Very much on Sicily as everywhere, the Greeks were constantly at war, when not with the native Sicilians, the Carthaginians from north Africa, or the Romans then with themselves. The following brief passage mentions the Sicilian Greek city of Segesta's alliance with Carthage against the Sicilian Greek city of Girgenti in 409 B.C., then briefly describes who bears most responsibility for the destruction of Sicily's Greek architecture. Randall-MacIver writes:
"The friendship with Carthage which saved the Segestans in 409 B.C. was the cause of their ruin a hundred years later, when Agathokles, foiled in Africa, turned savagely on the philo-Carthaginians in Sicily and crushed Segesta. From the Romans, however, the Segestans received unusual favor, and...Cicero (mentioned Segesta) as a place of some importance. That its temple survived when the city was devastated by the Saracens shows once again that the worst destroyers of ancient buildings were not Carthaginians, Romans, or Mohammedans. It was Christian fanatics of the first few centuries after Christ, it was the plundering kings, barons, and prelates of the Middle Ages, and their successors the money-grubbing materialists of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who destroyed the great monuments of antiquity in Sicily and southern Italy."
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