Many, many years ago I travelled to southern Italy off season to visit Pompeiiand Herculaneum.
Unfortunately my lodging address was much further away than what the travel
brochure made me believe and I wound up way south of Salerno.
This is how I discovered the existence of sites like Paestumand
Velia, once part of Magna Graecia.
Till then I had not heard of Magna Graecia and I had no idea what
it actually meant for when we talk about Greece, we automatically think of
mainland Greece and Athens in particular but not of any colonies or overseas
settlements.
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That trip was my very first encounter with
Greek civilization, even if it had been adapted and reshaped by the Romans. In
those days before internet, before color TV and few books with colored
pictures, my perception of Pompeiiand Herculaneum was
based on lots of imagination but I was over the moon to be able to investigate
these places by myself. It was February, a time no tourist in his right mind
would venture to those parts of Italy
and I remember that only seven cars were parked outside Pompeii. In short, I was not disturbed
or hampered by any crowd, meaning that conditions were right to get a true
feeling of these antique remains. I
found the same emptiness in Herculaneum where I thought I still
could inhale the smell of the burnt wooden beam that have survived, much unlike
Pompeii.
The Archeological Museum of Naples
war nearly empty, making me feel lost till I came face to face with Alexander on the famous mosaic from the
Villa of the Faun. It felt like a private audience with Alexander the Great, an unforgettable experience!
As I said, this was my very first
“archeological” trip and I learnt many precious lessons for the future. The
very first lesson was that I should prepare a trip, inquire locally about what
to see and what the opening hours are. Second lesson: get all the information
you can about a museum before going there as I spent several hours in Naplesbefore reaching those rooms with Alexander and other precious objects I really
wanted to see. Third lesson: do your homework. Since then, I did all that and
never had to regret missing anything major.
As I said, I was staying much too far away,
actually a good two-hours drive from Salerno over
winding local though beautiful roads. But there was an advantage to this
unfortunate situation for I was close to the ancient sites of Elea
(modern Velia) and Poseidona
(modern Paestum). This was my introduction to Magna Graecia. Life takes strange twists at times
…
It was here that I heard for the first time how
an impressive number of Greek colonies were founded all around the Mediterranean. For various reasons often including famine
or overpopulation at home but also frictions and competition between the rising
city-states, induced many Greeks between the eighth and fourth century BC to emigrated
in search of new opportunities overseas. After all, the Greeks were always
seeking business opportunities and perfectly understood the advantage of establishing good trade relations with
foreign countries. Settlements varied widely from the Black Sea, including
Crimea, and Asia Minor to North Africa and the
Iberian and Italic peninsulas. One of the most flourishing area was to become
known as Magna Graecia or Great Greece, i.e. the coastal region of
southern Italy which generally also includes Sicily, heavily colonized by the
Greeks during the 8th and 7th century BC.
Basically there were two types of colonies like those that existed as an
independent city-state and
the widely spread trading-colonies. We have to thank these Greek colonies for spreading Hellenistic
culture as most cities around the Mediterranean
somehow have Greek roots.
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Paestum was my first city to visit and it
looked familiar right away since I discovered it was the setting of the
well-known Sissi II movie in which
the Empress of Austria, who according to history went to Greece to
recover from tuberculosis, is walking among these very temples! I have not
returned there since but in those days the only buildings standing were the
three temples: the Temple of Ceres, the Temple of Poseidon
(Neptune) and the Basilica. Beside that the main
roads had been exposed with the Decumanus exiting the city at the Porta Marina
in the West and the Porta Sirena in the East, while the Cardo linked the Porta
Aura in the North to the Porta Giudizia in the South – all gates clearly
visible in the still standing city walls. The central Forum and part of the
Amphitheatre had been excavated, but that was about all.I was very impressed by the compact and sturdy
Basilica or possible Temple
of Hera which counted an
unusual nine columns in its façade while all temples basically have an even
number of columns (another thing I learnt). For this reason the temple has only
one row of columns running in the middle of the cella. Striking is that in this
Basilica built around 500 BC the optical correction of the columns was
apparently not yet known and looking carefully we clearly see how the columns
seem to lean inwards.
