Paestum: Ancient Greeks in Italy

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Speaker 1 It's 480 BC.

Speaker 1 The calm waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea are a royal blue, with the Italian coast visible in the distance.

Speaker 1 A small ship sails north, carried by a favorable wind and keeping close to the shoreline. It's a trading ship, full of fancy vases.

Speaker 1 The helmsman and his crew had come from Athens. They were sailing north to trade with the great power that dominated Italy at that time, the Etruscans, who had developed quite a love for Greek art.

Speaker 1 Over the past few weeks, they had been sailing around the Italian coastline, passing numerous cities along the way. Tarentum, Croton, Regium, Elea.

Speaker 1 valued havens in a world where sailing at night was avoided. Now they could see the next port city on the horizon, situated in a great fertile plain with mountains rising up behind.

Speaker 1 Impressive stone walls surround it and beyond, protruding above this defense, the tops of the great monuments that define this city were visible.

Speaker 1 Two large temples side by side, one bigger and grander than the other, shouting out a clear message, Greeks live here.

Speaker 1 A warm bed, wine, and music awaited the helmsman that night. Familiar Greek comforts in a foreign land.
He thanked Poseidon for the ship's safe journey so far.

Speaker 1 He vowed to make an offering to the terrifying deity as soon as he landed, lest his luck change. It was the least he could do.
He was entering the gods' namesake city, after all.

Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Ancients. Now last year I had the privilege of visiting what I will unashamedly say is my favourite ancient site in Italy.

Speaker 1 Not Pompeii, not the Colosseum, but Pestum.

Speaker 1 Home to some of the best surviving ancient Greek temples outside of Greece and so much more. Why is it my favourite site?

Speaker 1 Well, I love the story of the ancient Greeks who went west and settled in southern Italy and the interactions they had with various Italian peoples, including the Romans.

Speaker 1 Sometimes peaceful, sometimes not.

Speaker 1 We were there at Pestum to create a documentary all about this ancient city, Pestum a Tale of Three Cities, which you can go and watch now on History Hit. We'll put a link in the description.

Speaker 1 In this episode, we'll be walking you through this stunning site. We'll shine a light on some of its greatest treasures.
how this city has legacies left by Greeks, Etruscans, Lucanians and Romans.

Speaker 1 And why this site should be on any ancient history enthusiast's bucket list of places to visit.

Speaker 17 If we're looking at Peacetum as, say, a visitor walking into the city, it would have been a walled city with quite imposing monumental gates.

Speaker 17 It would have had the new temple, which was visible from the sea. So if you were arriving by sea, that's pretty much the first thing you would have seen.

Speaker 15 You must remember that the city in the 4th century BC did not just have a Lucanian population, the Greeks were there.

Speaker 15 And the connection, the interaction between the Greeks, the Lucanians and other populations, it was crucial to then define this new language.

Speaker 1 Along the way, I'll be helped by two leading experts on Pestum and the wider story of the ancient Greeks in Italy. Dr.
Catherine Lomas, an honorary research fellow at Durham University, and Dr.

Speaker 1 Tiziana D'Angelo, director of the archaeological park of Pestum and Velia.

Speaker 1 One last note. There are several ways people say Pestum today.
Others might say Paistum, others still Pestum. But rest assured, we are always talking about the same place.

Speaker 1 Let's get into it.

Speaker 1 Pestum lies in southern Italy, about a kilometer from the coast and 90 kilometers southeast of Naples.

Speaker 1 Founded by the Greeks at the turn of the 6th century BC, it was originally called Poseidonia, after the city's divine protector, the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon.

Speaker 1 An appropriate deity for a city joined to the rest of the Greek world by its proximity to the sea.

Speaker 17 It's on the Gulf of Salerno, and it's about two to three kilometers inland, so we're talking coastal plain, with a low plateau, which is where the city actually is.

Speaker 1 That's Dr. Catherine Lomas, Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University and the editor of the new book, The World of the Western Greeks.

Speaker 17 Basically, we're talking about somewhere which is quite close to the coast. It's about 10 kilometers south of the River Sele, which is one of the major waterways of southern Italy.

Speaker 17 So it's got very good maritime connections and a good way of bringing goods in, shipping goods out, keeping connections, which obviously is important because land transport is slow and expensive at this date.

Speaker 17 Basically, it's got the Apennines sort of inland, and also the Calabrian Mountains to the south, with passes leading southwards, which may have been significant in why the site was chosen.

Speaker 17 The area is quite prone to flooding and waterlogging, which is significant in its later history, so that's quite important.

Speaker 17 But also, it controls a very large territory of very fertile land, so it's got really good resources and good connections with the wider world, both Greek and non-Greek.

Speaker 1 Pestum was one of numerous settlements that the Greeks founded across the ancient Mediterranean. These stretched from Crimea to North Africa to Sicily and southern Italy.

Speaker 1 These settlers brought their Greek culture with them to these distant shores. They maintained close links between their new home and the mother city that they came from.

Speaker 1 Links that endured for generations.

Speaker 17 Magna Gracia, or Megalaehellas as it was known in Greek, literally means Greater Greece or Great Greece, and it's conventionally used to refer by scholars to the Greek settlements in Italy.

Speaker 17 These are conventionally termed colonies, but that's actually really contentious. Quite a lot of scholars reject that term in favour of something much more neutral, like migration.

Speaker 17 But the reason why the Greeks were there in the first place is that this is the culmination of a very long-standing network of social and economic contacts between Greece and the Western Mediterranean, stretching as far as Spain, which goes right back to the Bronze Age.

