Magna Graecia, the forgotten Greek legacy

Many, many years ago, I traveled to southern Italy off-season to visit Pompeii and 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 Paestum and Velia, once part of Magna Graecia. Until then, I had not heard of Magna Graecia, and I had no idea what it meant. When we talk about Greece, we automatically think of mainland Greece and Athens in particular but not of any colonies or overseas settlements.

[Map taken from Wikipedia]

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 the internet, color TV, and a few books with colored pictures, my perception of Pompeii and Herculaneum was based on lots of imagination. Still, I was over the moon to investigate these places by myself. It was February when 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 could inhale the smell of the burnt wooden beam that had survived, much unlike Pompeii. The Archaeological Museum of Naples was 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!

On this first “archaeological” trip, I learned many precious lessons for the future. The first lesson was to prepare a trip and inquire locally about what to see and the opening hours. Second lesson: get all the information I can about a museum before going there. I spent several hours in Naples' museum before reaching those rooms with Alexander and other precious objects I wanted to see. Third lesson: do your homework. Since then, I have done all three and never had to regret missing anything significant.

As I said, my lodging address was too far away, a good two-hour drive from Salerno over winding local roads through beautiful landscapes. But there was an advantage to this unfortunate situation since I was close to the ancient sites of Elea (modern Velia) and Poseidona (modern Paestum), 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. The reasons often included famine or overpopulation at home and friction and competition between the rising city-states, which induced many Greeks between the 8th and 4th century BC to emigrate in search of new opportunities overseas. After all, the Greeks always sought 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 areas was to become Magna Graecia or Great Greece, i.e., the coastal region of southern Italy, which also includes Sicily, heavily colonized by the Greeks during the 8th and 7th centuries BC.

Two types of colonies existed: one as independent city-states, the other as widely spread trading colonies. We must thank these Greek colonies for spreading Hellenistic culture, as most cities around the Mediterranean somehow have Greek roots.

Paestum was my first city to visit. 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 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. Besides that, the main Roman roads had been exposed, with the Decumanus exiting the city at the Porta Marina in the West and the Porta Sirena in the East. At the same time, the Cardo linked the Porta Aura in the North to the Porta Giudizia in the South – all gates still visible in the existing city walls. The central Forum and part of the Amphitheater had been excavated, but that was about all.

I was very impressed by the compact and sturdy Basilica or Temple of Hera, which counted an unusual nine columns in its façade. However, all temples had an even number of columns (another thing I learned). 

The middle temple dedicated to Poseidon (or maybe also to Hera) corresponded time-wise to the construction of the Parthenon in Athens when the purity of proportions reached its peak. No wonder this Temple of Poseidon steals the show in every way! A curious oddity used in only a few temples is the two rows of superposed columns inside the cella, where the god resides. These columns are incredibly slender and elegant, making the temple feel 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. Watching the sun and shadows play with the ocher-colored colonnades set against a steel-blue sky is now a beautiful spectacle.

On the other hand, the Temple of Ceres is more austere, probably because, like for the Basilica, the construction material comes from a different quarry than the Temple of Poseidon. Smaller than the two other temples, it stands slightly aside and has the oddity of counting 6x13 columns instead of the usual proportion of 6x12. There are exceptions to every rule, even when it comes to building temples.

Poseidonia was founded early in the 6th century BC by the Achaeans. By the end of the 5th 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 the Roman city of Paestum. It continued to flourish till the 4th century AD when decline set it, and by the Middle Ages, Paestum was entirely abandoned.

The story of Elea is slightly different. Greeks from Phocaea, who fled Asia Minor around 538-535 BC after a siege by the Persians, founded it. As opposed to Paestum, Elea was not conquered by the Lucanians but fell to Rome at the same time as Paestum. More importantly, it was the home of the Eleatic School founded by the philosopher Parmenides at the beginning of the 5th century BC that included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos – maybe even Xenophanes, but that is not proven.

The location of Velia, as I saw it, was quite striking. Early in spring, the light was gentle, and the skies were pale blue. The landscape was very green, with valleys of olive trees, fig-trees, and vines introduced by the Greeks. The mimosa bloomed, and the small mountain oranges were ripe for the picking. In the distance, the snow-capped mountains of the Apennines watched over these lands, unchanged throughout the centuries. What an excellent spot for founding a city!

High on the Acropolis of Elea stood an Ionic temple of which only the crepidoma and a few column stubs remain as most of the material was reused to build the medieval tower 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 found in Magna Graecia.

In the lower part of Elea, the Porta Marina was the eye-catcher. Elea was an active port that silted up in antiquity 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 6th century BC. Two centuries later, they were reinforced with sturdy towers to defend Elea against a possible attack from the Lucanians. There was no further explanation available. I located a Roman Bath, which Emperor Hadrian had built. There was also a vast Roman residence and other unidentified remains. Looking for pictures of Elea online today, I’m surprised that a Roman theater and an Asclepion have been excavated. Still, I find no traces of the aqueduct that I discovered there, partially running underground and covered by two slabs of stones between the cisterns that used to filter the water before reaching the lower city. It is all very intriguing, and I hope to return there one day.

In any case, my visit to Paestum has set my life-long love for and understanding of Greek art in motion. First in the Classical Period but mainly during the following Hellenistic era, when perfection was reached. that was never surpassed. Despite time and repeated wars, we are blessed that many buildings, statues, pots, jewelry, and other remains are still there. The many temples in Magna Graecia tend to give us the impression that the colonizers were even more Greek than the Greeks themselves!