The middle temple dedicated to Poseidon (or
maybe also to Hera) was built about one hundred years later and the optical
corrections in the architecture of this edifice have been carried out to
perfection. Time wise it corresponds to the construction of the Parthenon in Athens when the purity of proportions
reached its peak. No wonder that this Temple of Poseidon
steals the show in every way! A curious oddity used in only few temples is the
two rows of superposed columns inside the cella, the place where the god
resides. These columns are especially slender and elegant and seem to make the
temple feel very light. Greeks in antiquity would laugh at our admiration for
these ruins which they would have torn down without mercy, but they have not
seen how the color of the travertine stone turns to golden as the material aged
and hardened over the centuries. It is now a most wonderful spectacle to watch how
sun and shadows play with the ocher-colored colonnades set against a steel-blue
sky.
The Temple
of Ceres on the other hand is more
austere, probably because like for the Basilica, the construction material
comes from a different quarry than for the Temple of Poseidon.
Smaller than the two other temples, it stands a little to aside and has the
oddity of counting 6x13 columns instead of the normal proportion of 6x12. There
are exceptions to every rule, even when it comes to building temples, it seems.
Poseidonia was founded early in the sixth century BC by
Acheans and by the end of the fifth century the city was conquered by the
Lucanians who more or less followed the customs of the early settlers. In 273
BC, however, after siding with Pyrrhus
against Rome and sharing his
defeat, it became a Roman city under the name of Paestum. It continued to flourished
till the fourth century AD, at which time decline set it and by the Middle-Ages Paestum was entirely
abandoned.
The story of Elea
is slightly different. It was founded by Greeks from Phocaea
who fled Asia Minor around 538-535 BC after a
siege by the Persians. As opposed to Paestum,
Elea was not conquered by the Lucanians but fell to Rome at the same time in 273 BC. More
important is probably that it was the home of the Eleatic School founded by the philosopher Parmenides at the beginning of the fifth century BC that included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos– maybe even Xenophanes
but that is not proven.
The very location of Velia as I saw it was
quite striking. The light was still gentle and the skies were pale blue as they
generally are in spring. The landscape was very green for the valleys were
filled olive trees, fig trees and vines which the Greek had introduced. The
mimosa was blooming and the small mountain oranges were ripe for picking. In a
distant the snow capped mountains of the Apennines
kept watch over these lands, unchanged over the centuries. What a choice place
to found a city!
High on the Acropolis of Elea
stood an Ionic temple of which only the crepidoma remains and a few stubs of
columns as most of the material has been reused in the construction of the
medieval tower that stands on top of it, commanding the view from afar. To
reach the Acropolis, I remember walking over a most beautiful Greek road made
of cobblestones with intermittent horizontal slabs to keep them in place and
flanked on each side by a deep gutter (4th-3rd century BC). This road ends at
the Porta Rosa a magnificent example of a vaulted gate built by the Greeks and
the only one of its kind to be found in Magna
Graecia.
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In the lower part of Elea,
the Porta Marina was the eye-catcher. In antiquity Elea
was an active port that has as is often the case been silted up and now lies
much further inland. The surprise was to find this southern city gate flooded
after recent rainfall making it look like a gate to the sea. The five kilometers
long city walls were built in the sixth century BC and two centuries later they
were reinforced with sturdy towers to defend Elea
against a possible attack by the Lucanians. Explanations were non-existing but
I managed to locate some Roman Bath which turned out to be built by Emperor Hadrian. There was also a
vast Roman residence and other unidentified remains. Looking for pictures of Elea on the internet I’m surprised to see that a
Roman theater and an Asclepion have been excavated but I see no traces of the
aqueduct that I discovered there, partially running underground and covered by
two slabs of stones in between the cisterns that used to filter the water before
reaching the lower city. Well, enough to be intrigued and high-time for me to
return and see it all for myself.
In any case, my visit to Paestum has set in motion my life-long
love for and understanding of Greek art. First in the Classical Period but
mostly during the following Hellenistic era a degree of perfection was reached
that was never surpassed in later centuries by any civilization. We are blessed
that in spite of time and repeated wars so many of the buildings, statues,
pots, jewelry, and other remains have come to us. The many temples in Magna Graecia tend to give us the impression that
the colonizers were even more Greek than the Greeks themselves!
