When the First Punic War ended in 241 BC with Roman victory over Carthage, Sicily became something it had never been before: a province. For the first time in its history, the entire island was ruled by a single foreign power as a territorial possession. Rome would hold Sicily for over 700 years — longer than any other civilization in Sicilian history. The relationship between the island and its Roman rulers would set a repeated pattern of foreign rule in Sicily throughout the ages – extraction of wealth and resources from the land, coupled with the subjugation and exploitation of its population. 

Sicily became Rome’s granary. The island’s fertile plains were organized into vast estates, worked by enslaved laborers imported from across the Mediterranean. Grain from Sicily fed the city of Rome and Rome’s legions abroad. The tremendous revenue from Sicilian agriculture fueled Roman expansion. And the conditions on the great agricultural estates — the latifundia — were so brutal that they ignited two separate  Servile Wars, massive slave revolts that required full Roman armies to suppress.

The most notorious episode of Roman misrule in Sicily is preserved forever by Cicero’s prosecution of the Roman governor Gaius Verres in 70 BC. Verres systematically plundered Sicily during his three-year governorship, stealing art treasures, extorting citizens, and perverting justice on a scale so vast that his name became synonymous with corrupt provincial governance. The Sicilian people themselves brought the case to Rome, and Cicero’s speeches against Verres became one of the most famous prosecutions in Roman legal history. Thus, the pattern of foreign rulers exploiting Sicily as their personal wealth-extraction zone had been fully established by the end of the Roman Republic.