11: More Ruins

Viale di Villa Pamphili, May 25, 2015

I  WROTE THE OTHER day about the Roman ruins out at Ostia Antica — what must have been quite a big seaport town a couple of thousand years ago. As I noted, I have a fondness for ruins, which resonate with my innate melancholy.

Ten days ago — it seems longer — we visited Metaponto, now a sleepy beach community on the instep of the Italian boot, but in its day a similarly important Greek seaport. In those days, before the rise of the Roman republic, Magna Graecia — “greater Greece” — extended well beyond the present-day Greek peninsula and islands; it included much of coastal Sicily and Italy. Five years ago we visited the imposing ruins at Paestum, an hour or so south of Naples, again on the coast — I wrote about that visit here. Metaponto was perhaps a similar outpost, possibly not as extensive.

I don’t know anything about ancient history, and it’s too late for me to take it up now with any degree of seriousness. This doesn’t keep me from meditating, and speculating. These Greek settlements sprang up on the coasts, of course, because the first Greek visitors came by boat, hugging shorelines when possible for any number of reasons.

The earliest colonizing must have been closest to present-day Greece, on the heel of the Italian peninsula. A couple of days after visiting Metaponto we touched another site, Egnazia, again a seaport. The Greeks apparently never settled very far inland on the Italian peninsula, though they must have profited from mining that went on in the mountains. (The Apennines extend along the length of Italy as far south as Basilicata, which reaches the instep.)

Were those early Greek settlers of the Italian peninsula anything like the English colonists in New England, I wonder, and were the local Italic people anything like the Mohicans and the Iriquois? I doubt it. The Greeks certainly had an evolved culture, society, and technology; but I think their “values” must have been closer to those intrinsic to Italy than the Pilgrims’ were to the native Americans. I don’t know how uneasily the Greek within the coastal cities they built, but I doubt that they were raided from the interior. I don’t know how they treated the locals who kept to the interior, but they seem not to have the organization or the desire to enslave them. But I could be dead wrong about all this.

We first visited the ruins at Metaponto about sunset, after the gates to the archaeological park had been locked, and we were disappointed, though we enjoyed the light, the romantic twilight of both the day and the Greek civilization. Next morning the park was open and we walked freely among the exposed ruins. It’s a curious place, still a project of active archaeology though at a very slow pace dictated, I suppose, by governmental money.

Apart from the site itself there isn’t a lot to see. A part of the theater has been reconstructed, and a viewing platform allows a modest aerial view from what may have been the height of the highest seats. Part of the façade of one temple has been reconstructed in a curious way, omitting the height of its columns, bringing the lintel (which must have been sixteen or twenty feet above ground level) down to eye level.

We walked around the site in the morning light, looking at the ground-plans of the temples, at the alignments of what must have been streets, and enjoying the brekkek kekkek of the frogs. We’d been to the small but very interesting museum on site the previous day, where among the sculpture, the ceramics, and the suppositions of the wall-labels I was particularly moved by a pair of dividers, two bronze pointed legs hinged together.

Pythagorus is said to have spent his last years in retirement here; perhaps this instrument was used by a follower. A curious aspect of the ruins is that at least one temple was clearly laid out slightly out of alignment with other, later ones. I didn’t think to check my own compass; my impression is that the temples are generally east-west in position. The surviving grids here, as elsewhere — certainly in Paestum — suggest architects and town-planners greatly concerned with proportion and ratio: they intuited, I’m sure, that an orderly town plan contributes to an orderly civil mentality, something our own developers don’t seem overly concerned about.

But where were the fifteen columns still remaining from the Temple of Hera, so prominently displayed in the museum in a series of enlarged engravings and photographs demonstrating the history of archaeological tourism? Nowhere in sight. We walked in some disappointment and confusion back to our car, to find another had just parked next to it. Its driver turned out to be a German-born Canadian, touring such ruins with his wife — they’d just driven all the way from Messina.

We had a nice long conversation, and he explained that the Temple of Hera was a mile or two away, invisible from this site but not from the highway leading to Taranto. We thanked him and drove out to see it. It too stands completely unprotected on its hilltop — fenced off from adjacent farmland, it’s true, but vulnerable, I’d think, to the vagaries of mischievous visitors. An explanatory panel somewhere suggested the site was important in its day as marking the border of the Greek-dominated coastal area, on a road which even then traced the route of the present highway. From this hilltop you look inland toward the mountains, across fields which three thousand years ago yielded crops of wheat and barley.

It’s a melancholy site now, and must have been rather enigmatic even in its day. It reminded me of another such site, Segesta, in Sicily, where a temple and amphitheater look out over coastal farmland much like this. What were the means, I wonder, by which these architects and builders knew of one another, carried the codified plans of these temples, ordered up the stone and scaffolding they needed. How was their society ordered, and how did hoi polloi feel about that ordering.

WE LINGERED QUIETLY a half hour or so, enjoying these musings, the warm air, the scent of eucalyptus and sea air; and then we drove north to Matera, subject of another dispatch. A day or two later we were on the east-facing coast at Egnazia, an unpleasant modern form of the no more pleasant Greek name Gnathia (the word apparently means “Jaw”, and drives from the two points or moles extending into the Adriatic to contain the ancient port). Had we more time I’d have lingered here too, a day or two or three, to investigate; but at present the site seems to be once again abandoned, overgrown, a large expanse of walled-in grassland bordered by endless grove of enormous, ancient olive trees.

A relatively small area is open for a stroller’s inspection, but it is not Greek: it’s the Roman necropolis, the area of tombs developed apart, I suppose, from the residential and commercial areas of the city that once was here. The tombs were all raided years ago, of course; their stone ceilings have, most of them, round openings broken through, just big enough for a small man to drop through, with a lamp no doubt, and hand up whatever vases and other objects he can readily lay his hands on.

A few of the tombs can actually be entered now, thanks to steel staircases thoughtfully provided. They are empty, of course; but there are still traces of paint on the stone walls, and niches where vases containing ashes had been placed. You can just stand erect in these tombs, and your head is six feet at least below grade; but light comes in through openings here and there, revealing the sandy beige of the local stone, and the green of moss and lichen where there is moisture.

A relatively small area is open for a stroller’s inspection, but it is not Greek: it’s the Roman necropolis, the area of tombs developed apart, I suppose, from the residential and commercial areas of the city that once was here. The tombs were all raided years ago, of course; their stone ceilings have, most of them, round openings broken through, just big enough for a small man to drop through, with a lamp no doubt, and hand up whatever vases and other objects he can readily lay his hands on.

A few of the tombs can actually be entered now, thanks to steel staircases thoughtfully provided. They are empty, of course; but there are still traces of paint on the stone walls, and niches where vases containing ashes had been placed. You can just stand erect in these tombs, and your head is six feet at least below grade; but light comes in through openings here and there, revealing the sandy beige of the local stone, and the green of moss and lichen where there is moisture.

You can only — I mean, I can only deal with so much melancholy. I like the musings these visits encourage; I like the idea that certain human values, certain ways of living daily life, cotinue unbroken from the seaports of three thousand years ago to the corporate fattorie of our own time. But it’s time, now, to move from Pythagoras to the present.