It’s one of the most impressive views offered by an archaeological site in Sicily – and when you come here you’ll realise what a bold assertion that is. How you first encounter it is a choice; either way it’ll leave you awestruck. One way to is come down the still-paved ancient street, one of the two broad avenues draped down the length of the city; this way you’ll have your view masked until the last minute, as the planners surely intended, until you emerge beyond the concealing hill and take in the expanse before you. This way, you’re invited to walk on, see the remains emerge and with every succeeding step gradually appreciate the scale of what’s left, and what a fragment it is of the former magnificence that would have towered over you on all sides. Another way is to make your way to the crest of the thrillingly-named West Hill rearing above the whole space and, at the last moment, see everything emerge in all its glory. It’s one of those moments that leave you gasping with awe.
The Agora at Morgantina looking east. The East Hill above it is crowned with houses with Cittadella beyond and snow-capped Mt Etna in the background.
As you look down at the complex below – a grand theatre, a stoa – no, several stoas, each with multiple rooms, some climbing the far hill beyond the valley-like space, shrines, shops and far-off houses that proclaim themselves residences of the rich by their sheer size, even before you reach them, you realise that here was an ancient city that reached the pinnacle of success, its buildings expressing an organised, comfortable life built on the riches of a beautiful countryside. That, too, adds to the sense of majesty: seen from the heights of this beautifully winding hill, it stretches far into the distance in a series of coffee-table-book images by some master photographer. What a fortunate and happy place to have been able to create such marvels to crown such a lovely spot, now far into the aesthetic miracle that is Sicily’s eastern interior.
The edge of the city’s Agora, near the line of the now-gone city walls looking south.
Morgantina doesn’t trouble the ancient literary record much - remarkable, given the scale of the remains. To piece together its story, we have to turn to archaeology, and here we’re fortunate that much of the picture was formed by high quality post-war excavations, with much less of the haphazard nineteenth century work that characterises some sites, and a determined effort to head-off the tomb-robbers and site-plunderers who are so destructive to our ability to understand these havens where ancient remains can still speak to us, if we ask them carefully. That good fortune for us revealed that the apparent fortune of the inhabitants was illusory, or at least temporary. Something terrible happened here, and more than once. Stashes of coins have been found, many of them of the same date, terracotta vessels fallen in stacks while ready for sale; human remains litter the site – burials where they should not be, skeletal remains in four or five cisterns in houses of the wealthy. And those grand buildings of the agora, after a clear cut-off, go out of use, or are subdivided and turned to less grand purposes: squatter occupation, mean shops, small pottery ateliers with kilns shoehorned into areas once designed to awe a contented citizenry, a city council building turned into workshops. Morgantina suffered disaster and a slow sputtering end. And this was not the only time it had been struck, though it was the most damaging.
A pottery kiln built into the ruins of the great East Granary in the later Spanish period.
So, what is the story that archaeology tells us? Does it make up for the historical record amounting to little more than a few snippets? To the second question the answer is very much ‘yes.’ Our story of Morgantina is one of triumph and disaster, repeated several times, and in each revived iteration, the city’s story is unusual or unique, always filled with ambition and signs that the written sources sometimes present really don’t represent the full breadth of the Sicilian weave. For all its treasury of Greek stoas, theatres, and shrines, this is not a Greek settlement, or not straightforwardly so, even at its most Hellenised.
Occupation here goes back to the Early Bronze Age, if scrappily, but for our purposes, the story really picks up at the end of that era and into the Early Iron Age, around 2,900 years ago. And it begins, not where the grand buildings of the later Agora are, nor even on the flanking hills known for their later aristocratic residences, but on a different site entirely, albeit related to our main one and easily seen from the East Hill above the later centre. It’s a bit of a slog along a rough path today to a steep-sloped roundish hill semi-detached from the later site (but reoccupied later in Morgantina’s history, and clearly regarded as part of it): known as Cittadella. Here, from around 850 BC, we have a village, and then a town of huts and rectangular longhouses, stone walled, wooden roofed and cut into the bedrock. The dead are buried on the same hill in rock-cut tombs, accompanied by pottery and other goods. What’s interesting is that, though much is similar to other Iron Age sites of the island’s east, the region inhabited by the people known to – or bundled together as – ‘Sikels’ by the classical Greeks, some of the material remains are different, of a kind found much further north in the Aeolian islands. Interestingly, this fits with later legend about the city’s origins, which ascribed it to incomers from Italy under a mythical leader called Morges. He gives his name to the inhabitants, the Morgetes and thus to the ancient city. As the generations passed, Sicily attracted the attention of other outsiders, whose ships nosed their way down the east coast in the early 700s BC; those within the ships traded, and ultimately settled there. The island’s first permanently settled ancient Greeks.
