That the legionaries and officials were Roman in their political relations only, is nearly certain. Ethnologically they must have been chiefly South Italian. And the female part must have been native Sicilian. What does this mean--Greek, Carthaginian, Sikanian, or Sikelian? Any one in particular, or a little of each? The paramount fact for this question is the evidence to the existence of Sikeli and Sikani up to the reduction of the island. From then we hear no more of them: not, however, because they are known to have become extinct, but because their relations to Greece have ceased, and the historians who might mention them are wanting. Rome had no contemporary literature; and when it had, the Sicilian was known only as opposed to the Roman; for the writers use the word _Siculi_, in a general sense, making no distinction between the _Sikel_, the _Sikan_, and the _Sikeliot_. They were treated, however, as Greeks, not as barbarians; and the Latin language was not forced upon them. This is an inference from more than one expression in Cicero’s Oration against Verres, where they are spoken of as Greek.--“Novum est in Siculis, quidem, et in omnibus Græcis monstri simile.”--ii. 11. 65. Again, “Itaque eum non solum patronum istius insulæ sed etiam _sotera_ inscriptum vidi Syracusis.”--_Ibid._ 63. If the Romans disturbed the ethnology but little, the question is reduced to the extent to which the Greek colonies either displaced the earlier inhabitants, or effected an intermixture. Of Ducetius, a Sikel king, powerful in the middle of the island, we hear in the times between Gelon and the Athenian invasion; and of other less important chiefs (some with Greek names), we hear until the first Punic war. They are always, however, Sikel. Of the Sikanians, Elymæans, and the so-called Phocian Greeks, little or nothing is said. At the downfall of the Roman Empire, Sicily seems to have been Greek in speech, and Sikelo-Sikanian, strongly crossed with Greek, in blood. Then came the piracies of Genseric and his Vandals; then the invasion of the Goths of Theodoric; then the island is reconquered by Belisarius as a general of the _Eastern_ empire; none of which events were of much ethnological importance. Not so the events of the ninth century. The Arab conquest was a physical as well as a moral influence. [Sidenote: A.D. 827-878.]