From at least the end of the Bronze Age, Sicily has been a site of interaction among different population groups, so that by the Classical and Hellenistic periods Greeks, Carthaginians, Italians, Romans, and native Sikels and Elymians were circulating on the island. Mass enslavements, transfers or eliminations of city populations as well as new foundations are common events in the relevant literary and documentary sources, and are crucial to understanding life there. In this dissertation I combine historical and material evidence to argue that there was higher mobility in Sicily over the fourth and third centuries than elsewhere, due initially to the nearly constant tension among the imperial powers--Syracuse, Carthage, and Rome--operating on the island, whose forced destructions, relocations, and foundations weakened the connections of people to their homes. This lack of connection in turn encouraged greater voluntary and individual movement, and as the Sicilian concept of citizenship became more provisional, it raised problems of group cohesion that affected the island's social, economic, and military history. As a consequence cities could no longer count on a reliable citizen army; land had to be redistributed periodically, generating conflict; and certain population groups dissolved entirely requiring their members to find new identities. This instability of civic and ethnic divisions contributed to the emergence of the island of Sicily itself as the most salient basis for a group membership.
My first two chapters document the most significant episodes of population movement and attempt to unravel the various modes of movement and population manipulation. In the first I introduce the record of Sicilian mobility motivated by political, economic, and geographic considerations. Politically, tyrants and empires exercised autocratic control over the disposition of the populations subject to them. Economic considerations motivated some of these manipulations, and disparate economic conditions could also encourage group mobility aside from such forced movements. Sicily's paradoxical insularity--being a very large island--may have conditioned the economy, agricultural organization and imperial policies, while simultaneously giving mobile Sicilians a stable identity no matter where on the island they moved. In the second chapter I explore more closely the specific logic of particular forms of mobility. The goal of this chapter is to differentiate and analyze modes of movement and instances of non-movement in order to clarify the causes and effects of each mode, and to have a more secure basis on which to pursue comparative evidence in later chapters.
With this foundation in place, the second part of the dissertation examines the nature of citizenship in an environment of high mobility through a series of thematic chapters. In Chapter Three on exiles and diasporas, I argue that the dispersal, wandering, and irregular reunion of populations promoted the communication of defining cultural practices between groups. Diasporas in particular represented a spatial extension of the citizen community beyond political boundaries. In Chapter Four I show how the recruitment, circulation, and semi-retirement of mercenaries both affected settled communities and created alternative, mobile ones. Chapter Five addresses the enslavement of populations, tracing the similarities with the condition of exiles but with emphasis on communities of the enslaved in other polities, and on the itineraries traveled between slave and free. I discuss the effects of economically-driven mobility in Chapter Six, arguing that Sicily's orientation toward grain production and export led to a low-level structural mobility.
One corollary of mobility is the diverse and variable composition of populations, a potential obstacle to group cohesion. Throughout the dissertation I focus on the historical, archaeological, and documentary data relevant to the development and maintenance of communities. In Chapter Seven I mobilize this data in arguing that the diffusion and hybridity of communities created by high mobility constructed Sicily itself as the most relevant container of its populations. Rather than privileging the static and bounded polis, I examine alternative and distributed groupings through the practices that united them or differentiated one from another. These communities of practice sometimes aligned with and sometimes cut across other group boundaries. My engagement with the material record and with individuals and groups ignored or glossed over by the historical sources is intended to move beyond the political and military focus of previous scholarship. In addition to the evidence of domestic objects and funerary ritual, I utilize official documents as well as the abundance of informal writing to characterize the practices distinctive to certain Sicilian populations. Understanding routine practices might explain how certain communities did or did not cohere as groups when mobility was high; understanding the relative importance of different groupings or communities might explain how regions become meaningful bases for identity. In the case of Sicily, the internal distinctions faded and the island came to define its inhabitants.
