Paestum, Italy: The Enduring Splendour of Ancient Greece

Across the fertile plain of southern Campania, not far from the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, three immense Greek temples rise with an almost startling completeness from the landscape.

This is Paestum, one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Italy and one of the finest surviving remnants of Magna Graecia, the Greek world that once flourished across southern Italy and Sicily.

Long before Rome became the dominant power of the Mediterranean, the city was known as Poseidonia, named in honour of Poseidon, God of the sea. Its temples, streets, sanctuaries and painted tombs preserve the story of a city that passed from Greeks to Lucanians and Romans, then slowly declined until much of its ancient splendour became surrounded by marshes and vegetation.

Yet the great temples remained.

More than two and a half millennia after their construction, their massive Doric columns still dominate the plain, making Paestum one of those rare places where the architecture of ancient Greece can be experienced not as scattered fragments, but as something monumental and almost complete.

Poseidonia: A Greek City in Italy

Poseidonia was founded around 600 BCE by Greek settlers associated with the prosperous city of Sybaris, an Achaean colony on the Gulf of Taranto.

The ancient geographer Strabo records that settlers from Sybaris first established themselves near the coast before moving inland to found the city. Archaeological discoveries support a foundation around the beginning of the 6th century BCE.

It was an excellent location. The broad plain offered fertile agricultural land and plentiful water, while access through the surrounding hills connected the settlement with inland communities. The nearby coast provided another route towards the wider Mediterranean.

Poseidonia prospered.

Its citizens laid out a substantial Greek polis with streets, residential quarters, an agora, sanctuaries and defensive walls. Religious life occupied a particularly important place within the city, with monumental sacred areas established at its northern and southern ends.

Poseidon featured prominently on the city’s early silver coins, standing with his trident, a fitting emblem for a colony carrying the sea god’s name.

Yet it is another deity, Hera, who appears to have held an especially important place in the religious life of Poseidonia.

The Majestic Greek Temples of Paestum

Hera I: The Archaic Temple

At the southern end of ancient Poseidonia stands the oldest of Paestum’s three great surviving temples, an immense and powerfully archaic building traditionally known as the Basilica.

The name is misleading. When 18th-century scholars encountered the monument, its unusual proportions led them to believe that it had been a Roman civic basilica. Archaeological evidence has since established that it was a Greek temple, almost certainly dedicated to Hera, one of the most important deities worshipped at Poseidonia. It is therefore known today as Hera I.

Construction began around 560 BCE and was completed around 520 BCE, making Hera I the oldest monumental stone temple at Poseidonia. Its architecture belongs firmly to the Archaic period and has a striking weight and solidity. Nine Doric columns stand across each facade and eighteen along each side, an unusual arrangement because the odd number of frontal columns places one directly on the central axis of the building.

The columns themselves are among the temple’s most memorable features. Broad and massive, they swell noticeably towards the middle in a pronounced form of entasis, the slight outward curvature Greek architects used to counteract visual distortion and give columns a sense of organic strength. At Hera I, the effect is particularly emphatic, while the wide, flattened capitals above them reinforce the impression that the columns are physically bearing the immense weight of the structure.

The interior was equally unusual. A row of columns ran through the centre of the cella, dividing the sacred chamber into two aisles and creating a plan quite different from the more symmetrical interiors of later Classical temples. At the rear was an enclosed adyton, a restricted sacred chamber where the cult image may have stood. An altar positioned outside the eastern facade was the focus of sacrifice and public ritual, reminding us that much of Greek religious worship took place outside the temple itself rather than within its cella.

Although the temple today appears in the warm tones of exposed stone, the original building was considerably more colourful. Archaeologists have recovered numerous elements of its polychrome terracotta roof decoration, including lotus and palmette motifs and elaborate gutter elements imitating lion-head waterspouts. These remains allow much of the original roofline to be reconstructed and reveal how vivid an Archaic Greek sanctuary could once appear.

Hera herself occupied a central place in the religious world of Poseidonia. In addition to her familiar roles as wife of Zeus and protector of marriage and motherhood, inscriptions and votive offerings from the sanctuary indicate that she was also connected with young warriors and the passage of individuals through important stages of life. Her importance extended beyond the city to the great Heraion near the mouth of the River Sele, demonstrating the depth of her cult throughout the territory of Poseidonia.

Hera I may lack the refined proportions of the later temples, but this is precisely what gives it such character. Its broad columns, heavy capitals, and powerful proportions preserve an earlier stage in Greek monumental architecture, when builders were still exploring how the traditions of timber construction could be translated into enduring stone.

Hera II: The Great Classical Temple

Standing only a short distance away is a temple that appears at first to belong to the same architectural world, yet almost a century separates the two monuments.

Traditionally known as the Temple of Neptune, or Temple of Poseidon, the second magnificent temple of the southern sanctuary was completed around 460 BCE, during the early Classical period. Its traditional name arose from an 18th-century assumption that the most magnificent temple at Poseidonia must have been dedicated to Poseidon, the god after whom the city was named. Modern archaeology has shown that its true dedication remains uncertain; votive material suggests that Hera or Apollo may instead have been worshipped here.

