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Megara Hyblaea

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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MEGARA HYBLAEA (perhaps identical with Hybla Major), an ancient city of Sicily, on the E. coast, 12 m. N.N.W. of Syracuse, founded in 728 B.C. by Megarean colonists, who had previously settled successively at Trotilon, Leontini and Thapsus. A hundred years later it founded Selinus, apparently because it had no room for development. It never seems to have been a town of great importance, and had no advantages of position. It was destroyed by Gelon about 481 B.C., and its walls seem to have been razed to the ground. In the Athenian expedition against Syracuse (415-413) Lamachus proposed (it being then deserted) to make it the Athenian base of operations; but his advice was not taken, and in the next spring the Syracusans fortified it. In 309 it was still fortified; but, after Marcellus captured it, in 214, we hear little more of it. Excavations carried on in 1891 led to the discovery of the northern portion of the western town wall, which in one section served at the same time as an embankment against floods (it was apparently more conspicuous in the time of P. Cluver, Sicilia, p. 133), of an extensive necropolis, about loon tombs of which have been explored, and of a deposit of votive objects from a temple. The harbour lay to the north of the town.

See P. Orsi in Monumenti dei Lincei (1891), i. 689-950; and Atti del congresso delle scienze storiche, v. 181 (Rome, 1904). (T. As.)