Eighty miles south of Pompeii is a
place of which many tourists are unaware, and that is the ancient city of
Paestum. The Greeks settled there in seventh century BC and many of the temples
they built are still intact. It is an ancient town dating back to 700 BC. It later became a part of Magna Graecia. The
Greeks founded a community there around 600 BC.
The original inhabitants were the Oscans and archeology reveals that the
two, the Greeks and Oscans, lived together harmoniously. When the Greeks arrived they called it Poseidonia after their sea god Poseidon.
The name is equal to the Roman god Neptune. Sometime around 400 BC, the Lucans,
an Italic people, conquered and ruled until 273 BC, after which it became a
Roman colony. They renamed it Paestum. In Italian Poseidnonia translates into
Positano, which is a nearby famous resort town on the Amalfi Peninsula.
Since the Greeks mostly settled in
southern Italy they gave the names to many communities. These names later
became Italian. For example, Napoli was Neapolis,
meaning new city, Siracusa, Sirako,
(swamp), Brindisi, Brentension, (Deer
head), Cefalú cephalic or khefale
meaning head…
When Hannibal was raising havoc in
the peninsula the people of Paestum kept their allegiance to Rome. After the
defeat of Hannibal, it received special recognition and was able to mint its
own coinage. It stayed under the dominion of Rome until the end of the Empire
in the West.
During the Middle Age, the town
declined into complete abandon. It
wasn’t until 1840, when an interest in things ancient became popular, that the
city was uncovered. To the amazement of everyone a number of temples the Greeks
built were still standing. Unlike Pompeii and Herculaneum that the eruption of
Mt. Vesuvius covered in volcanic debris; weeds, trees and vines overgrew
whatever was in Paestum. It is because of that, much of the city remained
intact.
Paestum was originally a coastal city, but due
to siltation it now sits one mile from the seashore. The temples yet standing
have many different missing parts, mainly the roofs and the statues of the gods
that sat in them. The base of the temples are huge, easily the size of a
football field or larger. The main temples standing today are those of Hera,
Apollo, and Athena. All these temples are in the Doric style of architecture.
These gems of Greek construction, many consider second to those of Athens in
architecture, in general, many historians ascribe them as the best-preserved
Doric temples in the world.
When they were uncovered in the
eighteenth century archeologist misidentified two of them as the temples of
Neptune and Ceres, and that they were basilicas, which for the Romans, were
administrative buildings, not temples. The city had a forty-nine foot in height
wall around it, with a number of redoubts. A moat protected the wall. The area,
in and immediately outside of the city proper, covers some twenty-five
hectares―each being ten-thousand square feet.
On the grounds is a museum with
many artifacts. An imposing one is of Zeus, the chief of all gods. He lived on Mount Olympus and played games
with the people and the other gods. This statue portrays very clearly the view
the Greeks had of their god. They considered their gods human like themselves,
they had all the wants, weaknesses and strengths that they have, but the gods
were one step above them. The statue of Zeus or Poseidon shows him with a smirk
on his face and a twinkle in his eye as if to say, “Gotcha!” Wall paintings show him wearing a hat that
looks like the ten-gallon type worn in the American West. He appears to be
quite the character.
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