When the president Dupaty first beheld PÆstum, he expressed his admiration in the following manner:—“No; I am not at PÆstum, in a city of the Sybarites! Never did the Sybarites choose for their habitation so horrible a desert; never did they build a city in the midst of weeds, on a parched soil, on a spot where the little water to be met with is stagnant and dirty. Lead me to one of those groves of roses, which still bloom in the poetry of Virgil.102 Show me some baths of alabaster; some palaces of marble; show me on all sides voluptuousness, and you will indeed make me believe I am at PÆstum. It is true, nevertheless, that it was the Sybarites who built these three temples, in one of which I write this letter, seated on the ruins of a pediment, which has withstood the ravages of two thousand years. How strange! Sybarites and works that have endured two thousand years! How could Sybarites imagine and erect so prodigious a number of columns of such vile materials, of such uncouth workmanship, of so heavy a mass, and such a sameness of form? It is not the character of Grecian columns to crush the earth; they lightly mounted into the air; these, on the contrary, weigh ponderously on the earth; they fall. The Grecian columns had an elegant and slender shape, around which the eye continually glided; these have a wide and clumsy form, around which it is impossible for the eye to turn: our pencils and our graving-tools, which flatter every monument, have endeavoured in vain to beautify them. I am of the opinion of those, who think that these temples were the earliest essays of the Grecian architecture, and not its master-pieces. The Greeks, when they erected these pillars, were searching for the column. It must be admitted, however, that, notwithstanding their rusticity, these temples do possess beauties; they present at least simplicity, unity, and a whole, which constitute the first of beauties: the imagination may supply almost all the others, but it never can supply these. It is impossible to visit these places without emotion. I proceed across desert fields, along a frightful road, far from all human traces, at the foot of rugged mountains, on shores where there is nothing but the sea; and suddenly I behold a temple, then a second, then a third: I make my way through grass and weeds; I mount on the socle of a column, or on the ruins of a pediment: a cloud of ravens take their flight; cows low in the bottom of a sanctuary; the adder, basking between the column and the weeds, hisses and makes his escape; a young shepherd, however, carelessly leaning on an ancient cornice, stands serenading with his reedy pipe the vast silence of this desert.” Such was the language of Dupaty, when he entered these celebrated ruins; nor was his enthusiasm in any way misplaced.

PÆstum was a town of Lucania, called by the Greeks Posidonia and Neptunia, from its being situated in the bay. It was then called Sinus PÆstanus; now the Gulf of Salerno.

Obscurity hangs not only over the origin, but over the general history of this city. The mere outlines have been sketched, perhaps, with accuracy; but the details are, doubtless, obliterated for ever.

In scenery PÆstum yields not only to BaiÆ, but to many other towns in the vicinity of Vesuvius; yet, in noble and well-preserved monuments of antiquity, it surpasses any city in Italy; the immortal capital alone excepted.

The origin of the city may be safely referred to remote antiquity; but those are probably in the right, who would fix the period at which the existing temples were erected, as a little posterior to the building of the Parthenon at Athens. But even this calculation leaves them the venerable age of twenty-two centuries; and so firm and strong are they still, that, except in the case of extraordinary convulsions of nature, two thousand two hundred and many more years may pass over their mighty columns and architraves, and they remain, as they now are,—the object of the world’s admiration.

Whatever age we may ascribe to the temples, certain it is that the city cannot be less than two thousand five hundred years old.

It was founded by a colony of the Dorians, who called it Posetan; a Phoenician name for the God of the Sea, to whom it was dedicated. Those settlers were driven out by the Sybarites, who extended the name to Posidonia. The Sybarites were expelled by the Lucanians; and these, in turn, were expelled by the Romans, who took possession of it (A.C. 480). From this time the poets alone are found to speak of it. It was, nevertheless, the first city of Southern Italy, that embraced the Christian doctrine. In 840, the Saracens, having subdued Sicily, surprised the city, and took possession. The question now arises, to whom was PÆsium indebted for its temples? To this it has been answered, that, as the ruins seem to exhibit the oldest specimens of Greek architecture now in existence, the probability is, that they were erected by the Dorians.

“In beholding them,” says Mr. Eustace, “and contemplating their solidity, bordering upon heaviness, we are tempted to consider them as an intermediate link between the Egyptian and Grecian monuments; and the first attempt to pass from the immense masses of the former, to the graceful proportions of the latter.”

