Temple of Neptune
About
Six Doric columns anchor each short end of this temple, raised around 450 BCE from local travertine and ranked among the best-preserved Greek buildings on earth. Its interior colonnade rises in two stacked tiers, carrying the roof without a single central support. Eighteenth-century excavators who uncovered the ruins mistook them for a shrine to Neptune, and the name never left. By 117 CE it had already stood watch over the coastal plain for more than five centuries.
What happened here
The building itself is a house for the god, and most people never go inside. Everything public happens on the steps and at the altar in front: an animal led up, examined, killed cleanly, its organs read, the meat divided and eaten. The priest covers his head and a flute player keeps up a noise so no ill-omened word is heard. Worshippers leave what they can afford — a terracotta figure, a coin, a model of the body part they want healed — and the accumulated clutter is periodically cleared and buried on site. On festival days the doors are opened and the cult statue is dressed, garlanded, and sometimes carried out through the streets. The temple also holds money, which is why towns keep their treasury in one.
In ancient writing
- Strabo, Geography 6.1.1
Places Poseidonia (Paestum) near the mouth of the Silarus river, noting the nearby sanctuary of Argive Hera and the city's founding by colonists from Sybaris. Describes the city's setting rather than this specific temple.
Sources
Nearby
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