Paestum: Ancient Greeks in Italy

December 18, 2025·55 min·3 clips

The Tomb of the Diver preserves a 5th-century BC Greek wall painting that is almost unmatched anywhere else.

1. The Ancients episode focuses on Pestum, the ancient Greek city in Italy with surviving temples and tomb paintings. 2. Host Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Catherine Lomas, honorary research fellow at Durham University and editor of The World of the Western Greeks, and Dr Tiziana D'Angelo, director of the Archaeological Park of Pestum and Velia. 3. The episode asks why Pestum matters as a site where Greeks, Lucanians, Etruscans, and Romans left visible traces. 4. Catherine Lomas places Pestum on the Gulf of Salerno, about two to three kilometres inland and roughly 10 kilometres south of the River Sele. 5. She says the site had strong maritime links, fertile land, and passes toward the Apennines and the Calabrian mountains. 6. The hosts explain Magna Graecia as the Greek settlements in Italy, while noting that some scholars prefer migration over the label colony. 7. Lomas links those settlements to long-standing Greek-Western Mediterranean contacts reaching back to the Bronze Age. 8. The founding of Pestum is tied to Greeks from Sybaris, who left after civic discord in their home city. 9. The episode says Sybaris was later destroyed by Croton, which diverted a river to flood the city. 10. Pestum then absorbed refugees and grew into a substantial city with harbour links and arable land. 11. The middle of the episode describes Pestum’s urban scale through its walls, gates, agora, hero shrine, and ecclesiasterion. 12. The ecclesiasterion is described as a circular assembly building that may have seated 1,500 to 1,700 people. 13. The speakers estimate a city population in the region of 10,000 to 12,000. 14. The three temples are presented as the city’s defining monuments, built from local limestone between 550 and 450 BC. 15. D'Angelo explains that the Temple of Neptune was likely not dedicated to Poseidon, despite its later name. 16. She says the temple may instead have been dedicated to Hera or Apollo and calls it a mature expression of Doric architecture. 17. The Tomb of the Diver is presented as a 5th-century BC burial discovery made in 1968, with a sealed fresco preserved on the interior lid. 18. D'Angelo says scholars still debate the diver scene, while the surrounding banquet and symposium imagery points to Greek funerary and social practices. 19. The episode becomes more architectural and archaeological than dramatic, with an interview style that moves between site description, interpretation, and museum storage rooms. 20. Listeners interested in Greek Italy, ancient temples, and funerary art will get the most from it, while those wanting fast narrative drama may skip it.

As heard by us

A rare Greek wall painting survives in a sealed tomb, placing Pestum within Italy's ancient crossroads.

Pestum is approached by way of a small trading ship from Athens, which gives the episode a clean route into Greek culture in southern Italy and its contact with stronger neighbours.

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Why you'd press play

You can follow a Greek trading ship up the Italian coast toward Pestum, then step into a tomb where a 2,500-year-old diver still seems suspended above the water.

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