“On entering the walls,” says Mr. Forsyth, “I felt the religion of the place. I stood as on sacred ground. I stood amazed at the long obscurity of its mighty ruins. They can be descried with a glass from Salerno; the high road of Calabria commands a distant view; the city of Capaccio looks down upon them, and a few wretches have always lived on the spot; yet they remain unnoticed by the best Neapolitan antiquaries.”

The first temple103 that presents itself, to the traveller from Naples, is the smallest. It consists of six pillars at each end, and thirteen on each side. The cella occupied more than one-third of the length, and had a portico of two rows of columns, the shafts and capitals of which, now overgrown with grass and weeds, encumber the pavement, and almost fill the area of the temple:—

The columns of this temple are thick in proportion to their elevation, and much closer to each other than they are generally found to be in Greek temples; “and this,” says Mr. Forsyth, “crowds them advantageously on the eye, enlarges our idea of the space, and gives a grand and heroic air to a monument of very moderate dimensions.”

In the open space104 between the first and second temples, were two other large buildings, built of the same sort of stone, and nearly of the same size. Their substructions still remain, encumbered with fragments of the columns of the entablatures; and so overgrown with brambles, nettles, and weeds, as scarcely to admit a near inspection.

The second105, or the Temple of Neptune, is not the largest, but by far the most massy and imposing of the three: it has six columns in front and fourteen in length; the angular column to the west, with its capital, has been struck and partially shivered by lightning. It once threatened to fall and ruin the symmetry of one of the most perfect monuments now in existence, but it has been secured by iron cramps. An inner peristyle of much smaller columns rises in the cella, in two stories, with only an architrave, which has neither frieze nor cornice between the columns, which thus almost seem standing, the one on the capital of the other—a defect in architecture, which is, however, justified by Vitruvius and the example of the Parthenon. The light pillars of this interior peristyle, of which some have fallen, rise a few feet above the exterior cornice and the massy columns of the temple. Whether you gaze at this wonderful edifice from without or from within, as you stand on the floor of the cella, which is much encumbered with heaps of fallen stones and rubbish, the effect is awfully grand. The utter solitude, and the silence, never broken save by the flight and screams of the crows and birds of prey, which, your approach may scare from the cornices and architraves, where they roost in great numbers, add to the solemn impression, produced by those firm-set and eternal-looking columns.

The third edifice is the largest106. It has nine pillars at the end and eighteen on the sides. Its size is not its only distinction; a row of pillars, extending from the middle pillar at one end to the middle pillar on the other, divides it into equal parts, and it is considered that though it is now called a temple, it was not one originally. Some imagine it to have been a Curia, others a Basilica, and others an Exchange.

These relics stand on the edge of a vast and desolate plain107, that extends from the neighbourhood of Salerno nearly to the confines of Calabria. The approach to them is exceedingly impressive. For miles scarcely a human habitation is seen, or any living creature, save herds of buffaloes. And when you are within the lines of the ancient walls of the town—of the once opulent and magnificent PÆstum—only a miserable little taverna, or house of entertainment, a barn, and a mean modern edifice, belonging to the nominal bishop of the place, and nearly always uninhabited, meet your eye. But there the three ancient edifices rise before you in the most imposing and sublime manner—they can hardly be called ruins, they have still such a character of firmness and entireness. Their columns seem to be rooted in the earth, or to have grown from it!

“Accustomed as we were108 to the ancient and modern magnificence of Rome,” says Stuart, “in regard to the Parthenon, and, by what we had heard and read, impressed with an advantageous opinion of what we were to see, we found the image our fancy had preconceived greatly inferior to the real object.” Yet Wheler, who upon such a subject cannot be considered as of equal authority with Stuart, says of the monuments of antiquity yet remaining at Athens,—“I dare prefer them before any place in the world, Rome only excepted.” “If,” continues Dr. Clarke, “there be upon earth any buildings, which may be fairly brought into a comparison with the Parthenon, they are the temples of PÆstum in Lucania. But even these can only be so with reference to their superior antiquity, to their severe simplicity, and to the perfection of design visible in their structure. In graceful proportion, in magnificence, in costliness of materials, in splendid decoration, and in every thing that may denote the highest degree of improvement to which the Doric style of architecture ever attained, they are vastly inferior.” This is, at least, that author’s opinion. Lusieri, however, entertained different sentiments. Lusieri had resided at PÆstum; and had dedicated to those buildings a degree of study which, added to his knowledge of the arts, well qualified him to decide upon a question as to the relative merits of the Athenian and Posidonian specimens of Grecian architecture. His opinion is very remarkable. He considered the temples at PÆstum as examples of a pure style, or, as he termed it, of a more correct and classical taste. “In these buildings,” said he, “the Doric order attained a pre-eminence beyond which it never passed; not a stone has been there placed without some evident and important design; every part of the structure bespeaks its own essential utility109.”

