Almost Greek: The temple at Segesta

by Robert Veel

(Updated 01.01.2023 to reflect the authorship of Robert Veel)

One of the most memorable sites in Sicily is the sublimely sited temple at Segesta in western Sicily, midway between Palermo and the port city Marsala. Built in the late fifth century BCE, it has inspired generations of travellers. That towering figure of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, waxed lyrical in his 1788 Italian Journey:

“The position of the temple is amazing: at the top of a wide and long valley, at the top of an isolated hill and yet surrounded by cliffs, it dominates a vast prospect of lands.”

Most travellers, knowing a little of Sicily’s history and of classical architecture, would pigeonhole Segesta as a Greek temple. After all, it has all the hallmarks of a Greek temple – siting, architectural refinement, and plenty of evidence for its religious function. Yet it is not a Greek temple, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.

Segesta was a principal city of the Elymians, a people who occupied strategic locations in western Sicily before either the Greeks or their rivals the Carthaginians arrived and began their centuries-long struggle for domination of Sicily. Like other groups moving about the Mediterranean at the time, they were traders, receptive to other cultures and ready to adopt and adapt whatever they saw and liked. It seems they were favourably impressed by aspects of Greek culture and their civilization became ‘Hellenised’.

But just because Segesta looks like a Greek site, it doesn’t mean that the Elymians always got along with the Greeks. In fact in Sicily’s ancient history the Elymians are a byword for treachery, having changed sides repeatedly as the Greeks and Carthaginians waged war. This culminated in 307 BCE when the Greek tyrant of Syracuse, Agathocles, reportedly disposed of 8,000 Elymian boys and men by hurling them off the ravine just behind the temple, a punishment for having sided with the Carthaginians a year earlier.

While Segesta’s Greek-style theatre may never have been finished, the Punic Wars were soon to change the power dynamics of the island irrevocably. The Phoenicians and Greeks, along with indigenous groups such as the Elymians, Sicels and Sicanians, would fall before the rise of a new power, Rome. Over the ensuing centuries, Segesta became an inexorable part of the agricultural landscape that surrounded it, unloved until eighteenth-century Grand Tourers such as Goethe would be entranced by it once more.

Thomas Cole’s nineteenth-century painting of the scene is a good indication of the attributes that appealed to Romantic eyes, from the grand circuit of mountains that characterises Sicily’s west coast, to the soft qualities of the light and the incongruity of a superlative Greek temple standing in a deserted, green landscape. The temple, seen by Cole too in its perfect original proportions, designed to marry with the hillside that forms its backdrop, remains one of Sicily’s most evocative sites. It is the perfect place to appreciate and understand Sicily’s millennial role as a crossroads for Mediterranean power-brokers.

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May 2024

Discover the delights of Sicily beyond the big cities and beyond the tourist crowds. Explore less-visited archaeological and artistic sites while based in beautiful coastal and rural locations.