Segesta
Part of The Encyclopedia of Southern Italy.
Segesta (Acesta, Aegesta, Segeste): An ancient city of NW Sicily, situated to the SE of Eryx. Traditionally called a Trojan colony (its name deriving from its supposed founder, Aegestus), it was the longstanding and bitter rival of Selinus. Athens undertook (415-413 B.C.) the disastrous expedition against Syracuse as an ally of Segesta in troubles growing out of a quarrel with Selinus. After this failure, Segesta got the help of Carthage, and Selinus was sacked (409). Thereafter Segesta was a Carthaginian dependency with some interruptions until the First Punic War, when it surrendered to the Romans. Segesta was the setting for a story concerning Aemilius Censorinaus and a bronze horse, which was appears derive from the earlier tale of Perillus and his brazen bull. The city went into a decline in the 1st cent. B.C. from which it never recovered. Amid its ruins is a fine temple to Ceres.
The Romans called the city “Segeste” because Segesta was too similar to the Latin word aegesta or egesta (= discharge, excrement).
According to mythology, the original city, Aegesta, was founded by Aegestus, a Trojan, who had been sent by the Greek hero Philoctetes from the area near Croton on the Italian mainland, where Philoctetes himself had settled after the fall of Troy. Soon after Aegesta had been founded, Aeneas arrived with his fleet of Trojan refugees and named two nearby rivers Scamander and Simois in memory of a pair of streams in his Troad homeland. One version of the myth names Aeneas as the actual founder of the city. In this little-known tale, Aeneas founds both Aegesta and another city, Elyma, so-named for the Trojan Elymus, a companion of Aegestus. Aegestus and Elymus were able to reach Sicily before the arrival of Aeneas in three ships which they had previously captured from Achilles before the fall of Troy.