Speaker 17 So what we have is a very long-standing trade route, which basically means that the Greeks of Greece are very familiar with the Western Mediterranean.

Speaker 17 But eventually at some point around about the 8th to the 7th centuries BC, that really seems to ramp up in intensity.

Speaker 17 And we find that we have a period of quite intensive and quite rapid permanent settlements growing up in southern Italy and also Sicily.

Speaker 17 The contributory factors to that seem to have been a combination of economic opportunism.

Speaker 17 These are are areas with vast amounts of arable land compared with Greece, familiarity with the area through these trade contacts, which probably helped mediate this, and civil strife in Greece itself.

Speaker 17 And quite a lot of the foundation legends that we have handed down through the ancient sources feature stories about individuals or small groups of people who were forced out of their home cities for various reasons.

Speaker 17 And in fact, the foundation of Peacetom itself is a case in point because civic discord in its founding city, Sybaris, which is on the south coast of Italy, seems to have been a big factor in why Pistum was founded.

Speaker 1 Pestum was founded relatively late in the story of Greek settlements in southern Italy. As Catherine mentioned, it was founded by Greeks who came from Sybaris.

Speaker 1 Imagine Italy's boot-like shape. Sybaris could be found right on its soul, positioned next to what is now the Bay of Taranto and looking east towards Corthu Corthu and northwest Greece.

Speaker 1 The city had been founded by mainland Greeks in the 8th century BC.

Speaker 1 By around 600 BC, Sybaris had already become a wealthy city. But troubles within encouraged a group of people there to leave.

Speaker 1 They headed west, sailing around the toe of Italy in search of a new homeland. It was they who founded Poseidonia.
We'll largely say Pestum from now on to keep its symbol. Same place.

Speaker 1 Over the following decades, Pestum would grow and start to establish itself in the area.

Speaker 1 Its people built a harbour, taking advantage of the trade routes and farmed the abundant arable lands on this coastal plain.

Speaker 1 Word soon spread, with more settlers arriving at Pestum over the course of the 6th century, keen for a fresh start in this fledgling city.

Speaker 1 Early on, Pestum's story was intertwined with Sybaris, but that all changed at the end of the 6th century, when Sybaris was destroyed.

Speaker 1 According to the Greek geographer Strabo, Sybaris had grown into a rich and powerful city, but its people grew arrogant and decadent. This is where we get the word Sybarite from.

Speaker 1 And this led to their swift downfall.

Speaker 1 In a war with Croton, a neighboring Greek city and modern-day Crotone, Sybaris was destroyed.

Speaker 1 The armies of Croton diverted the water from the nearby river, flooding Sybaris and forcing its people to flee. It's likely that many of these Sybarite refugees fled to Pestum.

Speaker 1 Pestum had outlived the mother city, and its prominence would only increase.

Speaker 1 By the middle of the 5th century BC, Pestum had many of the classic hallmarks of an ancient Greek city.

Speaker 17 If we're looking at Pestum as, say, a visitor walking into the city, it would have been a walled city with quite imposing monumental gates.

Speaker 17 It would have had the new temple, which is currently under excavation, which was visible from the sea, right near the Porta Marina in the western end of the city.

Speaker 17 So if you were arriving by sea, that's pretty much the first thing you would have seen. And then you can walk down these long, narrow streets of houses and workshops and shops.

Speaker 17 And when you got to the centre, you would have the Agora, which was very big by Greek Agora standards,

Speaker 17 probably somewhere around about 330 by 300 meters.

Speaker 17 And in the middle, it's got a hero shrine, a heroon, which may have been the cult of the founder, the oicist, as the Greeks called them.

Speaker 17 By the beginning of the 5th century, it's also acquired an ecclesiasterion, which is a circular building with stepped seats, a bit like a theatre. which is where political assemblies are held.

Speaker 17 And that again gives you some sort of insight into the size of the city because, as a guesstimate, that could have probably seated about 1,500 to 1,700 people.

Speaker 17 And if you take into account the fact that the Greek cities only allowed adult male citizens into places like an Ecclesiasterion, therefore, you've got a multiplier that you can add on for

Speaker 17 wives, children, slaves, non-citizens, that gives you a really quite substantial population of probably in the region of 10,000 to 12,000 people.

Speaker 17 So it's quite a substantial sized city.

Speaker 1 Pestum was not just substantial, it was also incredibly striking, defined by three great temples that dominated the city. They were built between 550 and 450 BC,

Speaker 1 all made from local limestone.

Speaker 1 One of them was built at the northern end of the city, the Temple of Athena. The other two are situated in the south, right next to each other.

Speaker 1 The first is today known as the Basilica, so called because it was originally thought to be an ancient law court. But finds have since proven it was a temple to the goddess Hera.

Speaker 1 It's the oldest of the three temples, built in the mid-6th century BC, just decades after Pestum was founded.

Speaker 1 Next to the Basilica, you have the grandest of Pestum's surviving temples, standing more than 10 meters tall.

Speaker 1 It's called the Temple of Neptune today, but of course Neptune is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Poseidon, lord of the sea and the divine patron of Pestum.

Speaker 1 Whether the temple was actually dedicated to Poseidon, however, well we'll address that in a moment.

Speaker 1 But first let's paint a clear picture of the Temple of Neptune. It is one of the most spectacular surviving examples of ancient Greek temple architecture from anywhere in the world.

Speaker 1 It is the pinnacle of a particular style known as the Doric Order. It's called Doric after the long, almost nine meter high fluted columns that surround the outside of the temple, 36 in total.

Speaker 1 They're called Doric columns. A small capital adorns the top of each column, supporting the top half of the temple.

