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Selinunte 160 pictures The ancient Selinus in the island of Sicily represented the westernmost point of the epic and transformative Greek colonizing mission which expanded throughout the Mediterranean from the shores of Egypt and the interior regions of Greece. This huge city was the last to be founded, in that period of time which, in the space of little more than 150 years, saw the rise of so many splendid cities, centers of Hellenic civilization on the island, and imperishable witnesses to the political, cultural and religious presence of ancient Greece. Apart from the territories dominated by the Selinuntians, the whole western part of the island was under political, commercial and military control of the Phoenicians. Their might was expressed by the power of the city of Carthage founded almost a century earlier by Phoenician colonists from Tyre on the coast what is now Tunisia (its foundation is dated by the classical sources to 814-13 B.C.). The Phoenicians, able seafarers and traders, had long frequented the coasts of western Sicily, almost in rivalry with the Greeks who had landed on the eastern coasts of the island and established their first settlements there. Having previously established trading emporia, the Phoenicians later founded proper towns, such as Motya, on the little island of San Pantaleo off the coast of Marsala, and, on the Tyrrhenian coast to the north of the island, Panorma, the present-day Palermo, and Solunto, in the period between the 8^th and 7^th century B.C. Also settled in the western part of the island was a native population, the Elymi. According to Thucydides, they were in origin refugees from the fall of Troy. In fact he writes: "On the fall of Ilium, some of the Trojans escaped from the Achaeans, came in ships to Sicily, and settled next to the Sicacian under the general name of Elymi; their towns being called Eryx and Segesta. With them settled some of the Phocians carried on their way from Troy by a storm, first to Libya, and afterwards from thence to Sicily" (VI. 2). We know from Diodorus that Selinus was founded by the Megarians in 651-50 B.C., and represented the Greek Doric city that was in direct contact with the territories in which the Phoenicio-Punic element predominated. This geographic position of Selinus, and the power it acquired, made it a leading protagonist in the history of ancient Sicily. Even though the Greek element never predominated in the western territories, the influence it nonetheless exerted on the culture of the Punic and Elymian peoples was enormous, especially in the field of architecture. This has been corroborated by the excavations of ancient Segesta. The temple which dominated this ancient Elymian town, standing in splendid isolation on the top of the hill, is intrinsically Doric in style, though it may be doubted whether it served for celebrations of essentially Greek rites: the inhabitants chose to erect their temple in the Doric style in recognition of the beauty of this particular form of architecture which Greeks had brought to the island. The date of the foundation of Selinus, following recent archaeological exploration and detailed research, is now commonly accepted as being the one handed down by Diodorus, who fixed the year of the birth of the city in 650-651 B.C. This is in contrast with the version handed down by Thucydides, who dates the foundation of the colony to 629-628 B.C. The name that the colonists gave to the new city had derived from the corresponding Greek word for the wild parsley (Greek selinos) which still grows abundantly in the area and whose leaves are reproduced as a device on the first coins minted by the city. Temple E The temple was dedicated to the goddess Hera, Juno of the Romans. The original building was a Doric peripheral temple, with six columns in front and fifteen on the sides. It was built in the first half of the 5^th century B.C., very probably on the site of an even more ancient construction. The cella, which is preceded by a pronaos, was decorated with metopes with mythological scenes, some of which are now on show in the archaeological museum of Palermo. Inside the temple, the square pedestal that supported the statue of the goddess was found in front of the end wall of the cella. The Metopes of Temple E Temple F The smallest of the three, dates from the middle of the 6^th century B.C. and is surrounded by a peristyle with six columns at the ends and fourteen on each side. Inside was the cella with the pronaos and a further enclosed space. Temple G This temple is one of the most colossal religious buildings of the Greek world as a whole. It stood on the northernmost area of the sacred hill, and was surrounded by an enclosure which also comprised Temples F and E. There are two examples of columns that belonged to it, one fluted, and the other monolithic: they attest to the prolonged period of the temple's construction, which began in the 6^th century B.C. and perhaps had not yet been completed by the time Hannibal sacked ancient Selinunte in 409 B.C. The Wall A strech of the cyclopean retaining wall to the east of the city made necessary by the enlargement of the Acropolis, it also served as a defensive curtain. This formidable stepped rampart where one of the access gates to the Acropolis is thought to have been formerly situated, was reinforced on the outside by a second line of wall, of which considerable stretches are preserved. The Fortifications The Acropolis and the ancient city of Selinus were fortified by a defensive circuit of walls, which represents a notable example of military Hellenistic architecture. Northern Fortifications (The stone staircase to the battlements and gate XVIII) The northern battlements were accessible by a large stone staircase and the upper level of gate XVIII, which also provided a connection to the upper level of the great gallery. The study of the wedge-shaped elements, which were parts of the banister of the staircase, and the architectural elements of gate XVIII show that the height of the battlements was the same as the reconstructed upper level of the great gallery. Temple C The oldest temple on the Acropolis. It belongs, as its structure suggests, to the Archaic Doric period (6^th century B.C.), and was perhaps dedicated to Apollo. It has a peripteral structure with six frontal columns. Some of its columns and part of its entablature were restored to their places in relatively recent times. Temple D The lay-out of the second great peripteral temple on the Acropolis may be explained as a reaction to the early-archaic plan of temple C that matured under the influence of new ideas that came from the Greek motherland. The excessive archaic length is drastically reduced with only 13 columns being placed on the long sides. At the same time the ratio of the interaxes is inverted so that now they are larger at the sides than on the facades. But most important, the second colonnade of the eastern side is eliminated. This side seems rather to melt into the facade of the cella itself thanks to the contrivance that not only places the two columns between the heads of the walls of the pronaos but the formation of the antae themselves in the shape of 3/4 columns, which makes them appear, together with the two central columns, as a real prostyle tetrastyle colonnaded. Thus the facade of the cella itself is rather special while the spatial ratios of the reminder, both of the inside of the cella and the peristatis, are unchanged. The modernity of this new solution is particularly evident from the comparison with temple F of the eastern hill, where the second colonnade is obviously too close to the front of the cella. Back to Sicily Index