Paestum

Strabo has the city founded as Poseidonia, named for the Greek god of the sea, by Achaeans from Sybaris, who first built fortifications close to the shore and then chose to found the city farther inland on higher ground. Solinus instead calls Paestum a Dorian colony, and Aristotle's account of Troezenians expelled from Sybaris has been used to argue for a Troezenian foundation. Ancient sources give no date for the founding: the archaeological evidence points to about 600 BC, although a necropolis found just outside the walls in 1969, holding nothing but Corinthian vases, has been read as showing the polis already alive around 625 BC.

The richest period ran from about 560 to 440 BC. When Croton destroyed Sybaris in 510 BC, Poseidonia is presumed to have taken in refugees from its mother city, and its coins adopted the Achaean weight standard and the bull of the Sybarite issues in the early fifth century. The three Doric temples belong to these years: the first temple of Hera from about 550 BC, the temple of Athena from about 500 BC, and the second temple of Hera from about 460 to 450 BC.

The Lucanians took the city between 420 and 410 BC and renamed it Paistom. Strabo records the conquest, but nothing is known of the fighting, and the takeover was probably gradual, Italic people entering the life of a Greek city until they held political power in it. The archaeological evidence suggests Greek and Oscan cultures were then able to thrive alongside one another: painted pottery went on being made, some of it signed by Assteas, Python and the Painter of Aphrodite, and the frescoed tombs of these years are full of horses and horse-racing, a passion of the Lucanian elites. In 332 BC Alexander the Molossian, king of Epirus, who had come to Italy at the request of Taranto against the Bruttii and the Lucanians, reached Paistom after retaking Heraclea, Thurii and Cosentia, beat the Lucanians there and forced hostages from them; he was killed in battle near Pandosia in 331 BC, and the city returned to Lucanian rule.

Rome took Paistom from the Lucanian confederation in 273 BC, in the aftermath of the Pyrrhic War, in which the Graeco-Italian Poseidonians had sided with Pyrrhus of Epirus against the Republic; a colony of Latin right was settled and the city renamed Paestum. Paestum stayed loyal in the Second Punic War: after Cannae it offered Rome all the gold paterae kept in its temples, an offer Rome declined, though it did not refuse the grain ships by which the Romans besieged by Hannibal inside Taranto were able to hold out. In reward for that loyalty Paestum was allowed to strike its own bronze coinage, marked P. S. S. C. for Paesti Signatum Senatus Consulto; a senatorial decree of about 89 BC left it alone among the smaller Italian mints free to go on striking bronze, and the issues run down to the reign of Tiberius.

The forum replaced the agora and cut into the southern sanctuary, while the Via Appia and the Via Popilia, driven inland, left the city off the great trade routes. Virgil, in Book IV of the Georgics written around 29 BC, knew the place for roses that bloomed twice a year. Martyrdoms are recorded under Diocletian; in 370 a man of Paestum named Gavinius brought the body of the apostle Matthew to the city, later moved on to Capaccio Vecchio and finally to Salerno; and Paestum became a bishopric around 400.

Strabo already reported that a river running close by made Paestum unhealthy, spreading out until it made a marsh. The town shrank back towards its high ground around the temple of Athena, long miscalled the temple of Ceres, which was turned into a church. Paestum was abandoned in the eighth or ninth century, the remaining people moving to the cliff-top settlement at Agropoli by one account and by another to the springs of the Salso, the Caput Aquae from which Capaccio takes its name; malaria and Saracen raiding are given as the reasons in both. In the eleventh century the ruins were quarried, Robert Guiscard, who died in 1085, taking stone and sculpture for Salerno Cathedral, and the bishopric was suppressed in 1100.

Pietro Summonte mentioned the site in 1524 and correctly identified the three Doric temples for what they were, but the ruins came to wide notice only in the eighteenth century, after the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum and during the building of a new coastal road south from Naples. Savants of that century doubted the buildings had been temples at all, and Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi, the founder of the modern study of Magna Graecia, held them to be Etruscan and derived the name Poseidonia from an invented Phoenician sea deity. Winckelmann came in May 1758 and the temples proved decisive for his reading of Greek art as the origin of Western art; the first modern published account was G. P. M. Dumont's Les Ruines de Paestum of 1764; Piranesi's etchings appeared in 1778; and Goethe stood among the temples on 24 March 1787.

Excavation lagged far behind the fame: a bank of travertine laid down by the calcareous waters of the Salso covered everything and had persuaded scholars that nothing beyond the temples survived, and digging began only once that crust was recognised as a recent formation. Investigations led by Spinazzola worked the area of the Basilica towards the forum between 1907 and 1914, and between 1925 and 1938 the forum was finished, the comitium and the amphitheatre identified and the circuit walls excavated, in part restored on questionable principles. Systematic work followed the Second World War, with the votive deposits beside the temples recovered in the 1950s and the underground shrine found in July 1954. Of the thousands of Greek tombs known from roughly 700 to 400 BC, only one has been found decorated with frescoes of human subjects. That tomb, the Tomb of the Diver, came to light on 3 June 1968 in a small necropolis about 1.5 km south of the walls, in the systematic clearance of the city's cemeteries from the late 1960s.

On 9 September 1943 the beaches at Paestum were the landing ground of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division in the Allied invasion of Italy. German forces resisted from the outset and the fighting was heavy in and around the town, lasting nine days before the Germans withdrew to the north. The Allies set up their Red Cross first aid tents in and around the temples, which both sides regarded as "off limits" to bombing. The Gaudo necropolis, about a kilometre from the site, was found by chance during the US Army landing at Salerno, in the work of laying an airstrip.

Paestum has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998. The temple area was restored between 2003 and 2013. In June 2019, during work to secure the circuit walls, a fourth temple was found by accident, dated to the first quarter of the fifth century BC, and in 2024 the Ministry of Culture announced that two Doric temples had been uncovered at the site. The site is open to the public and holds a national museum, whose collection includes the Tomb of the Diver frescoes and the metopes from the sanctuary of Hera at the mouth of the Sele; it recorded over 216,000 visitors in 2021.