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*Includes pictures *Includes ancient accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading It is hard to find an island on the map more central than Sicily. Located at the crossroads between Europe and Africa, and between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, Sicily has rarely been governed as an independent, unified state. Nonetheless, the island has always occupied a front-row seat to some of the most important events in history, and nowhere is this more obvious than during antiquity. Very fertile in ancient times, Sicily was especially prized for its grain production. The island had been inhabited by native tribes since prehistoric times, but by the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, Sicily would be the staging area for a confrontation between the Greeks and the Phoenicians, seafaring powers that scrambled to establish colonies along its coasts. These colonies, in time, would grow independent, and by the Classical era (510-323 BCE), they would be waging wars of their own. It was during the Classical era that, especially under the tyrants (dictators) of the Greek city of Syracuse, Sicily came the closest to being governed as a single, unified, and independent state. In time, it came to challenge the powerful trade empire of Carthage, a former Phoenician colony in North Africa, and it vied with the cities and kingdoms of mainland Greece for primacy in the Greek world. Later on, Sicily would be both a prize and a battlefield during the First Punic War (263-241 BCE) and, to a lesser degree, also during the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE). These were massive, protracted conflicts between Carthage and the rising Roman Republic, and Rome would subsequently become the main power in the Mediterranean on its way to ruling much of the known world. Sicily would go on to become the Roman Republic's first territory outside of Italy and its first province; and Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse at the time, would be Rome's first client king. Th