Temple of Hera in Selinunte, Sicily - built a good 100 years earlier than the Pantheon in Athens and with 6 Doric front column almost as large
Before sailing along Sicily's south coast in summer 2020, my idea of Ancient Greece dated back to my High School years in Zurich. Athens and Sparta were at the center, allied with powerful city states on the Aegean Sea and colonies in the West and the North. The Greek world may not have been like this. Walking around the ruins of Selinunte (picture above), Agrigento and Syracuse made me think. Their perimeters were larger than Athens' their theatres easily rival the ones in mainland Greece and their temples are of the same size or larger than the Parthenon in Athens but built 50 to 100 years earlier.
Temple of Concordia in Agrigento - built at the same time as the Parthenon around 440 BC
Was the center of the Hellenistic World further to the West than I thought? The Greek towns in Sicily, Calabria and Puglia started as colonies in the 7th and 8th century BC but became as powerful, rich and influential as Athens, Corinth or Smyrna. Was this the same story as with Carthage which built the Punic Empire in North Africa and Spain whilst Tyre, its parent town, lost its independence? The Greek towns in Italy were at the center of large agricultural operations and could invest the agricultural surplus in big building projects, religious centres, armies and navies. The Greek parent towns were in a less comfortable situation. They created colonies in the first place to deal with the labour surplus they had and to import wheat!
The large town of Syracuse with its superb harbour and easy access to inland Sicily.
Maybe it was no accident either that Pythagoras taught in Syracuse and not in Athens. Maybe my idea of Athens as the intellectual center of gravity of the Hellenistic world was a wrong perception and the Greek culture far more distributed?
Do not really have an answer to all these questions but they are worth finding out. For 2021 we thus make a little detour from our Genovese trading routes and devote some extra time to this question busy following the coast lines of Sicily, Calabria and Puglia instead of sailing straight from Syracuse to the Aegean island under Genovese control (Chios, Samos and Lemnos)
Sailing Route 2021 starting in Carthage which we could not visit this year and then following the coast line of Magna Graecia to Athens.
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