Report on the Phoenician and Roman antiquities in the group of the islands of Malta.  By A. A. Caruana.  Published in 1883.

Between the primitive Phoenician period and the Roman occupation, an early Greek colony settled in the islands of Malta, contemporarily with the colonies led from Chalcis (Egripo in the island of Negropont) by the Athenian Theocles and other Greek emigrants in Sicily, by whom, as Thucydides, book IV, ch. III, relates, were founded Leontium, Catana, Taurominium, Zancla (Messina), &c., and with those led by Archias from Corinth by whom Syracuse was erected.  Subsequently, the Carthaginians held these islands up to the beginning of the second Punic war.