Graves, Gods, and Extratextual Ritual in Archaic Colonial Sicily Lela M. Urquhart Not far into the first volume of Edward Freeman’s A History of Sicily, published between 1891 and 1894, there is a section entitled “Sikel sites,” referring to the known sites of an ancient population recorded by Thucydides and indigenous to the island. A few paragraphs in, it becomes apparent that the focus of the section is not, however, on “sites” at all, but rather is on ancient indigenous Sicilian religion. More specifically, the section raises a series of questions about the extent to which native religious belief and worship changed after the beginning of Greek colonization. The responses to those questions are surprisingly ambivalent, however, given that Freeman was very much the Hellenist, one who compared the history of Sicily to that of America, a land that never possessed “strictly a native greatness” and that “became great by colonization from other lands,” (1891-1894, 1:6). Freeman asserts, for example, that while the Sikel may have “adopted, if not the religion, yet the mythology of the Greek,” it was also the Greek who “learned to worship the gods of the Sikel, to adopt them into his own mythology, and to turn the legends of Greece into new shapes which better fitted [the] new homes on Sicilian soil” (Ibid., 134). Later on, the ethnic or cultural origins of certain gods, such as Demeter and Kore, are interpreted as equally indiscernible: “One can hardly say,” he states, “whether it was the Greek that led captive the Sikel or the Sikel that led captive the Greek, when the gods of Sikel worship were so thoroughly sunk in those of Greece” (Ibid., 170). Perhaps most interesting of all are Freeman’s conclusions about the endurance of various native religious traditions: some, like the worship of Hybla “run a course” (Ibid., 162) of their own, independent of Greek influence. Others were syncretized with Greek deities and Greek belief, “fusing together…the religious life of the Greek and the Sikel” (Ibid., 154). Still others, like the Palici, were readily adopted by the Greeks, but remained for time immemorial a vanguard of native worship. Situated against the backdrop of European historiography on ancient Greek colonization, it is evident that Freeman, a British historian and politician who also wrote a history of England, was not the only scholar of his time uncertain of how to represent religion and religious development in ancient colonial Sicily. Adolf Holm, a German ancient historian appointed as chair of the University of Palermo in the 1870s, stated outright that he believed the Sikels worshipped Demeter prior to the Greeks, and that this explained why the goddess had been so widely revered across the island. Later, the Italian scholar Biagio Pace, though heavily influenced by Fascism, advocated a view of Sicilian religion in which early similarities between colonial and native religious systems had led to “an almost complete fusion” of the two. 1