​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.