Greek-style terracotta antefixes in the form of the heads of maenads from a building in the Cittadella settlement, about 550 BC.
Cittadella soon shows signs of them: pottery and other trade goods start to appear on the site and in the cemeteries. As the houses and shrines grow larger, we find Greek-style tiles and brightly painted antefixes in the form of striking faces staring out over more thickly populated streets, where it seems some voices were also speaking Greek. By no means was Morgantina a Greek city, but there were certainly Greek people living here in some numbers, surprisingly early and surprisingly far inland. Whether they lived as visiting merchants, long-term guests or equal members of the community is hard to say, but it makes Cittadella one of those special early sites in Sicily where the old idea that a settlement was either a Greek city or ‘native’ highly questionable. It’d be interesting to hear what contemporaries of all kinds had to say. However, you’d characterise it, though, the quality of incoming Greek goods could rise to masterpiece level without overwhelming or obliterating the local character.
A Sicilian ‘plumed ware’ amphora found on a platform with Iron Age huts on the east side of the Cittadella settlement in the 1960s.
And in the mid fifth-century, all that came to a shuddering halt. Morgantina was destroyed in a violent act linked probably with the place’s capture by the extraordinarily interesting figure of Ducetius, a charismatic Sikel leader who led what can be seen as a war of resistance or liberation against the now powerful Greek colonies on the island – Syracuse, Gela and Akragas in particular. It’s the one long-term, large-scale and (for a while) successful example of such resistance that we have. That at least is how the rather sketchy Greek sources put it; again, it’d be interesting to know what contemporaries thought. Either way, the old Morgantina on Cittadella ends and a new one arises on the neighbouring ridge-hill of Serra Orlando, perhaps the work of Ducetius himself. Though he was ultimately to fail in whatever his aims were, this new city would continue, albeit now under the domination of the Greeks of Syracuse and Camarina. Still, though, we’re not dealing with a ‘Greek’ city, even if the culture increasingly looked in that direction.
The move to Serra Orlando is interesting. Why not carry on at Cittadella? Well, the new location was far larger and more spacious: there was simply a lot more room. Far more than was initially needed for the refounded city. This was a declaration of intent, a marker of ambition. From the beginning, the Morgetian city gave itself a Greek-style grid plan, with broad avenues and narrower side streets across the long, sinewy ridge. Altars at the street corners imply a level of civil organisation that surpasses some cities of old Greece in this time, as does the reservation of a vast and broad space for an open agora in the Hellenic style. To be clear, Sikel and Morgetian still described the people here and their indigenous language, but they seem to have had no problem with admitting a sizeable number of Greek people and a Greek cultural strand into their civilisation, Ducetius’ example notwithstanding. One of the most telling ways this is exhibited, before and after the move from Cittadella, is the profusion of shrines to the Chthonic deities, Demeter and Persephone. The almost bewildering number of such shrines is typical, too, of Greek cities on the island, whose richness saw it held sacred to the goddesses, but particularly appropriate here, near where the core act of Persephone (or Kore’s) abduction by Hades was set. As a result, some of the finest artworks of the cult were, shall we say ‘found’ here – but perhaps that’s a story best told another time.
The third century BC ‘Doric Stoa’ at the edge of the Agora complex.
At any rate, this new and impressive blended city managed two or three generations of prosperity before suffering, in one of Sicily’s most traumatic and violent periods, another destruction at the hands of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius. She was not floored for long, though, and in the third century BC, entered upon her richest and most startling phase.
The Fountain House built in the third century BC had two separate basins, holding 34,000 litres between them.
By this time, Morgantina was under the control of another Syracusan monarch, Hieron II. Having come to power as a war-leader, he came into conflict with the Romans on their first incursion onto the island and, more savvily than many a ruler of the era, recognised when he was overmatched. Making a treaty with the aggressive Republic, he managed to avoid participation in one of antiquity’s most destructive wars – the First Punic War, which in the course of an adult lifetime and at unimaginable cost, made Rome a Mediterranean power. And by playing the part of good and helpful ally, managed to secure himself a long reign and an eventual peaceful death, and his part of Sicily an era of almost unparalleled peace and prosperity, as reflected in the superlative monuments in Syracuse itself and their impressive reflections in his subordinate cities like Taormina, Acrai – and Morgantina.
