A Deal with Athens

Up the neighboring hill, the temple faces in the direction of the sea–or in the direction of the gods on Mount Olympus... The Sicilians at Segesta agreed to build this greek temple in collaboration with Athens in exchange for Athens taking on another powerful Sicilian town on the opposing coast which was currently threatening Segesta's interests. Between them, Erice and Segesta could control a good third of Sicily, but they needed help from powerful Athens.

To please Athens, the Sicilians started building this temple, starting with the most visually appealing bits–the columns. When Athens challenged Segesta's opposition, they actually lost, so Segesta simply stopped constructing the temple.
This left the temple in an interesting state, which makes it easy for us to identify clues about how temples were constructed. All of the columns were upright, with a connecting frame on the top, but the columns themselves were unfinished, with individual segments of the stack still visible and the long furrows undone. Each segment of a column has a square hole in t he center which allows it to be stacked on a sturdy piece of wood to hold everything together and to provide flexibility during earthquakes. A shallower cut around the base of the column provided a measurement of how deep the fluting should go. A new experimental method placed each column on top of a pad of soft lead–this may contribute to the temple's remarkable stability through earthquakes over the years.

In finished temples, a roof is added to the whole structure and an inner room is constructed at the back for the statue of the god to whom the temple is dedicated and for a vault containing the temple's treasures. This temple at Segesta, unfinished, remained accessible from all sides and open to the elements. Under Roman rule, there would have been funds to finish the temple (when the romans were tolerant of other religions), but the locals preferred the flat and open space of the unfinished temple for their own ceremonies and rituals.

Optical Illusions
The columns themselves are somewhat bulged in the middle to make them appear straight from a distance–which is how the gods view them. The better the temple looked from a distance, the better it looked to the gods...

The base of the temple at the steps is curved to make it appear a perfect rectangle from a distance.

Other notes
This temple is slightly longer than it traditionally should be. It has 14 columns on the long end instead of the 13 it should have with a short end of 6. Most temples have dimensions of X by (2X+1) columns.

The steps are unfinished–some blocks are missing because construction stopped early. There are also 'tabs' on the stones which were used to help maneuver them. These tabs should have been sheared off in the finished product.

Blocks of stone were raised and lowered by manpower, with ~20 people all walking in a giant hamster wheel, winding ropes attached to the stones up and down.

The surrounding vegetation was chock-a-block FULL of snails. I was surprised at their numbers in this dry environment and even more surprised at their numbers IN GENERAL. I've never seen so many. It was an invasion!

The white stuff on that branch, the stuff that looks like beads? All snails.

Matt & Me