With this brief introduction to the history of a city, whose chief building is still standing almost intact after a lapse of 2500 years, let us take a rapid survey of Poseidonia as it exists to-day. Its walls, of Greek construction but probably built or restored as late as the time of Alexander of Epirus, who gave the captured town a fleeting spell of liberty, form an irregular pentagon about three miles in circumference, whereon the remains of eight towers can be observed, whilst the four gates, placed at the four cardinal points of the compass, are clearly traceable. We enter this _città morta_ by the so-called Porta della Sirena, the eastern gate that faces the hostile Samnite Hills and (oh, the prosaic touch!) the modern railway-station. This gate remains in a tolerable state of preservation, and draws its name from the key-stone of its arch, which bears in low relief a much defaced design of a mermaid or siren, its counterpart on the inner keystone being a dolphin: two devices very appropriate to the entrance of a city dedicated to the Lord of Ocean. Passing the picturesque yellow-washed Villa Salati, with its high walls and iron-barred windows testifying only too plainly to the lawlessness that once reigned in this district, we find ourselves face to face with the great temple of Neptune or Poseidon, and its companion-fane, the so-called Basilica. The Temple of Neptune (for in this instance at least the popular appellation chances to be the correct one), in all probability co-eval with the first Greek foundation of the city, formed the central point of the life of Poseidonia during the 1400 years of its existence as a Hellenic, a Samnite, and finally a Roman city. In its simple grandeur and its perfect proportions this wonderful temple possesses only one rival outside Greece itself: the Temple of Concord at Girgenti, which the poet Goethe compared to a god, after designating the building before us as a giant. Superiority in grace is therefore a disputed point between the two great structures of Poseidonia and Agrigentum, yet in every other respect the temple of the Lucanian Plain surpasses its Sicilian rival.
To-day, after more than a score of centuries of exposure to the salt winds and to the burning sunshine of the south, the walls and pillars of these great buildings have been calcined to a glorious shade of tawny yellow, fit to delight the soul of every artist, whether he views their Titanic but graceful forms outlined against the deep blue of sky and sea on the western horizon, or against the equally lovely background of grey and violet mountains to the east. But it was not always thus. The porous local travertine that gave their building material to the Greeks of the sixth century before Christ was once carefully stuccoed, and, in the manner of Hellenic art, painted in the most brilliant hues of azure and vermilion, so that it becomes hard for us to realise the original effect of such gorgeous masses standing erect in a landscape that is itself fraught with glowing colour. But better to appreciate the magnificence before us, let us give a brief technical description of the greatest of the temples in the choice words of an eminent French antiquary.