ABSTRACT
THE story of the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta with Gozo, and the small islands of the Maltese group, and Pantelleria, is by no means an integral part of the story of the Italian peninsula. It is rather an appendix than a continuation. The prehistory of the islands, so soon as it begins to show in any detail, is quite distinct from and independent of that of the mainland-apart that is to say, from their common occupation by men of the Mediterranean race; and, more particularly, apart from the hints, still rather vague, that we have already had occasion to observe of what may yet prove to have been an Apulo-Calabrio-Siculan culture that linked together, at least during the neolithic and bronze ages Sicily and south Italy -whatever its more remote affiliations. But these hints are still so vague that it is possible to speak of a " complete divorce between Sicily and Italy throughout all prehistoric time". At the other end of our time-scale, the Augustan unification ofItaly, the divorce persists in the continued organization 1 of Sicily as a separate province, although, from the days of the Greek colonization Sicily and Italy, especially southern Italy, had gradually drawn closer together culturally, and between Rome and Sicily there had been close contact, commercial and political, from the days of the First Punic war and even before. There is, in fact, a considerable number of words, all connected with trade, shared by Latin and by Sicel, which Mommsen and others have held to indicate commercial relationships between Rome and Sicily or a very remote antiquity; it may, however, be questioned whether
these words are not due rather to a common Indo-European inheritance than to borrowing. l Be that as it may, archreologically Sicily is independent of Italy throughout the early iron age until Hellenism began to affect both. Likewise Corsica and Sardinia are independent culturally in the periods preceding the Romanization, and always remained politically independent of the Roman organization of Italy.
