[Illustration: The Temple of Neptune.]
These sublime relics of antiquity stand on the edge of a vast and
desolate plain, that extends from the neighbourhood of the city of
Salerno to the mountains of the Cilento, or nearly to the confines of
Calabria. The approach to them across this wild is exceedingly
impressive. For miles and miles scarcely a human habitation is seen, or
any living creature, save herds of savage-looking buffaloes, that range
the lords of the waste. 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! The first impression produced on the traveller, when he
arrives at the spot, has often been described. Even the critical and
sceptical Forsyth exclaims, “On entering the walls of Pæstum I felt all
the religion of the place--I trod as on sacred ground--I stood amazed at
the long obscurity of its mighty ruins!”
These edifices have been called, rather by caprice or conjecture than
from any good grounds for such names, the Temple of Ceres, the Temple of
Neptune, and the Basilica. That of Ceres, which is the smallest of the
three, first presents itself to the traveller from Naples. It has six
columns in front, and thirteen in length; the columns are thick in
proportion to their elevation, and much closer to each other than they
are generally found to be in Greek Temples, “which,” says Mr. Forsyth,
“crowds them advantageously on the eye, enlarges our idea of the space,
and gives a grand, an heroic air to a monument of very moderate
dimension.”
The second, 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, adds to the solemn
impression produced by those firmset and eternal looking columns.
The third structure, generally called a basilica, but sometimes an
atrium, a curia, a market-place, or an exchange, is the most extensive,
and, in point of architecture, the most curious, It has nine columns in
front, and eighteen in length, and a row of pillars in the middle,
parallel to the sides, which divide the temple, or whatever it may have
been, into two equal parts. The diameter of these columns is somewhat
larger than that of the columns of the first temple, but much smaller
than the diameter of those of the second temple.
All the three structures are in the peculiar style called the Doric.
They are all raised upon substructions forming three gradations or high
steps--the columns without bases repose on the uppermost of these steps:
the columns are not quite five diameters in height, they taper off about
one-fourth as they ascend, they are fluted like all ancient Greek
columns, their capitals are flat and prominent, and their
intercolumniation, or the space from one to the other, little exceeds
one diameter. The material of which they are built is the same
throughout each of the temples and common to them 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 (who, however, rarely travel to see
things with their own eyes) wonder whence the ancients brought these
masses of curious stone. They found them on the spot. “The stone of
these edifices,” says Mr. Forsyth, “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. Mac Farlane, 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 the columns, walls,” &c.
These temples are the only ancient remains of any importance to be found
at Pæstum, except the Cyclopean walls of the city, which are pretty well
preserved on three sides, and only entirely obliterated on the side
towards the sea. On the eastern side, indeed, they have suffered little,
and fragments of towers, which seem to have flanked the walls at regular
distances, yet exist. There is a gate in this part called _La Porta
della Sirena_, or the Syren’s Gate (from a small rudely sculptured
figure that looks like a dolphin, over the arch) which is very perfect,
but mean and small; and here the ancient aqueduct is traced for some
distance.
The origin of the city may safely be referred to remote antiquity; but
those are probably in the right who would fix the period at which the
existing temples were erected as contemporary with, or 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 a
tremendous earthquake or some other extraordinary convulsion 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 objects
of the world’s admiration.
[Illustration: Interior of the Temple of Neptune.]
---------------------