Touching Magna Graecia

Temple of Neptune at Paestum

The most exciting part of being in Southern Italy is the chance to visit the best-preserved, oldest remains of ancient Greek culture outside of Greece, what the Roman geographer Strabo called Magna Graecia, (=Great Greece). Paestum, the site of the original Greek colony of Poseidonia, boasts the three best preserved, magnificent Doric temples, surrounded by the ruins of Greek, Lucanian, and Roman buildings.

We set aside a full day in early October, hired a driver to pick us up at Minori at 8:30 am for the two-hour drive south along the Amalfi coast, which was a gorgeous scenic route with the sparkling Tyrrhenian Sea on our right and clusters of villages clinging to the cliffs on our left.  We passed Salerno, a significant port city with a modern Maritime Terminal Station for cruise ships and for loading and unloading container ships.

At last we arrived at Paestum, thankfully not overrun with tourists. In fact, other than for some Italian tour groups, we had the place mostly to ourselves.  After obtaining entrance tickets in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Paestum, we crossed the road to the main gate.

The Temple of Ceres dominated the northern end of the complex, and we approached it with cameras and cell phones ready. This sanctuary, built in about 500 BC on the foundations of an older temple from 580 BC, was mistakenly attributed to the earth goddess Ceres by the 18^th century scholars.  Modern research has uncovered evidence that it was really dedicated to Athena, and when the Romans took over the site, continued the dedication to Minerva, the Roman Athena. 

This temple has a more ‘classical’ Greek look, the columns are more slender than standard Doric, and the ‘cella’ was surrounded with Ionic columns, with several sandstone Ionic capitols on display outside the temple, making this temple an example of the transition from archaic to early classicism. The cella was the inner chamber that held the oversize votive statue of the goddess, nothing of which now remains.

This elegant structure, as high as a three-story building, with six columns on short side and 14 on the long, glowed in the late-morning sun against the deep blue of the sky. The western façade has more of the triangular pediment surviving; the damaged eastern pediment was partially restored in 1828.  On the north side of the building there were the remains of medieval tombs, indicating that the temple had been used as a Christian church before Paestum was abandoned in the 9^th century.

Along the eastern edge of the Temple of Athena, a Roman road, the “Via Sacra” leads south toward the two other massive temples.  Walking along we passed the open areas of the Greek Agora, the Roman Forum, and a strange structure in a small walled garden that looked like a house, nearly-submerged in the soil, with only the pitched roof above ground.  Called the Heroon-Cenotaph, this was an underground sanctuary dedicated to the un-named Greek founder of Poseidonia, in which the excavators found wonderful artifacts which are on display in the museum.

Soon we reached the amazing ‘Temple of Neptune, so named because it seemed to the excavators that the most imposing temple should be dedicated to the god for whom the city was named: Poseidon/Neptune. I expected to be overwhelmed by this best-preserved Doric temple in Magna Graecia, and was not disappointed. 

Temple of Neptune

 The temple stands on a base three giant steps above the ground, the façade holds six massive columns and the long side has 13 columns.  These thick columns are clearly Doric, almost nine meters high, carved with 24 flutes to slenderize, displaying the ‘entasis’ - that technique where the columns have a slight curved bulge in the middle narrowing at the top.  The capital on top of the column was a simple flaring structure supporting a square slab called an abacus.  The horizontal stone beams called the entablature, showed the alternating pattern of the triglyphs separated by spaces where the metope (usually a carved figure in relief) would be inserted. The triglyph is the section along the roof that recalls the appearance of the end of wooden beams, timber being the original material the Greeks used to build their temples.  This use of stone to mimic lumber even carried over to the six pegs, called guttae, carved in the stone below each triglyph!

The inner chamber, the cella, was reached by climbing stone steps, and displayed the stone slabs that probably held the cult statue. The inside ceiling had been wooden but the outside gabled roof was probably covered by tiles, nothing of which remains.  The limestone of the base slabs, the columns and what remained of the entablature took on a warm terracotta color in the sunlight, separating the blue sky, making for a breathtaking sight. I couldn’t resist stroking with my hands the columns of this building, almost 2600 years old.

The southernmost temple, called the Basilica, was estimated to be the oldest, built in 550 BC.  When Paestum was rediscovered in the 18^th century, after a thousand years of neglect, the excavators thought it was a building for civic, not religious use and called it a basilica. 

 Basilica (Temple of Hera)

 Basilica (Temple of Hera) with Temple of Neptune in distance

 

This temple looks archaic, nine columns on the front and 18 along the side, with 20 shallow flutes on the columns, topped with a wide mushroom-shaped capital.  Nothing remains of triglyphs or metopes on the entablature, but the museum contains fragments of polychrome terracotta decoration from the roof. The cella was divided into two rooms, and votive offerings uncovered by excavators indicate an attribution to the goddess Hera.  When the Romans took over the city, this temple was dedicated to Juno, identified with the Greek Hera.

 Amphitheatre

Returning to the entrance we passed an amphitheatre, and a building called the Bouleuterion, dating from 470 BC, which was dug out of the rock in a series of concentric tiers, where assemblies of citizens could meet.

 Tomb Painting

 Triglyph and metope in museum

There was just enough time for a quick visit to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, which held the ancient treasures of Paestum. The most famous may be the tomb-painting on the Tomb of the Diver, which was not Greek, but from the period when Paestum was a Lucanian city.  The Lucanians favored tomb painting, and the museum held many examples, in addition to vases, weapons, jewelry, carved friezes, and statuary.  One hall in the museum held a reconstruction of the roofline of the Temple of Ceres, showing the original polychrome decoration on the gables.

The present building dates from 1952, replacing an earlier smaller museum that had been out-grown as more and more artifacts were uncovered. I read more about the history of Paestum, that it was founded by the Greek colonists from Sybaris in about 600 BC, and became extraordinarily wealthy on the trade routes across the “toe” of Italy. When Sybaris was destroyed by Crotona in 510 BC, Poseidonia became a refuge for the citizens of Sybaris. The Italic tribe of Lucanians gained control of Poseidonia in about 390 BC, and republican Rome made it a colony in 273 BC, renaming it Paestum. The city declined in the years of the Roman Empire, the river port silting up and the land gradually turning into malarial swamps. When Paestum was sacked by Muslim raiders in 871 AD the city was finally abandoned, forgotten until the 18^th century.  What we toured was just a fraction of the ancient city; the rest lies unexplored under private land and a road built in the days of the Bourbon monarchs of Italy.

When our driver returned to pick us up, he congratulated us on taking the time to visit Paestum, saying most foreign tourists to Naples and Amalfi do not think past Pompeii and Herculaneum.  I assured him we intrepid trekkers enjoy the “off the beaten path” discoveries!