THAPSUS  , a

low peninsula, now known as Magnisi, joined by a narrow isthmus to the mainland of Sicily, about 7 M . N.N.W. of Syracuse . The founders of Megara Hyblaea settled here temporarily, according to Thucydides, in the winter of 729-728 B.C., but it seems to have] remained almost if not entirely uninhabited until the Athenians used it as a naval station in their attack on Syracuse early in 414 B.C . A number of tombs were excavated in 1894, containing objects belonging to a transitional stage between the second and third Sicel period, attributable roughly to 1000-900 B.C., and with a certain proportion of Mycenean importations . See Orsi in Monumenti dei Lincei (1897), vi . 89-150 .