EARLY ITALIAN POLEIS
Unlike the Greeks, the Etruscans are largely silent. Some Etruscans probably did write histories and chronicles of their own cities, but only a few, slight traces of these works remain. The cities of coastal Etruria sometimes appear in the writings of Greek and Roman historians. In the Greek texts, the Etruscans appear as enemies, competitors, and pirates, cruel and faithless. The Roman writers were less hostile, but no less ethnocentric.
By the end of the eighth century, some of the Greek colonies of Sicily and south¬ern Italy began to take on the forms of city-states (Greek, polis).
Several became notably powerful, dominating extensive hinterlands and large populations. Only a fraction of the inhabitants, however, would have been citizens of the ruling polis, for these Greek cities made sharp distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, and even between the descendants of the first Greek settlers and the offspring of later arrivals. At sixth century Selinus, for example, the original walled enclosure of the seventh-century colony (covering under 24 acres/10 hectares) contained temples and a residential district for the elite. Poorer residents, by contrast, lived in a large cluster of crowded dwellings outside the walls, or in scattered houses and villages in the countryside. At the same time, Syracuse had come to dominate a large territory.
This comprised the city itself and the lands cultivated directly by its citizens; a number of military strongholds with perma¬nent garrisons; the semiautonomous Greek colony of Camarina with its own citizens and territory; a number of villages inhabited by native Sicels who had been reduced to the status of serfs working the lands of the governing elite; and finally a few areas where Sicels maintained a semiautonomous status. Elsewhere the Greek cities of Gela and Acragas (both on the south coast of Sicily) maintained similar arrangements, as did the south Italian cities of Taras (Latin, Tarentum), Sybaris, and Croton.