It was also the most advanced point of Greek colonial expansion, on the border between Greek colonies and the barbarous triangle made by Mothya, Palermo and Solunto: that's why Selinus suffered from this particular position in the events which heavily bore upon its history.
In the developed city life went on with a magnificence unknown in the mother country and its richness is testified by the grandeur of the buildings that, in number and dimension, seem sometimes superior also to the great assets of the citizens.
In the first period the city had an aristocratic gouvernment based on the predominance of the great landowners. Later, tyranny occurs with Terone Selinuntino, Miltiades' son, who, for love of luxury and to strike popular imagination, supports and protects arts and literature without neglecting its work of government, which is rich of political and military contents. He built the city walls and widened the borders of the Selinuntine state.
In the beginning of the VIth century the Selinuntines occupied the southern coast as far as the modern Sciacca and in 570 B.C. they found, at the mouth of Platani river, the subcolony Minoa, name relating with Monos and the legend of his expedition and death in Sicily at the Sican King Kokalos.
The next tyrant was Pythagoras Selinuntino who is deposed by Eurileontes
who, in his tune, is massacred on Jove Agoraios' altar where he had uselessly
looked for sacred asylum.
In the VIth century the plan of the selinuntine state showed an irregular
quadrilateral shape made by the axes Mazara Sciacca in the South and Salemi -
Poggioreale in the North, with a topo- graphic area of 1750 kmq, with a
population of about 200.000 inhabitants (33.000 in the city according to
Beloch).
In that period many distinguished and famous personalities can be noticed in
the life of Selinus: the philosopher Aristossenus, the orator Aristoteles, the
poet Telestes, the sculptor Acrontes, the painter Poliedus.
Also Empedocles, one of the most distinguished figure of Greek genius, left
his mark in Selinus saving the city from malaria. He executed, at his expense,
hydraulic works, and he deserved a quasi divine honour: an effigy on their
coins and a votive small temple consecrated to him.
The Greek settlers of Selinus didn't limit themseleves to take possession of
the eastward coast and wanted to expand westwards in the direction of Mazara
and north wards in the direction of Segesta;
consequently the rivalry with this city became unavoidable.
From the tension between Segesta and Selinus started a long hard war, which
culminated with the end of Sicilian hellenism.
Pentatlus from Cnido, who bragged to be a Heracle's descendant, arriving in
Sicily (580 B.C.) with the purpose of settling in Lilybeum (Marsala), found
that Selinuntines and Segestans were fighting; he formed an alliance with the
first and died during a battle.
Threatened by Selinuntine expansionist trend Segesta called Athens for
help. It was the immediate cause of Athenian expedition (415 B.C.) wich turned
into a disaster, prelude of the collapse of the Athenian power.
Some years later, in 409 B.C., Carthage, after a nine-days siege, at the end
of a blitz war, razed Selinus to the ground.
Tradition recorder by the historian Diodorus Siculus talks with striking realism about the destruction of Selinus by the Carthaginians. As the city was fallen, barbaric mercenaries sacked all the things of great value in the houses; the inhabitants were locked up and compelled to die stifled: burnt alive or smashed by the weight of the roofs and walls or carried away and throtled without considering sex or age, included boys and girl, children, women, old people.
Then they mutilated the corpses according to the custom of their own country. Some of them made a show of trophies with cut hands, bound together; others carried stuck int their barbaric poles.
Hannibal, grandson of Hamilcar, who had been won and killed by Gelon from
Syracuse, and Teron from Agrigento in the great battle at Himera in 480 B.C.,
spared only the mothers who have found shelter with their children in the
temples.
He save their lives not because of a feeling of humanity, but because of the
fear that the women, without any hope of escape, could set the temples in fire,
so that he couldn't sack the treasures kept there.
About 16.000 people were massacred and more than 5.000 fell into captivity. He was cruel as at Imera, where he extorted 3.000 citizens from the ffirious soldiers, to lead them to the place where atrocius tortures. Only 2.600 citizens found salvation taking shelter in Agrigento and Sciacca where they were received and treated with all the attentions.
When Agrigentan ambassadors asked to negotiate the ransom of the
prisoners, the respect of the temples and the conditions of peace, Hannibal
gave a famous answer: he said that Selinuntines, as they hadn't be able to
defend their own freedom, deserved to be slaves.
Gods were by then enemies to Selinus as they had abandoned its temples;
Annibal posed himself as a messenger of their revenge.
At the end of the V th century B.C. the city regained its indipendence, but never re-carned the richness and the politica power of the past time, living under syracusan control or under Carthaginians' epicracy.
Ermocrates, a Syracusan exile, occupied in 407 B.C. the citadel of Selinus, raised the walls, and dug himself in with 6.000 Selinuntines and Himerans with the intention to wage war to Syracuse.
From 397 B.C. Selinus stayed for 5 years under Dyonisos, the first tyrant of Syracuse. It became subiect to Syracuse for brief periods with Agathocles, a man without any moral scruple, who, in 307 B.C., avercoming the defences, entered also Segesta victoriou- sly, and in an outburst of inhuman wroth he abandoned the city to massacre, sack and fire.
The tyrant was also sadly famous for the invenction of the torture called
"Agathocles's bed", a spiked copper plane on which were bound and
roasted the rich citizens who refused to give him their own family goods.
Sometimes, he made them throw in the air by catapults, the artillery of that
time. He ordered that poor citizens should be betchered on the banks of the
Scamandrus river, today Gaggera women and children sold to the Brutiis of
Calabria.
In 270 B.C. Selinus adhered to the liberation of Sicily from Carthaginian
dominion led by Pyrrhus, and ended with the ignominious abandon by the leader.
In 250 B.C. Selinus suffered the final destruction by Carthaginians who, in
the cadre of the war against Romans, decided abandon the city after having
destroyed it: tran splanting the inhabitants in Lilybeum (Marsala), the main
Carthaginians base in Sicily.
It became Roman at the end of the First Punic War, in 241 B.C..
So Selinuntine land was a very rich one and testated how the way of human
civilization went on according to eternal laws, unchanging in the essence even
if different in forms.
But, as all the things in this world have a beginning, a more or less bri,aht life and an unavoidable end, so happened to Selinus magnificent temples. And only observing these splendid ruins, today finally protected in a park of 270 hectares, it is possible to understand what talked about archaeological visions which conquer us with their extraordinary grandeur and invite us to meditate, pervaled with that silence which infuses us with the relentless sense of the passing of the time, is one of the essential elements of suggestion of archaeological works.