Greek Goddesses’ Temples Grace Paestum On The Italian Tyrrhenian Sea
The ancient Greek city of Poseidonia, now Paestum, lies on the Italian coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Paestum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is famed for its well-preserved ruins. In fact, posterity owes a debt of gratitude to its swampy marshlands for helping preserve some of the earliest examples of Doric architecture in the Greek world. It was due to the wetlands that malaria would emerge making the area inhospitable to human life, thus all but abandoned for roughly 1,000 years, from the fall of the ancient world in the fourth century AD through the Middle Ages. During a time when Greek temples were systematically dismantled and quarried for their stone, the Doric temples of Paestum were largely forgotten and left alone.
View of the magnificent ruins of the ancient city of Paestum, showing part of the wall and the three temples by Isidro González Velázquez (1837) (Public Domain)
Paestum was originally called Poseidonia, in honor of Poseidon, the god of the sea, and founded in 600 BC by settlers from Sybaris, a prosperous Greek colony on the Ionian side of Calabria in southern Italy. The Sybarites themselves hailed from Achaea and Troezen— two northernmost cities in the Peloponnese region. But long before Poseidonia was a gleam in the eye of the colonizing Sybarites the area was inhabited by an indigenous population who, according to the Greek geographer, Strabo, took refuge further inland once the intrepid Greeks took center stage. Yet the candle was brief. The displaced indigenous Italic tribes, who referred to themselves as Lucanians, reconquered their former land in 400 BC and ruled until it became a Roman colony in 273 BC, at which time the name changed to Paestum, a Latin adulteration of Poseidonia.