A find from the North Stoa – a bronze wing from a figurine of Eros; third-second centuries BC
Here they took a particularly grandiose form. In the 260s and 250s, in the old Agora space, the existing public buildings were swept away and replaced by a vast new arrangement, seemingly a single concept by one guiding genius, even if it was later modified and expanded. Like other projects of Hieron, it employed long colonnaded Greek stoas, vast in scale and beautifully decorated, and these worked and interplayed with the other buildings to create dramatic vistas and sightlines, no longer sited where the land allowed, but remaking and reshaping it to create a sense of drama and unity to the architecture. The north of the Agora was framed by three of these stoas, the northernmost featuring 17 rooms, the eastern three-hundred-feet long, its colonnade embellished by 43 columns.
The Theatre, which could seat about 1,000 people. In front is one of the city’s numerous shrines to Demeter and Kore.
The third stoa was to be even grander, replacing a less ambitious false start, but was never to be completed for reasons that you’ve probably guessed are not good. Apart from these stoas, there was – again, typical for Hieron – an impressive theatre leaning into the hillside with hefty supporting walls and tiered stone seating, on one row of which, in the right light, and if you know where to look, you can make out an inscription in large Greek letters telling us, in a burst of self-aggrandising pride typical of the public philanthropy of hellenistic Greek cities, that the seating, at least, was a gift to the god Dionysus by Archelas, the son of Eukleidas. Good Doric Greek names.
The dedicatory inscription on the theatre’s seating: ‘Archelas son of Eucleidas, to Dionysus’.
Next to this is perhaps the most unique and extraordinary monument of Morgantina, the so-called Ekklesiasterion. This is a 50-metre stretch of tiered seating, monumentalising a natural declivity in the old agora, and making it exceptional. The modern name suggests it was where the citizens assembled for political meetings, and this makes perfect sense, particularly as it lines up nicely with the base of a speaker’s platform and, too, with the entrance to a clearly official building, probably the representative of King Hieron from Syracuse.
A view over the southern Agora from the so-called Public Office of about 250-225 BC to the Ekklesiasterion.
We can add more to the complex – a beautiful monumental fountain, shopping complexes, and vast grain stores for the tribute due to the overlord, Hieron, who very scientifically reordered and systematised the extraction of wealth from his territories. But he didn’t squeeze them dry: the same period gives us house after wealthy house, epic displays of wealth filled with fine things, centred around opulent courtyards and with refined paving floors, either in the attractive red opus signinum cement-work with white stone decoration – dotted patterns or even the word for good fortune in Greek, or as splendid full-scale mosaics, as in that which gives the name to the House of Ganymede. As well as the many shrines that still existed to Demeter and Persephone (and others) there were at least two bath-houses of innovative design, linked by some to Hieron’s scientist-courtier and possible relative, Archimedes. This city, ‘barbarian’ in origin, now easily stood as a visual rival to many celebrated cities of old Greece. Rule from Syracuse may have been extractive, but it seems to have left more than enough for a good life.
‘Fish Plates’ such as this are typical originating in Greek south Italy. This one is from the ‘House of the Silver Hoard’.
But this being ancient Sicily, it was not to persist. After a long reign, loyal to the last to his Roman alliance, Hieron II died in the midst of the epochal Roman war against Hannibal. His grandson and the city sought freedom in rejection of that link, and rebellion, but bought only destruction. In a war which is usually just a footnote to the main struggle, Syracuse fell to an epic siege, betrayed by Spanish mercenaries. That’s the only part that is remembered, thanks to Archimedes’ role in it. But there was a footnote to the footnote, which wrapped thousands of lives up in it in forgotten disaster. Morgantina stayed true to Syracuse, and died as a result. Again, we hear next to nothing in the sources, but the archaeology is clear. Coins buried for safety under floor after floor, all ending just before this year of 211; dead bodies in shallow graves in the corners of collapsed buildings destroyed in the sack by Marcus Cornelius Cethegus which followed its capture or surrender - most of the skeletons, the bodies in the cisterns, they belong here. Other treasures are buried, never to be recovered by their owners – more on them another time – and the victorious soldiers camp and eat in the remains of the Agora. Roman behaviour on taking a city in this period, when the Republic was fighting for its survival, was famously brutal.
