Sicilian Expedition - Motya

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this Sicilian port aboard this tiny ship.

The mate was a mighty professor man, the philologist brave and sure.

36 passengers set sail that day, a 10 minute tour, a 10 minute tour...

Anyway, we did actually ride a boat on that day in Sicily, because our next site was the small island of Motya, about a kilometer from shore. The island was initially settled in the 8th century BC by Phoenicians. It was an important trade outpost for the Carthaginians (a Phoenician colony in north Africa which began to dominate the western Mediterranean) and was involved in many of the military and political struggles of the 5th and 4th centuries in Sicily. Carthage used Motya as a staging ground to attack Greek colonies on the island. Finally, in 397 Syracuse razed Motya to the ground.

This enigmatic statue was found on the island and now sits in Motya's museum. Scholars are unable to agree upon what the "Motya Ephebe" (Motyan Youth) is and when he was made. The face has some very archaic looking elements (stylized hair, almond shaped eyes, etc), but the body's extreme contraposto and wet drapery looks Hellenistic. This makes dating the statue very difficult, anywhere from the early 5th to the late 4th century BC. This lecture confirmed some of my skepticism about dating works of art on purely stylistic grounds. Unless a work of art is accompanied by other evidence, art historians should be flexible in their estimates.

The next site we visited was a Carthaginian tophet, or infant burial ground. Tophets lie at the center of a large controversy over whether or not the Phoenicians practiced child sacrifice. Sources like Plutarch (De Superstitione XIII), Jeremiah (7:31-33), and Dionysus of Halicarnassus all attest to the practice. However, we don't know whether tophets were actually sacrificial burial grounds or merely infant burial grounds. Some students and I did some quick math which suggests the former rather than the latter. The tophet was in continual use from the 7th to the 3rd century BC, and around 1000 child burials (ages 0-2) were found there. That means that on average only 2 or 3 babies were buried there every year. If the burial ground was a general cemetary for all dead infants, and not just sacrifices, one would expect a far greater number buried over the course of 400 years, given the high incidence of child mortality in antiquity. The relatively small number of burials suggests one of two things: either this was a burial ground for only certain infants (say, those of the local elite), or it was associated with a horrific practice of child sacrifice. Given the literary evidence, I'm inclined to believe the latter.