Speaker 1 Directly above the columns on all four sides is a long blank rectangular strip called the architrave.

Speaker 1 Above that is another rectangular strip. But this time the strip is intersected with regular patterns of three vertical lines.

Speaker 1 Now those three vertical lines are called triglyphs and the blank squarish spaces created between them are called metopes.

Speaker 1 Usually That would be where you would find carved reliefs, but none survive on this particular temple. Either the metopes were left empty or they were painted and the paint hasn't survived.

Speaker 1 Finally, right at the top at each end of the temple, you have one of the most iconic parts of its design. The pediment, the triangular top.

Speaker 1 We usually picture pediments filled with statues, posing in clever ways to take advantage of the diminishing space. But Once again, no such decorations survive on this temple.

Speaker 1 But let that not take away anything from the majesty of this building. Visually, it is perfect.
One of the best Doric temples in the world, magnificent and awe-inspiring.

Speaker 1 Stepping inside, you are dwarfed by the large Doric columns that fill its interior. And it's not just single-tiered.
If you look up, you notice that there is another level of columns in the center.

Speaker 1 The remains of limestone stairs confirm the fact this temple originally had multiple floors.

Speaker 1 It was here within the grand ruins of the Temple of Neptune that I met Dr. Tiziana D'Angelo, director of the Archaeological Park of Pestum and Davelya.

Speaker 1 Tiziana, this does just blow me away. I'm so excited.
And this was right at the heart. Was this the sacred center of the temple?

Speaker 15 Yes, so right now we're in the Laos, the cellar. This would have been the space where the cult statue was placed.
And you always have to remember that Greek temples are not like churches.

Speaker 15 They were very different. They were more like, you know, the house of the god.

Speaker 15 And worshippers would have had access to these buildings, but most of the sacred rituals would have taken place outside by the altar.

Speaker 1 So this is just the big house for the god, but do we know which god was worshipped here?

Speaker 15 That is a very good question and one that we've been trying to answer. I mean, when the first archaeologists came to Pestum during the Grand Tour and they saw this monumental

Speaker 15 18th century, mid-18th century, that's when the site starts being rediscovered as it were.

Speaker 15 And archaeologists thought that this temple was so monumental that it must have been the one dedicated to Poseidon, the god who protected the city of Poseidonia.

Speaker 15 But in fact, archaeological evidence shows that that is not the case. And this temple was more likely dedicated to the goddess Hira or perhaps to the god Apollo.

Speaker 1 The queen of the gods. So Hira, she's the wife of Zeus.
So she is one of the top gods of the Malt.

Speaker 15 Yes, and we have several temples that were dedicated to her.

Speaker 15 I mean, we have just behind us the so-called basilica that was dedicated to Hira, and also the spectacular temple of Hira, just nine kilometers north of Pestum, at the mouth of the river Sele.

Speaker 1 Being such a massive construction, not just one story, two stories high. I mean, do we know much about how they built this?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so this is a great example of Doric architecture, and more specifically, of the way in which Doric architecture developed here in Poseidonia.

Speaker 15 And it's a very mature expression of Doric architecture as well.

Speaker 15 I mean, with the other great temples that we have preserved here in Pestum, what we see is really the sort of stylistic development of these structures.

Speaker 15 So with the temple Temple of Hera, the so-called Basilica.

Speaker 1 So it's that one right there behind us.

Speaker 15 That one right behind us.

Speaker 15 What we can see is one of the early examples of the Doric. So more sort of experimental.

Speaker 15 But with the Temple of Neptune, which was finished around the mid-5th century BC, we have probably the most mature expression of Doric architecture that is preserved here.

Speaker 1 So interestingly, that one is almost, so they're experimenting with Doric architecture. And this is almost a finalized version of it when they've almost got the style nailed out more to a T.

Speaker 15 Yeah, even though it's not always as easy as that.

Speaker 1 Of course, absolutely.

Speaker 15 I mean, with this temple in particular, the project must have changed along the way.

Speaker 15 So, when they started building it, probably towards the end of the 6th century, they had an idea of what the temple would have looked like.

Speaker 15 And then the project changed, and that's why they probably finished it a bit later.

Speaker 15 And we see this change precisely between, you know, by looking at the base of the temple, the the podium of the temple, and then the upper part of it, which are different.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned there, so the end of the sixth century BC, so that's within roughly a hundred years of Pestum, you know, ancient Posidonia, being founded. It seems pretty quick.

Speaker 1 Was this almost a statement of power, of the wealth of Pestum at that time, that, you know, within a hundred years of it being founded, they could already build massive temples like this?

Speaker 15 I mean, the city was indeed very wealthy, just like its mother city in Calabria, Sybaris, but it also had you know very skilled architects and you know engineers.

Speaker 15 So in 510 BC when the mother city of Poseidonia, Sybaris, was destroyed, then what we see here in Pestum is almost like a process of monumentalization of this city, which would have to some extent also replaced its mother city in terms of its power and control over Western Greece.

Speaker 1 It's almost like the the colony overtakes the mother city, almost kind of the apprentice becomes the master in a weird kind of way.

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, in some ways, yes.

Speaker 15 And then you can imagine that probably, but again, you know, this is also speculation, but probably you would have had some, you know, groups of people from Sybaris also coming here to Poseidonia after the destruction of the mother city.

Speaker 1 And so, how powerful and significant does Greek pestum does Poseidonia become?