Part of the rich House of the Arched Cistern, the city’s largest, on Morgantina’s West Hill.
We don’t know what happened to the Morgantinians – those we can name, like Eupolemos and Theudoros, Archelas, if he was still alive; and those we can’t, like the keeper of the pottery shop whose stacks of vessels were found tipped over, the buyers winked out of existence, or the young women who dedicated terracotta busts of Persephone or similarly-aged girls entering marriage at the now-extinguished shrine next to the agora – but we can guess. Some are among the recovered dead, others found in even less formal, unvisited graves; others still will have passed through Roman slave markets to new lives and new names far from their murdered city, having been turned into money to reward the victorious soldiers. The life promised by the ongoing, hopeful building programme, like the construction work itself, ended.
The cult festivals of Demeter and Persephone are always accompanied by large numbers of terracotta lamps. These are from the Central Sanctuary, still used in the Spanish period, third-first centuries BC.
But Morgantina didn’t, not yet, not quite. Remember those Spanish mercenaries who betrayed Syracuse? Well, Morgantina was their reward. They took over the grand houses and the remains of the city. There were fewer of them, they didn’t need such grand buildings, but here they lived for nearly two centuries, their coins proclaiming them to be HISPANORUM, of the Spaniards. The rich houses found new owners, who subdivided some of them rather artlessly. Others saw workshops introduced. Some of the public buildings weren’t needed at all and were put to more mundane uses as shops or workshops, though one of the stoas saw a very impressive pottery inserted in part of the old structure. This all sounds rather depressing, but it’d be unfair to have that as the only takeaway, as if the Spanish period were one of brutal occupiers incapable of managing this level of civilisation. There were far fewer of them, it seems, than the original Morgantinians, and they had less desire to operate as a Greek city, but - even in the face of earthquakes and some difficulties of the site, they still kept the ekklesiasterion at least partially clear and they did make one major addition to the site – a very fine building that is the first known example of a type that would become very common in the Roman world, a built market-hall called a macellum. It’s a worthy addition to the city, though rather divorced from the artful homogeneity of the agora complex it stands within. Impressive, even so.
View over the northern part of the Agora towards the East Hill and Cittadella. In the foreground, the square building is the innovative Macellum market from the Spanish period, the first surviving example of the type.
And this is nearly the final act. This Spanish Morgantina – or Murgantia, as it was now called – lasted through several generations: we shouldn’t see it as a mere coda. But it was fated to suffer the fate of its predecessor, pretty certainly as a consequence of the Roman civil wars after Julius Caesar’s murder. Sextus Pompeius, son of Pompey the Great, had seized the island. Eventually, after several false starts, he was defeated by Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, and the future first emperor of Rome. Murgantia/Morgantina, though likely it had little choice in the matter, suffered for siding with Sextus and once again was sacked by the legions. At least some of the skeletons within the site belong to this melancholy episode. Afterwards, the life of any kind of city on the hill ended after eight centuries.
Painted wall plaster from houses on the West Hill, Spanish period, third-first centuries BC. The largest simulates richer stone.
But not all life. Some of the old houses were still occupied, and shops and small shrines still found a home in old public buildings. This lasted for half a century or more, in feel more like a rural hamlet with a few finer houses nearby amid increasingly forgotten ruins. Some time in the early first century AD, with the Roman empire now fully established, a work-gang came to what was now a small village and began to prise out the well-shaped ashlar stones from the old public buildings around the old north stoa, not far from the still functioning centuries old fountain house. Out came the stones, out to the side of the old road.
Countryside near Morgantina. The core of the land of the ancient Sikels, and the setting for the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
And there they remained. No-one carried them off. There’s no sign, for once, of violence. The fountain house collapsed around the same time. Probably the culprit of all of this was an earthquake, shaking down some of the rickety, once marvellous, buildings, and scaring off the workers, and either no-one sent them back again or they no longer thought it worth the effort.
With that, the long life of ancient Morgantina was ended. Its subsequent remoteness has bequeathed us some of the finest ancient remains in Sicily, and extraordinary treasures for the superb local museum. What we’ve described here is just an opener, though: believe me – the physical remains on the site are only a part of what is amazing here. The site alone takes our visitors’ breath away when we show it to them, but it’s an entrée.
More anon.
You can discover the fascinating site of Morgantina with expert guides on our Exploring Sicily tour.
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