BC, two new praetores were created : one, Gaius Flaminius, was sent to Sicily; the other, Marcus Valerius Laevinus, to the new province of Corsica and Sardinia. Originally, the term provincia indicated the jurisdiction of a magistrate ; eventually it came to indicate the territory under their control. The change of 227 is reported by Gaius Julius Solinus:
It was in 227 BC that an annual grain tribute was imposed on the Sicilian communities by a lex frumentaria. This is best known for the province of Sicily from the 1st century BC context. At that time, the tribute consisted of a tenth of the harvest and it is possible that this system derived from the Syracusan kingdom. The tithe decuma was contracted out to the highest bidder. These contractors were called decumani. It seems that this lex frumentaria had results which were "not excessively grievous for the cities to pay... and the small Italians proprietors livin on the island. It developed in the context of Gaius Flaminius' focus on the development of small proprietors and of their class.".