Speaker 15 Well, if you think about its urban sanctuaries, so you know, here the so-called Temple of Neptune, the so-called basilica, then the Temple of Athena, if you think about its five kilometers of city walls, if you think about its huge agora and where an ecclesiasterion, where the ecclesiasterion is still preserved, if you think about the Heron,

Speaker 15 the tomb dedicated to the hero founder of the city, then you realize that this was a powerful city in southern Italy, Magna Greta.

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Speaker 1 Pestum was one of many ancient Greek cities in Magna Gretea that has become prosperous by the 5th century BC.

Speaker 1 Others included Syracuse and Akragas in Sicily, the latter famous for its own valley of temples at today's Agrigento.

Speaker 1 There was also Regium at the toe of Italy, Tarentum at the heel, and of course Neapolis beneath Mount Vesuvius. We know it today as Naples.

Speaker 1 At the same time that famous Greek cities on the mainland like Athens and Sparta were fighting off the Persians and reaching their zeniths, these Greeks in the West were enjoying their own golden age.

Speaker 1 Greek culture was thriving in southern Italy and during these centuries you would see a special development of Greek art in these cities, influenced by powerful Italian neighbors like the Etruscans who at that time were still the dominant power in Italy.

Speaker 1 Rome, at that time, still paled in comparison.

Speaker 1 Visit somewhere like the National Museum of Archaeology in Naples today, and you can see great examples of this Italiot Greek art.

Speaker 1 But the art from Pestum is particularly special. Pestum has treasures that are as rare and as beautiful as anything from ancient Greece, with one particular example standing out above all others.

Speaker 1 It was discovered one and a half kilometers south of Pestum,

Speaker 1 not in a grand temple, but in a tomb.

Speaker 1 It's called the Tomb of the Diver, after one of the most stunning pieces of ancient Greek art in the world.

Speaker 1 A wall painting, rectangular in its design, that depicts a very unique and tranquil scene. A young man who has just jumped off a tall platform caught in a perfect dive position.

Speaker 1 moments away from hitting a pool of water beneath him.

Speaker 1 Today, this painting has become a symbol of Pestum and the ancient Greeks in Italy, on display at Pestum's Archaeological Museum. I was lucky enough to see it up close with Tiziana as my expert guide.

Speaker 1 I mean, Tiziana, I have to say, this is one of the most incredible wall paintings I've ever seen. The details that survive, I mean, it's astonishing.

Speaker 15 Yeah, this is a very unique example of ancient wall painting.

Speaker 15 It dates to the 5th century BC and we hear so much about, you know, Greek wall painting from literary sources, but actually pretty much nothing survives.

Speaker 15 But here in southern Italy, there you have an example that is still so well preserved.

Speaker 1 And of all places, and so this is roughly 2,500 years old. And you wouldn't believe it at first when you see it because of how much it survived.

Speaker 15 Exactly, I mean this was preserved so well because it was in a tomb, right? So the context was sealed.

Speaker 15 And until 1968, when the tomb was discovered, when the tomb was excavated, you know, its colours just kind of stayed hidden below the ground.

Speaker 1 What exactly can we see here? I'm guessing this figure, right, in the center, the main character, this is the diver.

Speaker 15 Exactly, this is the diver. This is a diving scene.
But first of all, let's just try and imagine this tomb. You know, this is the lid.
And this is the interior side of the lid.

Speaker 1 So this would be face down in the tomb.

Speaker 15 Exactly. It's, you know, the figure of the diver would have been right above the deceased face.
So the tomb was decorated on the inside. So its interior walls were decorated with frescoes.

Speaker 15 And this in particular was, as I said, the lid. So there you have, you know, the diver.
This is a very special painting and it's become

Speaker 15 over the years almost like an icon of the archaeological park of Pestum.

Speaker 1 And what other things can we see here? So we've got this kind of this platform-like image here, and is there water there? So what are these other details?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so here we have, as you said, you know, we've got this sort of tower, this platform, and the diver, you know, has just jumped off that platform exactly. And here what you have is water.

Speaker 15 It looks like a lake, maybe the sea, you know, we don't know. I mean, this scene is still so mysterious to us.
And, you know, here we have some trees.

Speaker 15 And what makes it so interesting is the fact that it doesn't have so many comparisons, so many comparanda that we can look to in order to reconstruct what is going on.

Speaker 15 And there are so many interpretations that have been suggested, that have been put forward for this scene. But in a way, you know,

Speaker 15 we're still thinking, we're still trying to figure out the dieter.

Speaker 1 We've got some interesting kind of floral patterns and trees either side. But what I also love, you can see the pupil of his eye, and you can also see like hair as well.

Speaker 1 So does that reveal more about the actual figure?

Speaker 15 Yeah, there's a lot of attention to anatomical details. I mean, you see a little bit of his beard, but not too much.

Speaker 15 And that tells us that this is a young man, you know, not a full beard that would qualify him as an adult man but at the same time this is not a child um so that also suggests that what we are dealing with is almost like you know potentially a an age group ritual potentially um a kind of you know coming of age moment um so you know this dive must have been a very special um dive i mean i haven't seen any other scene like this in any Greek wall painting or Roman wall painting or anything like it.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 talking about paint itself, I mean, so how was this actually created? Do we know about that?

Speaker 15 Yes, the technique that was used is the fresco technique, which means that a stone was coated with plaster, with a very thin layer of plaster. I mean, this is very high-quality painting.

Speaker 15 And while the plaster was still wet, the artist applied the pigments, the painting. So this technique was widespread in the ancient Mediterranean from the Archaic period onwards.

Speaker 1 Okay, the big question. So we've got this beautiful scene here found in a tomb.
What do we think this scene represents?

