Excerpt from History of Sicily, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times
These two volumes are the beginning of a work which, if I did not think before I thought of the History of the Norman Conquest, I certainly thought of before the plan of that work had taken any definite shape. I believe my thoughts were first drawn towards Sicily, nearly fifty years back, by a Pindar lecture of the late Isaac Williams. That gave me, and I suppose others, some dim notion of one side of the story of the great Mediterranean island. The other side was suggested to me some years later by Gaily Knights Normans in Sicily. The two sides were put into their fitting relation to one another by a few memorable words of Grote (chap, xliii. vol. v.p. 277);
"We are here introduced to the first known instance of that series of contests between the Phoenicians and Greeks of Sicily, which, like the struggles between the Saracens and the Normans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries after the Christian ?ra, were destined to determine whether the island should be a part of Africa or a part of Europe - and which were only terminated, after the lapse of three centuries, by the absorption of both into the vast bosom of Rome."
Those words I wish to have looked on as the text of all that I have since thought and written on Sicilian history.
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