Whatever the identity of its deity, the temple is one of the finest and most complete surviving examples of Doric architecture in the Greek world.

Its exterior colonnade comprises six columns across each facade and fourteen along the sides, producing a more harmonious and classically balanced form than the broad nine by eighteen arrangement of Hera I. The columns remain substantial, but their entasis is less exaggerated, the capitals are less heavily flared, and the entire building seems to rise with greater verticality and restraint. Seen beside the older temple, it provides an extraordinary demonstration of how Greek architectural ideals had evolved between the Archaic and Classical periods.

The remarkable preservation of the upper structure makes the temple particularly impressive. Much of the architrave, Doric frieze and pediments remain in position. The frieze contains alternating triglyphs and metopes; the metopes were not carved with relief sculpture, although they may once have carried painted decoration. Like the other temples of Poseidonia, the building itself was originally enriched with colour rather than presenting the monochrome stone appearance familiar today.

Its interior is even more exceptional.

Beyond the pronaos, the cella was divided into three aisles by two parallel rows of Doric columns. Above these stood a second tier of smaller columns, creating a two-storey internal colonnade that helped support the roof while dramatically framing the central sacred space. This sophisticated arrangement contrasts strongly with the single central row of columns inside Hera I and represents a much more developed architectural solution.

Behind the cella was an opisthodomos, a rear porch that could be entered only from outside. In front of the temple stood the great altar upon which sacrifices would have been performed, while another altar was added during the later Roman Republican period, evidence that the sacred precinct continued to evolve long after Poseidonia had become Roman Paestum.

Hera II is striking not simply because so much of it survives, but because its survival allows us to experience the architecture as a complete composition. The columns still carry much of the entablature, the triangular pediments still crown the facades, and the internal colonnades remain sufficiently intact to reveal how the sacred interior was organised.

Standing beside the heavier and more archaic Hera I, the temple becomes even more remarkable. Together, the two monuments preserve almost a century of architectural development in stone: from the muscular experimentation of the Archaic period to the greater proportion, symmetry and refinement that would characterise the Classical Greek temple.

They are not simply two exceptionally preserved buildings. Side by side on the plain of Paestum, they allow us to watch Greek architecture itself evolve.

Athena Above the City

At the northern end of ancient Poseidonia stands the Temple of Athena, occupying a small artificial hill created to resemble an acropolis and giving the sanctuary a commanding position above this part of the ancient city.

Constructed around 500 BCE, the surviving temple replaced an earlier sacred building dating to around 580 BCE, which was destroyed by fire. The sanctuary therefore had already been an important place of worship for generations before the monumental temple visible today was raised.

For centuries the building was mistakenly known as the Temple of Ceres. Archaeological discoveries eventually revealed its true identity. More than one hundred terracotta votive figurines representing Athena were found in the sanctuary, together with other offerings associated with the goddess, firmly establishing Athena as the principal deity worshipped here.

The temple is particularly important in the history of ancient Greek architecture because of the unusual way its builders combined two architectural traditions within a single structure.

Its exterior is predominantly Doric, with six columns across the short sides and thirteen along the longer sides. Yet the pronaos, or entrance porch leading towards the cella, was preceded by columns crowned with Ionic capitals. This represents the first known incorporation of Ionic columns into a Doric temple in Italy and is one of the earliest surviving examples of the two great Greek architectural orders being deliberately brought together within the same sacred building.

The innovation is particularly striking because the temple was constructed during a transitional moment in Greek architecture, at the end of the Archaic period and on the threshold of the Classical age. Its builders were not simply repeating established forms but experimenting with different architectural traditions and creating a monument distinct from the older Temple of Hera elsewhere at Poseidonia.

The temple would also have appeared very different in antiquity from the warm, weathered stone seen today. Its architectural elements were covered in plaster and vividly painted. The roofline was embellished with palmettes and lotus flowers, while sculpted lion heads projected from the gutter to carry rainwater away from the building. Even the Doric frieze, composed of alternating triglyphs and metopes, formed part of a richly decorated architectural composition.

Although smaller than the two immense temples of the southern sanctuary, the Temple of Athena possesses an elegance and architectural importance of its own. Standing above the northern sanctuary, it preserves not only the worship of one of the most powerful goddesses of the Greek world, but also a remarkable moment when the architects of Poseidonia were willing to experiment, bringing Doric strength and Ionic refinement together beneath the same sacred roof.

Greeks, Lucanians and Romans

Poseidonia’s prosperity did not protect it from the changing political world of southern Italy.

Towards the end of the 5th century BCE, the city came under the control of the Lucanians, an indigenous Italic people who had expanded into the region.

Yet Greek culture did not simply disappear.

Archaeological evidence reveals considerable continuity between the Greek and Lucanian periods. Sanctuaries continued to function, Greek monuments remained important, and the city’s population appears to have developed a culture in which Greek and Lucanian traditions increasingly interacted. The Oscan language entered public life alongside inherited Greek customs.

