PAESTUM in LUCANIA 1stCenBC Demeter Boar Authentic Ancient Greek Coin i52378

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In
Greek mythology
,
Demeter was the goddess
of the harvest, who presided over
grains
, the
fertility
of the earth, the
seasons
(personified by the
Hours
), and the
harvest
. One of her surnames is Sito (σίτος:
wheat) as the giver of food or corn. Though Demeter is often described simply as
the goddess of the harvest, she presided also over the sanctity of
marriage
, the
sacred law
, and the cycle of
life and death
. She and her daughter
Persephone
were the central figures of the
Eleusinian Mysteries
that also predated the
Olympian pantheon.

Her
Roman
cognate is
Ceres
.

The Calydonian
Boar is
one of the monsters of Greek
mythology that
had to be overcome by heroes of the Olympian age. Sent by Artemis to ravage the
region of Calydon in Aetolia because
its king failed to honor her in his rites to the gods, it was killed in the Calydonian
Hunt,
in which many male heroes took part, but also a powerful woman, Atalanta,
who won its hide by first wounding it with an arrow. This outraged some of the
men, with tragic results. Strabo was
under the impression that the Calydonian Boar was an offspring of the Crommyonian
Sow vanquished
by Theseus.

Paestum was a major
ancient Greek
city on the coast of the
Tyrrhenian Sea
in
Magna Graecia
. After its foundation by
Greek
colonists under the name of Poseidonia
(Ancient Greek:
Ποσειδωνία) it was eventually conquered by the
Lucanians
and later the
Romans
. The Lucanians renamed it to Paistos
and the Romans gave the city its current name. The ruins of Paestum are notable
for their three
ancient Greek temples
which are in a very good
state of preservation. Today the remains of the city are found in the modern
frazione
of the
same name
, which is part of the
comune
of
Capaccio
in the
Province of Salerno
,
Campania
,
Italy
.

History

Foundation

According to Strabo
the city was founded as Poseidonia by
Greek Achaeans
from
Sybaris
. The colonists had built fortifications
close to the sea, but then decided to found the city further inland at a higher
elevation. The fortifications might have been built to the south of Poseidonia
on the promontory where
Agropoli
is now. According to the historical
tradition the sanctuary to
Poseidon
was located there, after which the
city would have been named. The date of Poseidonia’s founding is not given by
ancient sources, but the archaeological evidence gives a date of approximately
600 BC.

Alternatively, the Sybarites may in fact have been
Troezenians
.
Aristotle
wrote that a group of Troezenians was
expelled from Sybaris by the Achaeans after their joint founding of that city.
Gaius Julius Solinus
calls Paestum a
Dorian
colony and Strabo mentions that Troezen
was once called Poseidonia. As a consequence it has been argued that Paestum was
founded by the Troezenians
referred to by Aristotle. Another
hypothesis is that the Sybarites were aided by Dorians in their founding of
Poseidonia.

Greek period

Archaeological evidence from Paestum’s first centuries indicates the building
of roads, temples and other features of a growing city. Coinage, architecture
and molded votive figurines all attest to close relations maintained with
Metaponto
in the sixth and fifth centuries.^{[citation
needed]}

It is assumed that Poseidonia harbored refugees from its mother city Sybaris
when that city was conquered by Croton in 510 BC. In the early fifth century,
Poseidonia’s coins adopted the Achaean weight standard and the bull seen on
Sybarite coins. A. J. Graham thinks it was plausible that the number of refugees
was large enough for some kind of
synoecism
to have occurred between the
Poseidonians and the Sybarites, possibly in the form of a
sympolity
.

Poseidonia might have had a major share in a new foundation of Sybaris which
lasted from 452/1 BC until 446/5 BC. This is suggested by the great resemblance
of the coins of Sybaris to those of Poseidonia in this period. Possibly a treaty
of friendship between Sybaris, its allies and the Serdaioi (an unknown people)
dates to this new foundation, because Poseidonia was the guarantor of this
treaty.

Lucanian period

It is not until the end of the fifth century BC that the city is mentioned,
when according to Strabo the city was conquered by the Lucanians. From the
archaeological evidence it appears that the two cultures, Greek and Oscan, were
able to thrive alongside one another.

Roman period

What is known is it later became the Roman city of Paestum in 273 BC after
the Graeco-Italian Poseidonians sided with the loser,
Pyrrhus
, in war against

Rome during the first quarter of the third century BC.

During the invasion of Italy by
Hannibal
the city remained faithful to Rome and
afterwards was granted special favours such as the minting of its coinage. The
city continued to prosper during the
Roman imperial period
, but started to go into
decline between the 4th and 7th centuries. It was abandoned during the
Middle Ages
and its ruins only came to notice
again in the 18th century, following the rediscovery of the Roman cities of
Pompeii
and
Herculaneum
. The decline and desertion were
probably due to changes in local land drainage patterns, leading to swampy
malarial
conditions.

Second World War

On September 9, 1943, Paestum was the location of the landing beaches of the
U.S. 36th Infantry Division
during the
Allied

invasion of Italy
.
German
forces resisted the landings from the
outset, causing heavy fighting within and around the town. Combat persisted
around the town for nine days before the Germans withdrew to the north.

Overview

 

The main features of the site today are the standing remains of three major
temples in
Doric
style, dating from the first half of the
6th century BC. These were dedicated to

Hera and
Poseidon
, although they have traditionally been
identified as a
basilica
and temples of
Neptune
and
Ceres
, owing to 18th-century mis-attribution.

