Morgantina

Murgantia (Serra Orlando, three miles from Aidone)

A Greek city in east-central Sicily, lying on a ridge at the junction of the island's central plateaus with the fertile Catana (Catania) plain; watered by the upper course of the river Symaethus (Simeto) and its tributaries. The original Sicel hut village goes back to the third millennium BC, and the city's subsequent name was owed to the immigration, recorded by Strabo, of a people known as the Morgetes from south-central Italy c 1200 (?). Greek settlers, probably from Catana and Leontini (Carlentini near Lentini), arrived c 500 and created an urban community. However, Sicel occupation also continued, and the mixed burial rites, noted in an excavated tomb, have been ascribed to cultural amalgamation, perhaps as a result of intermarriage. Nevertheless, the main role of the city was to form a Greek outpost on the fringe of the Sicel hinterland, dominating the roads to the south and northwest as well as eastward to Catana.

Severe damage inflicted by the Sicel king Ducetius (459) caused a temporary decline, and subsequently Morgantina remained under the domination of the Syracusans until they ceded it to Camarina (425). In 397 Dionysius I restored the influence of Syracuse, whose leader Timoleon undertook the refortification of the city in the 350s, followed by rebuilding and resettlement by other Syracusan rulers, Agathocles (317–289) and Hiero II (275–215). From the middle of the third century, when their coins depict a god Alkos (perhaps identifiable with Apollo), the Morgantinans enriched themselves from their grain-producing surroundings and their skilful production of terracotta figurines. During the Second Punic War, however, when the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured Syracuse (211), he sacked Morgentina and handed it over to Rome's Spanish allies. Subsequent repairs were only on a modest scale; then slave revolts (c 139–132, 104–100) caused further suffering, and by the time of Augustus, according to Strabo, the town had virtually ceased to exist.

The original settlement stood on a steep isolated acropolis ridge (Mount Cittadella). The later habitation area, at the midpoint of a ridge in a hollow between two low hills, displays a town plan that goes back to the second quarter of the fifth century. But the zone is chiefly notable for an exceptional agora of the time of Agathocles; this was built on a slope, with flights of steps forming three sides of a polygon and serving as seats for public meetings addressed from a podium that has recently been discovered. The remaining side of the agora was flanked by a long stuccoed and painted portico. However, the whole complex was abandoned before completion. Other public buildings included at least four temples of Demeter and Persephone (Kore) as well as another sanctuary dedicated to the gods of the underworld, a theater of the third century BC, and numerous dwellings of the same time or later. The `House of Ganymede’ contains a mosaic—representing Ganymede being carried off by the eagle of Zeus—that dates from c 250 and is therefore one of the earliest tessellated mosaics to have been discovered so far. Traces of two large public granaries, built in the fourth and third centuries, have also been unearthed.

Excavations outside the city at San Francesco Bisconti have now revealed an unusual group of shrines that date from the mid-sixth century and the two centuries that followed, and are arranged on at least three different levels of the hillside. Like so many other local monuments, this sanctuary shows signs of destruction by fire, presumably in 211. Objects from the site of Morgantina have now been lodged in a museum at nearby Aidone. During the later Roman empire, a great residence was erected five miles from the city, near Philosophiana (qv) and the modern Piazza Armerina.