The Sanctuary of Hera at the Mouth of the Sele River, Paestum
by Jessica Hughes
The sanctuary of Hera at Foce del Sele lies roughly 60km south-east of Naples, 9km north of the ancient city of Poseidonia – Roman Paestum – which was founded by Greek colonists during the Archaic period (eighth-sixth centuries BCE). Dedicated to Hera, wife of Zeus and queen of the gods, the sanctuary was situated on the northern boundary of the city’s territory, right next to where the Sele river emptied into the Gulf of Salerno. Ancient tradition held that the temple had been built by Jason and his Argonauts on a stop-off during their journey around the Mediterranean (Strabo VI.I.I); archaeological evidence suggests, though, that the site was founded in the early sixth century BCE, perhaps by Achaean Greeks who had settled further South in Sybaris. Today, there is relatively little left to see at the Sele sanctuary (Fig. 1); nevertheless, it is still a promising place to begin our exploration of Gods’ Collections in Greco-Roman antiquity, thanks to the thousands of votive offerings that accumulated there – both above and below ground – over the sanctuary’s long lifetime.
Figure 1. The site of Foce del Sele today. Two further temples of Hera were built within the city walls of nearby Paestum. Hera was worshipped all over the Greek world, and there are particular links between the river Sele sanctuary and the great Heraion of Argos in the Peloponnese, including the range of offerings found at the two sites.
The Foce del Sele sanctuary initially comprised a simple ash altar, but at some point during the sixth century BCE a series of buildings were constructed, including a majestic Doric temple, flanking peristyles, and a building that has been identified as a treasury (thesauros). When the site was first excavated in the 1930s, the most astonishing discovery was a series of over sixty limestone metopes sculpted with bold relief images of dancing girls and stories from the Greek ‘deep past’ – the labours of Herakles, the trials of Odysseus, and other mythological narratives (Fig. 2). These slabs are amongst our best-preserved examples of Archaic Greek temple sculpture; they would originally have been fixed to the exterior of one or more of the sanctuary buildings (probably the temple and treasury), and would have been visible to people making or attending sacrifices at the monumental altars placed in front of the temple. At the end of the fifth century, the local Italic Lucanians took control of Paestum, and the sanctuary of Hera underwent further developments. A new ‘square building’ (12 x 12m) was added to the site, which archaeologists think was used for ‘sacred weaving’, since more than 300 terracotta loom weights were found there. Loom weights were frequently dedicated as votive offerings at Greek and Italic temples, but at the Sele sanctuary the evidence points to them being used for weaving, perhaps by groups of women and girls whose role it was to make the new peplos garment which would be handed over to the main cult statue of Hera in an annual procession (Sofroniew 2011). The collection of loom weights might thus be classed as belong to the broad category of a ‘ritual kit’ – one of the types of temple collection outlined by Crispin Paine in his introductory essay on this website.
Figure 2. One of a series of 38 sculpted metopes showing mythological scenes, made c.580-c.550BCE. This metope shows a fighting Centaur, and may have formed part of a two- or multi-panel composition showing Herakles and the Centaurs. Most of the slabs show episodes from the life of Herakles or the Trojan war: researchers have noted that the theme of Greek victory over adversity is prevalent in these metopes, and have connected this to the temple’s location at a ‘borderland’ at the edge of Paestan territory. This long series of mythical subjects fits well with the theme of ‘Storytelling’ which is another strand of the Gods’ Collections project.