The city of Paestum covers an area of approximately 120 hectares. It is only
the 25 hectares that contain the three main temples that have been excavated.
The other 95 hectares remain on private land and have not been excavated. The
city is surrounded by defensive walls that still stand. The walls are
approximately 4750 m long, 5 – 7 m thick and 15 m high. Positioned along the
wall are 24 square and round towers. There may have been up to 28 but some of
them were destroyed during the construction of highway in the 18th century that
effectively cuts the site in two.

The modern town of
Paestum
, directly to the south of the
archaeological site, is a popular seaside resort. In the region of Paestum there
are long, sandy beaches.

Historic buildings

 

The
first Temple of Hera
, built around 550 BC by
Greek colonists, is the oldest surviving temple in Paestum. Eighteenth-century
archaeologists named it “The Basilica” because they mistakenly believed it to be
a Roman building. A basilica in Roman times was a civil building, not a
religious one. Inscriptions revealed that the goddess worshiped here was

Hera. Later, an
altar
was unearthed in front of the temple, in
the open-air site usual for a Greek altar; the faithful could attend rites and
sacrifices
without entering the
cella
.

Just south of the city walls, at a site still called Santa Venera, a series
of small terracotta

offertory
molded statuettes of a standing
female nude wearing the
polos
headdress of Anatolian and Syrian
goddesses, which were dated to the first half of the sixth century BC, were
found in the sanctuary; other similar ones have been excavated at other Paestum
sanctuaries during excavations in the 1980s, but the figure is highly unusual in
the Western Mediterranean. The open-air
temenos
was established at the start of
Greek occupation: a temple on the site was not built until the early fifth
century. A nude goddess is a figure alien to Greek culture before
Praxiteles
‘ famous
Cnidian Aphrodite
in the fourth century:
iconographic analogies must be sought in Phoenician
Astarte
and the Cypriote Aphrodite. “In places
where the Greeks and Phoenicians came in contact with one another, there is
often an overlapping in the persona of the two deities,” Rebecca Miller Ammerman
has explained (Ammerman 1991), in identifying the cult at the site as that of
Phoenician Astarte or Cypriot Aphrodite. In Roman times, inscriptions make
clear, the cult was reserved to
Venus
.

 

The
second Temple of Hera
was built around 460–450
BC. It has been variously thought of as a temple dedicated to
Poseidon
. The Temple of Hera II has nothing in
common with the first temple, reason being for its symmetrical style for its
columns. Also every column does not have a normal 20 flutes on each column but
it has 24 flutes. The Temple of Hera II also has a wider column and a smaller
spacing for the placing of the columns. The temple was also found to be used to
worship more than just Hera but also Zeus and another unknown god. There are
visible on the east side the remains of two altars, one large and one smaller.
The smaller one is a Roman addition, built when they cut through the larger one
to build a road to the
forum
. It is also possible that the temple was
originally dedicated to both Hera and Poseidon; some offertory statues found
around the larger altar are thought to demonstrate this identification.

In the central part of the complex is the Roman
Forum
, thought to have been built on the site
of the preceding Greek
agora
. On the north side of the forum is a
small Roman temple, dated to 200 BC. It was dedicated to the
Capitoline Triad
,
Jupiter
,
Juno
and
Minerva
.

To the north-east of the forum is the
amphitheater
. This is of normal Roman pattern,
though much smaller than later examples. Only the western half is visible; in
1930 AD, a road was built across the site, burying the eastern half. It is said
by local inhabitants that the civil engineer responsible was tried, convicted
and received a prison sentence for what was described as wanton destruction of
an historic site.

 

On the highest point of the town, some way from the other temples, is the
Temple of Athena
. It was built around 500 BC,
and was for some time incorrectly thought to have been dedicated to Ceres. The
architecture is transitional, being partly in the Ionic style and partly early
Doric. Three medieval Christian tombs in the floor show that the temple was at
one time used as a
Christian
church.

All three temples have undergone some renovation and repair in recent years.

Painted tombs

 

Paestum is also renowned for its painted tombs, mainly belonging to the
period of the Lucanian
rule, while only one of them dates to
the Greek period. It was found, on 3 June 1968, in a small
necropolis
some 1.5 km south of the ancient
walls. The burial monument was named
Tomb of the Diver
(Italian: Tomba del
tuffatore) after the enigmatic scene, depicted on the covering slab, of a
lonely young man diving into a stream of water. It was dated to the first half
of the fifth century BC (about 470 BC), the
Golden Age
of the Greek town. The tomb is
painted with the
true fresco
technique and its importance
lies in being “the only example of Greek painting with figured scenes dating
from the
Orientalizing
,
Archaic
, or
Classical
periods to survive in its entirety.
Among the thousands of Greek tombs known from this time (roughly 700–400 BC),
this is the only one to have been decorated with frescoes of human subjects.”

 

The remaining four walls of the tombs are occupied by
symposium
related scenes, an iconography far
more familiar from the
Greek pottery
than the diving scene.

All the five frescoes are visible in the local National Museum, together with
the cycle of Lucanian painted tombs.

In fiction

• Gate to the Sea, a historical novel by
  Bryher
  published in 1958, portrays the
  flight of Harmonia, a Greek high priestess, from Poseidonia (Paestum), where
  the Greek inhabitants have been enslaved and culturally dominated by the
  Lucani
  since the death of Alexander the
  Great in 323 BC
• In the novel
  My Antonia
  by
  Willa Cather
  , the professor Gaston Cleric
  contracts a fever after spending the night outdoors admiring “the sea
  temples at Paestum.”
• In the film
  Mare Nostrum (film)
  by
  Rex Ingram (director)
  , they visit Paestum.
• In the 2007 video game
  Medal of Honor: Airborne
  , the second
  mission takes place in Paestum.

See also

• Architecture of Ancient Greece
• Greek temple
• List of ancient Greek temples
• List of Greco-Roman roofs
• List of archaeological sites sorted by country