Speaker 15 Yeah, that is a very good question. I mean the tomb was discovered in 1968 over half a century ago and scholars are still debating about its interpretation.

Speaker 15 Some scholars have suggested that this might be a sort of metaphor of, you know, the dive as a passage from life to afterlife but more recent interpretations have tried to look at it as a representation of daily life or right or you know the life of the deceased as i said you know something that would refer to his passage from youth to adulthood but the diver was not the only image found in this tomb So, as I said, you know, the deceased was surrounded by these figural paintings.

Speaker 15 And all around him, we have a a banquet scene, or more precisely, a symposium that unfolded. So, a banquet to which only men participated.

Speaker 1 The symposium was the drinking party of ancient Greek culture. Guests would recline on couches, listen to music, discuss politics and philosophy, drink wine out of rounded cups called kylikes.

Speaker 1 One of the men shown reclining at the banquet is engaged in a drinking game called kotobos, where you threw the dregs of wine out of your cup towards a target elsewhere in the room.

Speaker 1 Another figure plays the lyre, another is a cupbearer.

Speaker 1 Very rarely do we see humans depicted in Greek wall paintings, and these frescoes speak to an influence from the neighbouring Etruscans, the most powerful Italian people at the beginning of the fifth century BC.

Speaker 15 At the same time, in the early 5th century BC, wall painting was at its height in the Etruscan world.

Speaker 15 And there are similarities between this tomb and Etruscan painted tombs, which reminds us again of the importance of cultural contacts between the Greeks and other populations living nearby.

Speaker 1 So this could actually be showing the meetings that the Greeks who were here in southern Italy were having with other Italian peoples at that time. That's extraordinary.

Speaker 15 I mean, the Greek art here in Pestum is different from Greek art elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 15 And the reason is precisely that the population here interacted, and sometimes there were conflicts as well with different cultures.

Speaker 15 I mentioned the Etruscans and then the Lucanians also lived nearby and other Italic populations. They created a very different, a very specific type of art.

Speaker 15 And in the banquet scene, we can see elements of this multiculturality.

Speaker 1 These stunning wall paintings from the tomb of the diver are some of the most beautiful from anywhere in the Greek world, showing just how prosperous Pestum had become by the 5th century BC,

Speaker 1 and how prominent a place it was.

Speaker 1 But nothing lasts forever. 200 years after its foundation, Pestum, this idyllic Greek city, gradually came under threat.

Speaker 1 Not from abroad, beyond the seas, but from closer to home, from inland.

Speaker 17 The main question about Pestum's relationships with the indigenous Italians Italians is really centres on the Lucanians, which are a group that speaks a language called Oscan, which is the common language of Apennine and large parts of southern Italy, and seems to be culturally related to the Samnites who live in the Apennines.

Speaker 17 But by this stage, they were migrating south and developing their own very distinct cultural and ethnic identity as they went.

Speaker 17 Quite a lot of them move into Peacetem territory, settle there, may be brought in as mercenaries. They have quite a ferocious military reputation.

Speaker 17 So by this stage, what we've got is a situation that the fall of Sybaris has created a bit of a power vacuum at the end of the 6th century.

Speaker 17 You've got Lucanians sort of migrating south in the 5th, and Pestum is becoming much more ethnically mixed as a result.

Speaker 1 As the 5th century went on, Lucanian power only increased, and they began to pressure Greek cities all across southern Italy, including Pestum.

Speaker 1 By 400 BC, the scales had tipped, and Pestum fell into the hands of the Lucanians.

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem to have been a violent takeover, no destruction layer has been found in the archaeology.

Speaker 1 Instead, there appears to have been an ethnographic shift, with the Lucanians now outnumbering the Greeks in the city.

Speaker 1 For the people of Pestum, a new age in their story had begun, an age where Lucanian overlords ran the show.

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Speaker 1 For haughty Greeks elsewhere, Seeing Pestum fall into the hands of these so-called barbarians led them to deride the city.

Speaker 1 They saw this as the beginning of a dark age in Pestum's story, where Greek culture was suppressed and barbarity reigned supreme.

Speaker 1 One person who held to this view was a philosopher called Aristoxenus, who hailed from Tarentum, which remained free of Italian control.

Speaker 1 Remarking on Pestum's Lucanian takeover, he bemoaned the tragedy of the Greeks that lived there.

Speaker 1 What happened to them is that they were originally Greeks but have have turned into barbarians and their language has changed along with all their other practices.

Speaker 1 They continue today to celebrate only one Greek festival in which they get together and imitate their ancient way of speaking and behaving.

Speaker 1 After they wail about them with one another and cry their hearts out, they go back home.

Speaker 1 In Aristoxenus's view, the Greeks that lived alongside Lucanians at Pestum had forgotten everything that made them Greek, that made them civilized and rational human beings.

Speaker 1 It's a damning portrayal, but it's also fictional, because, contrary to what Aristoxenus would have us believe, the Greeks did not forget their beliefs. Greek culture at Pestum was not suppressed.

Speaker 1 In fact, the archaeology is revealing quite the opposite.

Speaker 1 Inscriptions and dedications show how the Greek language endured alongside Oscan, the language that the Lucanians spoke.

Speaker 1 Pestum's prestigious Greek sanctuaries, including those three great temples we mentioned earlier, continued in use. As did the Greek cemeteries, as did their public buildings in the Agora.

Speaker 1 Lucanian elites may now have ruled Pestum, but they made no attempts to suppress Greek culture. They admired it.
Let's take pottery as an example.

Speaker 1 Under Lucanian overlordship, Pestum produced some of the most beautiful vases from the ancient Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 Made in the classically Greek red figure style, more than 2,000 of these Peston vases have been discovered. Many depict scenes of Greek mythology.

