The history of Greek Sicily (Ancient Greek: Σικελία) began with the foundation of the first Greek colonies around the mid 8th century BC. The Greeks of Sicily were known as Siceliotes.
Over the following centuries many conflicts between the city-states occurred until around 276 BC Pyrrhus of Epirus managed to conquer the whole island except Carthaginian Lilybaeum. After the First Punic War in 241 BC the island was conquered by the Romans.
Hiero II (/ˈhaɪəroʊ/; also Hieron /ˈhaɪərɒn/; Ancient Greek: Ἱέρων; c. 308 BC – 215 BC) was the Greek tyrant of Syracuse, Greek Sicily, from 275 to 215 BC, and the illegitimate son of a Syracusan noble, Hierocles, who claimed descent from Gelon. He was a former general of Pyrrhus of Epirus and an important figure of the First Punic War. He figures in the story of famed thinker Archimedes shouting "Eureka".
During the Muslim rule on Sicily, the island was divided into three different administrative regions: the Val di Noto in the southeast, the Val Demone in the northeast and the Val di Mazara in the west. Each zone has a noticeably different agriculture and topography and they converged near Castrogiovanni (Enna). The term val or vallo (plural: valli) is derived from Arabic (Siculo Arabic: وَلاية, romanized: walāya; compare وَلِيّ, waliyy), with the administrative meaning of 'province', and was retained for various administrative divisions of the Kingdom of Sicily until the 19th century.
There are many Arab-derived names in the Val di Mazara (and more Christians converted to Islam from this region), are more mixed in the Val di Noto, while Christian (particularly Greek) identities survived strongest in the Val Demone (with the least Arab-derived names), which was the last to fall to the Muslims, where Christian refugees from other parts of Sicily had assembled, and which furthermore remained in contact with Byzantine southern Italy. Even in present-day Sicily, differences between the east and west of the island are often explained by locals as being due to the Greek and Arab descent of the populations, respectively. Later Christian Lombard settlements would split the remaining Muslims of Sicily in half, separating the Val di Mazara and the Val di Noto.
Gorgias (/ˈɡɔːrdʒiəs/ GOR-jee-əs; Ancient Greek: Γοργίας; c. 483 BC – c. 375 BC) was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist", although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.
Prominent among his claims to recognition is that he transplanted rhetoric from his native Sicily to Attica, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.