Writing the history of the island of Sicily in the last three centuries befor Augustus presents a challenge: that of overcoming the narratives constructed b our Greco-Roman literary sources and firmly embedded within our Hellen and Romano-centric traditions of historical study of the Mediterranean. Sic is hardly unique in this respect, but presents a good case-study, situated as it is between East and West, North and South, at the crossroads of Mediterranea connectivity'. 1 The traditional narrative for Sicily is that of a region on th margins of the Hellenistic world, whose at times outlandish Hellenism is gradually crushed by the conquest and incorporation of the island as a prouincia of the Roman Republic. 2 The story is well defined: the island dro out of mainstream (ie Roman) history following the establishment of Rom provincial government in the third century BC, and the island s cities suff a comprehensive loss of autonomy, worn down by the demands of Roman taxation and the effects of Roman rule; this process culminates towards the end of the Republican period with the depredations of Verres and the impact of the civil wars; and the island becomes a quiet backwater of veteran coloniae and the extensive lattfundia of absentee landlords, a peaceful suburbana of Imperial Ital This narrative follows easily from the literary sources, dominated as they are b Cicero on Verres and Diodorus on the Slave Wars. Ex silentio, the narrative was confirmed by the limited evidence of archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics. The picture drawn from the archaeological evidence for urban settlement w one of decline from the fourth century BC onwards (even though complication could already be seen in more careful readings); the epigraphy was consider so minimal as to imply a lack of civic life (Syracuse could be described as