Speaker 1 There's one that depicts the wondrous birth of Helen of Troy, who hatched from an egg after Helen's mother, Queen Leda of Sparta, had been seduced by Zeus, king of the gods, in the guise of a swan.

Speaker 1 Another shows the Phoenician princess Europa being abducted from her homeland in the eastern Mediterranean by Zeus in the guise of a bull. We even have the names of vase makers surviving.

Speaker 1 Acetas was one celebrity name. Pythone was another.
Both left their signatures on their vases, ensuring their names have survived to the present day.

Speaker 1 The archaeology shows just how wrong Aristoxenus was. Greek culture was flourishing at Pestum.
The Lucanian elites admired it. Many of these elaborate vases were found in Lucanian tombs.

Speaker 1 But the Lucanians also had their own rich culture, with a big emphasis on the warrior. And it's at Pestum that we see a fascinating blend of the two in some stunning wall paintings.

Speaker 1 More than 400 wall paintings dating to the Lucanian period have been found from tombs around Pestum. Many are stored in the museum's storerooms, a sistine chapel of ancient Lucanian art.

Speaker 15 Welcome to our museum storerooms.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 No way.

Speaker 1 This is an archaeologist's dream, isn't it? Look at this.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's a bit of a hidden treasure. Our storerooms are about 1400 square meters and you see they're completely packed with these gems.

Speaker 1 And these gems, these are just more of these kind of these great slabs and wall paintings paintings from Pestum's long history.

Speaker 15 Yeah we've got hundreds of painted slabs that come from cemeteries all around the city of Pestum. And most of them are so-called Lucanian tombs, so they date to the fourth century BC.

Speaker 1 Look at that, it's the weird creature there as well.

Speaker 15 I know that's a demon, right? It's one of these fantastic creatures that populate these very lively scenes.

Speaker 1 Their imagination, yeah. How many? So some 400, did you say?

Speaker 15 Yeah, around 400 slabs, yeah. In addition to some chamber-painted tombs as well.

Speaker 1 As you walk past row after row of these wall paintings, you notice much more of a focus on fighting. Tiziana took me to two particularly interesting slabs.

Speaker 1 One showing two warriors fighting with swords, spears and shields. The other showing a rider elegantly dressed and carrying a war trophy, a pole with with a flag attached.

Speaker 1 So what's so interesting about this one? I mean it is striking, but why?

Speaker 15 Well when you look at both these slabs, what you can see is a very important feature of Lucanian culture, of the Lucanian people.

Speaker 15 In particular here, you realize how important it was for the Lucanian aristocracy, for Lucanian men, to be celebrated as warriors, to be commemorated for their militaristic virtue.

Speaker 1 So militaristic scene, I mean, and this straight away, it's so different to the Tomb of the Diver earlier in the type of scene that it's depicting.

Speaker 1 As you say, this is much more showing themselves in the heat of battle fighting.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so you go from a banquet scene, from a sympotic scene, which really commemorates the role of the individual within the polis, within the community.

Speaker 15 What you're looking at here instead is how important it was for the Lucanians to commemorate their victories in battle, for example. So, here you see, for example, two warriors fighting.
Okay, great.

Speaker 15 But over there, what you have is a rider. You see he's coming back.
He's on his horse. And what he's holding is a spear, and you see a trophy.
So he's coming back from battle.

Speaker 1 That flag, that little flag thing that he's carrying, very triumphant looking.

Speaker 15 Exactly. So he comes back.
And so that shows him as a victorious rider. And in a way, also overcoming not just the enemy, but also overcoming death.

Speaker 1 And that scene right there. so he's upright on his horse and he's carrying that flag standard slash trophy on the spear as you say.
And I've seen similar depictions on that on other wall paintings.

Speaker 1 So was that the common way that these people, they liked to portray themselves as triumphant victors returning from a war?

Speaker 15 Well yes, these painted tombs, they had a set of recurring iconographies that you have over and over again in these tombs. And the iconography of the return of the rider, that's how we refer to it.

Speaker 1 The return of the rider.

Speaker 15 Yeah the return of the rider very mysterious right but that's a very popular one and it's popular for men then you have a completely different set of iconographies for women so they're very much different in terms of gender.

Speaker 1 And these two scenes I'm guessing there were other types of scenes depicted in these tombs too.

Speaker 15 Yeah, absolutely. I mean our Lucanian painted tombs had a wide range of iconographies, very lively scenes and I would like to show you a few of them.

Speaker 1 Well I'm not going to say no in this absolute archaeological treasure trove that you have here.

Speaker 15 And I've got one in particular that I want to show you and it's here. There we have it.

Speaker 1 Let me see if I can pull it out. Good luck.

Speaker 15 There we go, yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 15 Now you're going to have to tell me what you think about it.

Speaker 1 Wow, stunning. You know me,

Speaker 1 it's not bad. It's not.
It's not bad. You know, I kind of expected a more, you know, enthusiastic reaction.
It's incredible.

Speaker 1 What Tiziana has just pulled out is a large rectangular slab depicting an ancient Lucanian chariot race.

Speaker 1 There are two chariots on opposite ends of the painting, each pulled by two horses.

Speaker 1 One set of horses have red manes, the others have yellow. The charioteers steer them with reins hunched over on very light chariots.
A majestic Doric column is painted in the middle of the scene.

Speaker 1 with both chariot teams racing towards it. So what can I see? So I can see chariots and a column in in the center too.

Speaker 15 Yeah, what we have here is a chariot race and that was another very common iconography and it was probably linked to funerary games.

