PÆSTUM, or POSIDONIA, an ancient city of Lucania, was situated near the shore of the Pæstanus Sinus (Gulf of Salerno), about 5 miles S.E. from the mouth of the Silarus (Sele). The facts of its primitive history are very few. A colony of Greeks from Sybaris were probably its founders; it was originally called Posidonia ("the city of Poseidon or Neptune"); the magnificent remains of Grecian architecture that are still seen on its site indicate that it rose under its first inhabitants to opulence and splendour; and we infer that it passed, along with the neighbouring colonies, into the power of the Lucanians, and afterwards into that of the Romans. Not much greater is the historical importance of Pæstum during the period which followed its subjugation to Rome. During the second Punic war it had become one of the Colonia Latinae; in the time of Strabo the stagnation of a rivulet that flowed past the walls had rendered the inhabitants unhealthy; during the period between the fifth and tenth centuries the town is noticed by ecclesiastical historians as the seat of a bishopric; and immediately afterwards it fell into ruin and desolation under the devastations of the Saracens. It was not until the eighteenth century that Pæstum attained its chief celebrity on account of its splendid architectural remains. These stand on a level uninhabited plain by the sea-shore, and are described by the mariner from afar as he sails across the Gulf of Salerno. The principal structures are two hexastyle peripteral buildings, which, with the exception of the temple of Corinth, are considered to be the most severe and massive specimens of Doric architecture now extant. The finer and older of the two, which is known
by the name of the temple of Neptune, is hypæthral or open to the sky, and occupies a space of 180 feet long by 80 wide. The other, differently called the temple of Vesta and of Ceres, is 108 feet in length by 48 in breadth. There is also another edifice which is supposed to have been a basilica. The remaining vestiges of the city consist of the ruins of an amphitheatre, many private houses, the walls and the gates, interspersed occasionally with the famous Pæstan roses, which were celebrated by Ovid, Virgil, and other Latin poets, and which still, in their wild state, flower twice a year, and shed a surpassing fragrance. (Swinburne's Travels into the Two Sicilies in 1777-78-79-80, in 2 vols. 4to, London, 1783-85; and Wilkins' Magna Græcia, fol., Cambridge, 1807.)