Sicily

Sikanía is the older Greek name of the island, named for the Sicani, the people the Greeks reckoned the earliest inhabitants, whom some said had come from Iberia and others held to be native. Thucydides states plainly that the whole island was once called Sikania after them, before the later Sikels gave it the name Sikelía; the name is old enough to appear already in the Odyssey, where Laertes speaks of a man from Sikaníē.

Sikanía is the discarded earlier name beneath the surviving one, the deepest layer of the island’s naming. It records the people the Greeks found, or believed they found, on the island before the Sikels, and it was already archaic by the classical period, kept by the poets and the antiquarians while everyday usage said Sikelía. Sicily thus carries, in its two Greek names, the memory of two successive peoples: the living name of the Sikels and, beneath it, the older name of the Sicani whom the Sikels displaced, the island renamed as its inhabitants changed.

The Greek name of the island, Sikelía, named for the Sikeloi, the Sicels, an Italic people who, the Greeks held, had crossed from the mainland and given their name to the eastern part of the island and then the whole. Thucydides, opening his account of the Athenian expedition, runs through the peoples of Sicily and notes that the island, once called Sikania after the Sicani, took the name Sikelía from these later Sikels. It is the mainline name, the one the Greek colonists of Syracuse and the rest used.

Sikelía is the head of the family and the survivor. From it came the Latin Sicilia and the Roman province, the first the Romans ever held, and the granary that fed the city; and from the Latin, by way of Byzantine Greek, came even the Arabic Ṣiqilliya of the island’s Muslim centuries. Of the island’s several ancient names, this is the one that lasted, so that “Sicily” today is, at root, “the land of the Sikels,” a vanished Italic people remembered only in the name they left on the island that outlived them.

Trinakría is the Greek name of the island taken from its shape, “the three-cornered,” from tri-, “three,” and akra, “headland,” for the three great capes, Pelorus, Pachynus, and Lilybaeum, that give Sicily its triangular form. It is a learned reanalysis of an older, opaque name: Homer’s island of the Sun’s cattle is Thrinakíē, a word of no clear meaning that the Greeks reshaped, by way of its sound, into the transparent Trinakría, “three-pointed,” with the three capes read into it.

Trinakría is the island named not for a people but for its form, the odd one out among Sicily’s names. Where Sikanía and Sikelía record who lived there, Trinakría records what it looks like, the unmistakable triangle on the map; and where those names are flat description, this one began as a poet’s obscure Thrinakíē and was rationalized into geometry. The three-cornered island kept the name as a poetic alternative through antiquity, and it survives still as the island’s emblem, the triskelion of three running legs that is the figure of three-cornered Sicily.

The Latin name of the island, Sicilia, taken from the Greek, the name of the first province Rome ever acquired, won from Carthage in the First Punic War. Roman Sicily was the granary of the Republic, its grain feeding the city, its governance the subject of Cicero’s great prosecution of the rapacious governor Verres. The Latin form is the Greek Sikelía with the ordinary shifts into Latin.

Sicilia is the form that became the modern name, in Italian Sicilia and in English Sicily, the most durable of the island’s names. It carried the name of the Sikels, by then a people long absorbed, forward through the whole of Roman and medieval history; even the Arabic name of the island, when the emirate ruled it, descended ultimately from this same Greco-Latin word. The island that changed masters so often kept, through Latin, the name of one of its earliest peoples, the Sikels surviving as a sound long after they had ceased to be a nation.

The Latin name of the island, Trinacria, taken from the Greek shape-name, the form the Roman poets favored for Sicily. Virgil’s Aeneas coasts the Trinacrian shores and shoals on his way to Italy, and Ovid uses Trinacris and Trinacria for the island of Ceres and of the rape of Proserpina; it was the high, poetic name beside the plain prose Sicilia.

Trinacria is the poets’ Sicily, the three-cornered island in the grand manner, and it kept the geometry of the Greek name alive in Latin verse. Where Sicilia was the name of the province and the tax-rolls, Trinacria was the name of the epic, the shape of the island invoked for its sound and its antiquity; the two coexisted, the workaday and the poetic, as the island’s two faces. Through Latin literature Trinacria carried the shape-name forward, and the triangular island of the three capes is “Trinacria” in the high style to this day.

The Arabic name of the island, Ṣiqilliya, the name under which Sicily passed into the Islamic world during the long Muslim conquest that began in 827 and the Emirate of Sicily that followed, ruled from Palermo, which became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean. The Arabs took the name from the Greek and Latin Sikelía / Sicilia, current in the Byzantine island they conquered, rendering its k with a qāf.

Ṣiqilliya is the southern, Islamic chapter of the island’s oldest name, the Sikels’ name reaching Arabic after a thousand years and two more empires. Under it Sicily became a brilliant center of Arabic learning and agriculture, and even after the Normans took the island the Arabic name and the culture lingered, so that the Norman king Roger II had the geographer al-Idrīsī compose his great atlas at the Sicilian court. The name of an Italic people who had vanished before Rome was still, in Arabic, the name of the island, carried east and then back through the Greek of Byzantium into the language of the emirate.