Speaker 15 That's a very important topic in the context of these ancient tomb paintings. I mean the funerary ceremony was crucial to understand the role that these paintings had.

Speaker 1 So do we think many of the scenes, not just the chariots but also let's say sometimes the warriors, I mean all those things, do we think many of the scenes that are depicted on these tombs do have a relevance to the funerary games that would have accompanied the burying of that individual?

Speaker 15 Well you have to think that these tombs and therefore the paintings would have been visible during the funerary ceremony.

Speaker 15 They would have been visible to the community and probably they were also made during the funerary ceremony.

Speaker 1 So not in a workshop far away. These were made on site basically do we think?

Speaker 15 Yeah we are we have certain clues. There are certain things that suggest that the paintings themselves were executed during the ceremony.

Speaker 15 So you would have had the artists, you know, inside the tomb painting them. So the painting is not just a decoration of the tomb.
It's actually part of the funerary ceremony.

Speaker 15 It's part of funerary ideology.

Speaker 1 And do we think this whole tradition of these beautifully coloured wall paintings, do we think there is an influence?

Speaker 1 from the Greeks here too and then the Lucanians they see it but then they put their own twist on it with their own cultural ideas?

Speaker 1 I mean what do we think do we think there is a link with the Greeks of Pestum here too?

Speaker 15 Well yes. I mean, you must remember that the city in the 4th century BC did not just have a Lucanian population.
The Greeks were there.

Speaker 15 And the connection, the interaction between the Greeks, the Lucanians, and other populations, it was crucial to then define this new language, this new artistic language. So, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 15 There was influence, but they still preserved specific features that speak this different Lucanian language.

Speaker 1 I must admit, the Lucanians, compared to other peoples, let's say, like the Romans, even the Etruscans, I mean, I haven't heard of them as much.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing, are things like this invaluable for trying to learn more about this particular people who many of us haven't heard much of at all?

Speaker 15 Well, the Lucanians, unlike the Greeks or the Romans, have not left us any literary texts, for example.

Speaker 15 We have some inscriptions, but these tombs, these paintings, are sort of visual book, and they offer us some very important glimpses in the life and culture of the Lucanians.

Speaker 15 So yes, the material culture is absolutely key to understand this population.

Speaker 1 Too often we can think of ancient Italy as just being Roman.

Speaker 1 What coming to a place like Pestum makes you realize is just how many different cultures lived and interacted with each other on this peninsula throughout antiquity.

Speaker 1 At Pestum you can see clear connections between the Greeks, the Lucanians and the Etruscans.

Speaker 1 Elsewhere in Magna Grecia, you can see Greek contact with other local Italian peoples, Samnites, Apulians, Brutians, Mesapians, Campanians, showing how there was a rich mosaic of different powers in southern Italy before the Romans took over.

Speaker 1 Speaking of which,

Speaker 1 the Lucanians ruled Pestum for just over a hundred years. But in the early third century BC, great change was coming to southern Italy.

Speaker 1 A new power had risen to the fore in central Italy and was now looking to expand. Yep, these were the Romans.

Speaker 17 The history of the 4th century BC is really a seminal one for Rome. It's the period in which Rome really starts its push to control the rest of Italy.

Speaker 17 So, right at the beginning of the 4th century, Rome is really rather in the doldrums. It gets sacked by the Gauls, it has to rebuild.
It's not in a very happy state.

Speaker 17 But by the middle of the century, it embarks on a whole series of wars in Italy, which ultimately end up by the early third century with it conquering the whole of Italy.

Speaker 17 Polybius famously says that it conquered the whole of Italy within a very short period of time, and this is a tremendous achievement.

Speaker 17 A lot of ancient sources theme this as a series of coherent wars against the Samnites. Livy says rather grandly that, you know, this is going to determine whether Samnite or Roman shall rule Italy.

Speaker 17 It really does see it as a sort of complete showdown with the Samnites.

Speaker 1 We're not going to get into the complexities of the Samnite wars now. That's a topic for another podcast or several.

Speaker 1 But Rome's ultimate victory against the Samnites paved the way for their expansion into southern Italy. Now this put them into conflict with the Greek cities, led by Tarentum.

Speaker 1 Yet these cities lacked the strength to oppose the Romans on their own. In recent decades, they had grown used to requesting outside assistance.

Speaker 1 Warlords from mainland Greece keen to expand their power into rich and fertile Magna Gretia.

Speaker 1 The policy hadn't enjoyed the greatest success in the past, but in 281 BC, with the Romans knocking on their door, the Tarantines tried again.

Speaker 1 They looked to a new rising warlord on the Greek mainland. Pyrrhus, king of Molossia, leader of the Epirots in northwest Greece, a relative of Alexander the Great, and a charismatic proven commander.

Speaker 1 With a mighty army centered around professional pike phalanxes, shock cavalry and Indian war elephants, Pyrrhus crossed the small strait that divides Greece and Italy and led the resistance against the Romans.

Speaker 1 He gained early success, winning a victory against the Romans at Heraclea, after which it's likely that Pestum joined his side.

Speaker 1 Samnites, Lucanians and Greeks were united under Pyrrhus' banner against Rome.

Speaker 1 Another victory followed for Pyrrhus the next year at Asculum, but this one was less clear-cut.

Speaker 1 Pyrrhus lost a lot of his key troops, with him supposedly remarking at the end of the day, another such victory and I am undone. Effectively, Another victory that costly and I'll lose the war.

Speaker 1 This is where we get the phrase Pyrrhic

Speaker 1 from.

