Paestum (c. 550 BC): The Greek Temples of Poseidonia in Italy

Paestum, known to its Greek founders as Poseidonia, is an ancient city in southern Italy whose three Doric temples, built between about 550 and 450 BC, are among the best preserved in the Greek world. Founded around 600 BC by Greek colonists, the city later passed to the Lucanians and then to Rome. Its temples and the painted Tomb of the Diver offer a rare picture of Greek religion, architecture and art in Italy.

Founding of Poseidonia

From the eighth century BC Greek cities sent out settlers to found new communities around the Mediterranean, part of the wider movement described in Greek Colonization. Southern Italy received so many that it became known as Magna Graecia, “Great Greece”.

According to the geographer Strabo, Poseidonia was founded by settlers from Sybaris, a wealthy Greek city on the Gulf of Taranto. The foundation is usually dated to around 600 BC. The city lay on a fertile coastal plain near the mouth of the River Sele and controlled trade routes between the Greek south and the Etruscans and Italic peoples to the north. It was named after Poseidon, god of the sea.

The three temples

The temples stand in two sanctuaries, a southern one dedicated mainly to Hera and a northern one to Athena. Their names have changed as scholars studied them, which explains the older names still seen in guidebooks.

• First Temple of Hera (the “Basilica”), c. 550 BC. The oldest temple has nine columns across its front, an unusual odd number, and eighteen along each side. Its columns swell strongly in the middle and taper sharply. Eighteenth-century visitors, who found no pediments, took it for a civic building and named it the Basilica.
• Temple of Athena (once the “Temple of Ceres”), c. 500 BC. This smaller temple combines a Doric exterior with Ionic columns in its porch, an early example of mixing the two orders.
• Second Temple of Hera (once the “Temple of Neptune”), c. 460–450 BC. The largest and best preserved, it has six columns across the front and fourteen along each side, with an inner double row of columns in two storeys. Its massive proportions are close in date to the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

The temples were built of local travertine limestone, originally finished with stucco and paint. Their survival with entablatures and pediments largely intact is extraordinary; on mainland Greece, few temples of this age stand so complete.

The Tomb of the Diver

On 3 June 1968 the archaeologist Mario Napoli uncovered a tomb about 1.5 km south of the city. Made of stone slabs painted on the inside, it dates to about 480–470 BC. The side walls show a symposium, a drinking party with music and conversation, with men reclining on couches.

The lid shows a young man diving from a high platform into water. Its meaning is still debated; many scholars read it as an image of the passage from life to death. Because almost all Greek wall and panel painting has been lost, the tomb is one of the most important surviving works of Greek painting. It is displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Paestum.

Lucanians and Romans

Towards the end of the fifth century BC the Lucanians, an Italic people of the interior, took control of the city, which continued to flourish. Lucanian tombs from Paestum, with their painted scenes of warriors and funerals, form another important collection.

In 273 BC Rome founded a Latin colony on the site, named Paestum. The forum, an amphitheatre and other Roman buildings sit beside the Greek temples. The city remained loyal to Rome during the war with Hannibal.

Decline and rediscovery

In late antiquity the coast became marshy and malarial. The population shrank, and by the ninth century AD most inhabitants had moved to the hills at Capaccio. The temples survived largely because the abandoned site was overgrown and avoided.

Paestum attracted attention again in the mid-eighteenth century, when a road was built across the area under the Bourbon kings of Naples. Artists and travellers came to see it; Giovanni Battista Piranesi made a celebrated series of drawings, and Goethe visited in 1787. The temples’ heavy, early Doric style strongly influenced Neoclassical architecture. In 1998 Paestum became part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Timeline

• c. 600 BC: Greek settlers from Sybaris found Poseidonia.
• c. 550 BC: The first Temple of Hera is built.
• c. 500 BC: The Temple of Athena is built.
• c. 480–470 BC: The Tomb of the Diver is painted.
• c. 460–450 BC: The second Temple of Hera is built.
• Late 5th century BC: The Lucanians take control of the city.
• 273 BC: Rome founds the Latin colony of Paestum.
• 1998: Paestum is inscribed as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Paestum preserves Greek temple architecture of the sixth and fifth centuries BC more completely than almost anywhere in Greece itself, making it a key site for the history of the Doric order, which reached its classical form in the Parthenon. Its Tomb of the Diver is a rare survival of Greek painting, and the city’s history shows how Greek, Italic and Roman cultures met in southern Italy, the same world in which Pythagoras taught at Croton.