Another transformation came in 273 BCE, when Rome established a Latin colony here and renamed the city Paestum.

The Romans reshaped the centre of the city. The Greek agora was transformed by the development of a Roman forum, while new civic and commercial buildings appeared, including a basilica, curia, comitium, market and amphitheatre.

Consequently, the extraordinary archaeological landscape visible today does not belong to a single cultural heritage. Greek sanctuaries stand beside the remains of Roman public buildings, while beneath and around them lie traces of Lucanian occupation.

Paestum is not simply a preserved Greek city. It is a place where several Mediterranean worlds overlap.

The Tomb of the Diver

Among the treasures displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Paestum, none is more haunting than the Tomb of the Diver.

Discovered by archaeologist Mario Napoli in 1968 in a necropolis south of the ancient city, the tomb dates to around 480 to 470 BCE.

Its importance is exceptional. It is the only known 5th century BCE Greek tomb decorated internally with complete figurative wall paintings and one of the rare surviving examples of large scale Greek painting from this period outside painted pottery.

The four walls of the tomb depict a symposium, the drinking banquet that occupied an important place in Greek social life. Men recline on couches, drink wine, converse, play music and participate in the drinking game known as kottabos.

Above the deceased, however, was an image unlike anything else known from surviving Greek art of the period.

A solitary, naked young man launches himself from a stone platform into a body of water.

The simplicity of the scene gives it extraordinary power.

There is no obvious mythological narrative and no inscription explaining what the diver represents. The most widely accepted interpretation views the plunge as a metaphor for the transition from life into death, the young man leaving the familiar world behind and crossing into an unknown realm.

Other interpretations have connected the imagery with Orphic or Pythagorean beliefs concerning the soul and existence after death, although its precise meaning remains debated.

Perhaps that uncertainty is part of its fascination.

The diver has been suspended forever between two worlds, caught in the instant after leaving the solid earth but before entering the water below.

From Abandonment to Rediscovery

Paestum’s disappearance was gradual rather than sudden.

From around the 4th century CE, as the Roman world weakened, the city’s economy declined and its population contracted. The low-lying plain became increasingly marshy, malaria spread through the region, and many inhabitants moved towards the higher ground of the surrounding hills. By the 8th and 9th centuries, much of the remaining population had abandoned the ancient city.

Slowly, the once prosperous streets, houses, and public buildings of Paestum fell into ruin. Vegetation encroached across the abandoned landscape, and the wider city receded beneath centuries of neglect.

Yet the great Greek temples never entirely disappeared.

Long after the people of Paestum had departed, their immense Doric columns continued to rise above the lonely plain. Stripped of their ancient sacred purpose, the temples survived amid marshland and overgrowth, serving the humbler needs of shepherds and their livestock. Their endurance seems even more extraordinary considering how completely the civilisation that created them had vanished from the surrounding landscape.

For centuries Paestum remained remote and little known beyond the region. Then, during the mid-18th century, artists, architects, antiquarians and travellers began bringing its astonishing ruins to the attention of Europe.

Paestum soon became an important destination on the Grand Tour. Visitors encountered monumental Greek architecture without travelling to Greece itself, and the temples deeply influenced the developing European understanding of ancient Greek art and architecture. Johann Joachim Winckelmann visited in 1758, Giovanni Battista Piranesi later immortalised the temples in a magnificent series of engravings, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe marvelled at them during his Italian journey in 1787.

Their so-called rediscovery was therefore not the uncovering of temples that had been completely lost, but the awakening of the wider world to monuments that had stood in isolation for centuries.

In 1829, a new road was controversially cut through the ancient city walls and brought travellers directly past the temples. Systematic archaeological excavations did not begin until the early 20th century, when the streets, sanctuaries, and buried remains of the ancient city gradually emerged around the monuments that had never ceased to stand above them.

The image is compelling: the civilisation of Poseidonia had faded, its streets had fallen silent, and nature had reclaimed much of the plain, yet the temples endured, immense and solitary, waiting for the world to look upon them again.

A Greek World Still Standing

Paestum was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998 as part of the Cilento and Vallo di Diano cultural landscape, together with the archaeological site of Velia and the Certosa di Padula.

Yet its importance is difficult to express through designation alone.

There are places where antiquity survives primarily in foundations, broken columns and imagination. Paestum is different.

Here, the ancient temples still rise almost to their original height against the mountains and open sky. Their columns retain the immense physical presence intended by their Greek builders more than two and a half thousand years ago.

Around them lie the traces of another city: Greek streets and sanctuaries, a Roman forum and amphitheatre, tombs, houses and walls, while inside the museum a young diver remains forever suspended above painted water.

Poseidonia became Paestum. Greeks yielded to Lucanians, Lucanians to Romans, and eventually the city itself surrendered to marshland and silence.

But the temples endured.

They remain among the most magnificent survivors of Magna Graecia, monuments to a Greek world planted on the shores of Italy and a city whose gods, stones and stories refused to disappear.

View a selection of images of Paestum

All images, text and content are copyright Steven Sklifas.