Speaker 1 Pyrrhus would have expected the Romans to give in after two defeats, but the Romans had other ideas. Like the Hydra, they raised new forces to fight Pyrrhus and the tables started to turn.

Speaker 1 A few years and a disastrous Sicilian expedition later, Pyrrhus brought the Romans to battle once more in southern Italy. This time at a place called Beneventum.

Speaker 1 There the Romans either defeated Pyrrhus or brought him to a stalemate. The result was the same.
Pyrrhus, who many had likened to Alexander the Great, abandoned his Italian venture.

Speaker 1 With Pyrrhus gone, the writing was on the wall for cities like Pestum.

Speaker 1 The Romans took control of the city soon after in around 273 BC, marking the beginning of the next stage in Pestum's story.

Speaker 1 The Romans established a colony at Pestum and were quick to leave their mark on the city.

Speaker 1 They built a forum, as well as baths, law courts, a treasury, marketplaces, and more, building over Pestum's original Greek heart of the city its meeting place, its agora, and main political building, its ecclesiasterion,

Speaker 1 in the process.

Speaker 1 Like the Greeks and the Lucanians, The Romans realized that Pestum was a key city in the southern part of Italy, helping them solidify their control over this area.

Speaker 1 When the great Carthaginian general Hannibal came knocking in the late 3rd century BC during his decades-long campaign in Italy, Pestum didn't switch sides.

Speaker 1 They remained a Roman ally, a wise decision in hindsight, given Rome's ultimate victory in that war.

Speaker 1 Over time, new, noticeably Roman buildings would be built at Pestum, including lavish townhouses and an amphitheater for gladiatorial games.

Speaker 1 It remained an important city under Roman rule, famous for its sweet-smelling roses that flowered twice a year according to the Roman poet Virgil, and its great temples remained in use.

Speaker 1 There was almost certainly for centuries a Greek population that remained at Pestum.

Speaker 1 But Pestum did ultimately decline. More than a millennia later in the Middle Ages, Flooding and climate shifts turned Pestum into a malarial swamp.

Speaker 1 The site was abandoned and its magnificent temples fell into obscurity for centuries, marking the spot of a once mighty city.

Speaker 1 Only in the 18th century was Pestum's story revived. Since then, Pestum and its great temples have continued to inspire.

Speaker 1 From painters and young aristocrats on their grand tours in the Georgian period, to Allied soldiers invading Italy in World War II, to filming the 1963 sword and sandal epic Jason and the Argonauts, to people visiting the site today.

Speaker 17 Peesum is very much a special site today. I mean, the reason why is, I think, partly its visual impact.

Speaker 17 You know, it is in this very low-lying area, and as you approach it from the railway station, or as you pass it on the train, you know, you see this vast plain with these three absolutely magnificent Doric temples, and it is really quite eye-popping.

Speaker 17 Now that it is visible again,

Speaker 17 it is this really very visually striking site, one which gives you a tremendous sense of what these cities were and how important they were.

Speaker 1 When you think of ancient Italy, you naturally think of Rome. But coming to a site like Pestum makes you realize that the Romans didn't live in a vacuum.

Speaker 1 They shared Italy with a huge range of extraordinary cultures. Etruscans, Samnites, Lucanians, and of course, the Greeks.

Speaker 1 And Pestum is the greatest place where you can see that today.

Speaker 1 Thanks to the amazing work of experts like Catherine and Tiziana, we're still learning more about Pestum and the people who lived in this city.

Speaker 1 We're learning more about the Greeks of Magna Greccia full stop, their interactions with the local peoples, their lasting impacts on the ancient Mediterranean world, their incredible art and architecture that has stood the test of time, epitomized by Pestum's magnificent temples.

Speaker 1 I'll end this episode with a poem, written by Cornish poet Nicholas Michel almost 200 years ago, after he visited Pestum and laid eyes on its majestic ruins.

Speaker 20 But Pestum's giant temples, lift thine eyes, in all their stern and columned grandeur rise. Pause, traveller, pause.
Say, doth not wonder thrill thy creeping veins and o'er thy bosom fill?

Speaker 20 Wrestling with time, the hoary brethren stand, superbly graceful and severely grand. Their style of rival countries seems to speak, in strength Egyptian, and in beauty Greek.

Speaker 20 Built ere Minerva's shrine on Athens gazed, or by wild Tiber Rome's rude walls were raised, Three thousand years these structures fail to bow, Massive when Christ was born, and massive now.

Speaker 20 Gaze Gaze on the architrave's majestic length, the deep-ranged fluted pillars, titan strength, the low wide pediment, the strong-walled cell, where altars burned, and gods were wont to dwell.

Speaker 20 And say no more, in poor and narrow pride, Art lives to-day, but rather art hath died. Confess that taste beholds on pestum's plain, what modern skill might strive to match in vain.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening to this special Ancients episode all about the ancient wonder that is Pestum.

Speaker 1 Hopefully this has inspired you to add the site to your ancient history sites buckets list, and you won't be disappointed.

Speaker 1 If you want to see all the things we've talked about and so much more, then do go and check out my latest documentary on History Hit, which explores the story of this city and its people, from its Greek beginnings to its final takeover by the Romans.

Speaker 1 We'll put a link to the documentary in the show notes. Thank you once again for listening.

Speaker 1 If you enjoyed this special episode, please remember to follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Now that really helps us, and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 1 If you'd also be kind enough to to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that.

Speaker 1 Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my new documentary on Pestum, with a new release every week.

Speaker 1 Simply sign up at historyhit.com/slash subscribe. That's all from me.
I'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker 2 Hi, folks. It's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

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