“Can there be any doubt,” says Mr. Williams, “that in the temple of Neptune at PÆstum, the very forms have something within themselves, calculated to fill the mind with the impression which belongs to the sublime; whilst, in the temple of Theseus (at Athens), the simple preservation of its form bespeaks that species of admiration, that peculiar feeling, which beauty is calculated to draw forth? It required not age to constitute the one sublime, or the other beautiful. In truth, their respective characters must have been much more deeply impressed upon them in their most perfect state, than in the mutilated form in which they now stand; surrounded by the adventitious attributes with which antiquity invests every monument of human art.”

Several medals110 have been found at PÆstum; but they denote a degeneracy from Grecian skill and elegance, being more clumsily designed and executed than most coins of Magna GrÆcia.

The private habitations111 were unable to resist the dilapidations of so many ages; but the town wall is almost entire, and incloses an area of three miles in circumference. In many places it is of the original height, and built with oblong stones, dug out of the adjacent fields. They are a red tavertino, formed by a sediment of sulphureous water, of which a strong stream washes the foot of the walls. It comes from the mountains, and, spreading itself over a flat, forms pools, where buffaloes are in summer continually wallowing up to their noses.

These walls are built of huge polyhedric stones112, which afford some idea of what has been lately thought the Cyclopean construction. Their materials, however, are a grey stone, without any mixture of the marble, granite, and lava, which are held essential to their construction. They are five, at least113, and, in some places, twelve feet high. They are formed of solid blocks of stone, with towers at intervals; the archway of one gate only, however, stands entire. Considering the materials and the extent of this rampart, which incloses a space of nearly four miles round, with the many towers that rose at intervals, and its elevation of more than forty feet, it must be acknowledged that it was, on the whole, a work not only of great strength, but of great magnificence.

The material, of which they are built, is the same throughout each of the temples and common to all. It is an exceedingly hard, but porous and brittle stone, of a sober brownish-grey colour. It is a curious fact, that not only the ignorant people on the spot, but Neapolitan antiquaries also, wonder whence the ancients brought these masses of curious stone: and yet few things are more certain, than that they found them on the spot.

The stone of these edifices114 was probably formed at PÆstum itself, by the brackish water of the Salso acting on vegetable earth, roots, and plants; for you can distinguish their petrified tubes in every column:—and Mr. Macfarlane, who passed a considerable time on the spot, adds, “The brackish water of the river Salso that runs by the wall of the town, and in different branches across the plain, has so strong a petrifying virtue that you can almost follow the operation with the eye. The waters of the neighbouring Sele (a considerable river—the ancient Silarus) have in all ages been remarkable for the same quality. In many places where the soil had been removed, we perceived strata of stone similar to the stones which compose the temples; and I could almost venture to say that the substratum of all the plain, from the Sele to Acropoli, is of the like substance. Curious petrifactions of leaves, pieces of wood, insects, and other vegetable and animal matters, are observed in the materials of columns, walls, &c.”

Taking these wonderful objects into view115, their immemorial antiquity, their astonishing preservation, their grandeur, or rather grandiosity, their bold columnar elevation, at once massive and open, their severe simplicity of design, that simplicity in which art gradually begins, and to which, after a thousand revolutions of ornament, it again returns, taking, says Mr. Forsyth, all into one view, “I do not hesitate to call these the most impressive monuments I ever beheld on earth.”

Within116 those walls, that once encircled a populous and splendid city, now rise one cottage, two farm-houses, a villa, and a church. The remaining space is covered with thick, matted grass, overgrown with brambles, spreading over the ruins, or buried under yellow, undulating corn; a few rose-bushes flourish neglected here and there, and still blossom twice a year;—in May and December. They are remarkable for their fragrance. Amid these objects and scenes, rural and ordinary, rise the three temples, like the mausoleums of the ruined city, dark, silent, and majestic117.