Besides the loom weights, further traces of ritual activity at the site include ceramic vessels for pouring and drinking libations, and the charred remains of animal sacrifices. Perhaps most significant for us, though, are the thousands of votive offerings which were dedicated between the sixth century BCE and second century CE, which gradually accumulated into an amorphous and ever-growing ‘collection’. As at most other ancient (and later) sanctuaries, the votives that were left at the Sele Heraion reflected aspects of the deity’s perceived role and powers. The earliest Archaic offerings included terracotta statuettes of an enthroned female figure holding a baby (Hera as kourotrophos or ‘nurse’), and standing figures of the goddess holding a spear (Hera as warrior and guardian of male as well as female rites of passage). In the fifth century the kourotrophos type fades out, and instead we find terracotta statuettes of Zeus and Hera seated on thrones, perhaps reflecting the divine couple’s role in sanctioning and protecting human marriages (Giacco and Marchetti 2017). The many bronze and iron keys which were dedicated in the fifth century have been interpreted as offerings made in the hope or thanks for an easy childbirth, while characteristic offerings of the fourth and third centuries include the so-called ‘femmes-fleurs’ incense burners (Fig 3; cf. Cantone 2015), as well as miniature models of fruit, votive wombs, and two unusual statuettes of women crouching in childbirth.
Figure 3. Clay thymiateria (incense burners) in the form of female busts emerging from or supporting a lily-like flower, now on display in the Archaeological Museum at Paestum. Some of these have traces of burning inside, and thus help to show the dynamic and performative nature of ancient votive offerings. Like the vessels used for libations and sacrifices, these clay pieces also straddle our modern categories of ‘ritual kit’ and ‘votive offering’ – they may have been brought to the temple by worshippers, then used for a sustained period within the sanctuary, before being buried in pits along with the rest of the votive offerings (see below).
Decade after decade, these varied offerings were brought and added to the temple collection by visiting worshippers, many of whom would have made the c.18km round-trip from the settlement of Paestum. Others might have arrived at the sanctuary via the river, or by sea, which in antiquity was much closer than it is today. Once the votives had entered the temple, they became the inalienable property of the goddess, that is, ‘things that cannot be given away, regifted or reused…because of their role in enchaining the participants to one another’ (Graham 2017, 50). Each individual offering created and sustained a private, reciprocal relationship between the goddess and the person who had offered the gift. As a group, the votives had other functions too - they provided collective evidence of Hera’s immense divine power, helped to ratify the sanctuary as a charged place of communion with the divine, and created a vibrant symbol of collective social identity and ‘imagined community’ (Hughes 2017, Chapter 5).
As the sanctuary surfaces became more crowded, the votives may have been rearranged and shifted around, entering into new relationships with other objects and structures. Unfortunately, as at the great majority of ancient Greco-Roman sanctuaries, we know virtually nothing about where and how the collection was originally displayed. On analogy with the few sites in Italy and Greece where votives are preserved in situ, we might guess that the terracotta models were clustered around statues of the goddess, or piled up around altars, while any votives in other materials (metals, textiles, foliage, wooden plaques) may have been nailed to walls, mounted on column bases, or hung on rafters inside the temple. At this point, the accumulation of gifts was being deliberately ‘staged’, presented to the curious gaze of a visiting public, in a manner that resonates with some temple museums of later periods. Literary sources from antiquity confirm that sanctuaries attracted people who were interested in looking at votive offerings and finding out or guessing at the personal narratives behind their dedication, like the second-century CE Greek traveller Pausanias, whose multi-volume Travels contains some of our best evidence for ancient temple collections, and the two female characters described in Herodas’ fourth mime (mid-third century BCE), who visit a sanctuary of Asklepios at dawn, place votive gifts next to the statue of Hygeia, and then spend time wandering around the site and admiring gifts given by other worshippers who had visited it before them (Dignas 2007, 169-70).
Figure 4. Plan of Foce del Sele, with locations of the votive pits. a: bothroi, b: pit with loculi, c: shallow votive pits. After Dewailly 1997.
At Foce del Sele, after a period of time, the accumulated votives were removed into purpose-dug pits in the ground, again matching widespread practices at sanctuaries around the ancient Mediterranean (Glinister 2000). While at some ancient temples the burial of votive objects seems to be connected with a ‘ritual closure’ of the site, perhaps in response to disuse or invasion, in most cases the removal of objects seems more likely a strategy to deal with ‘overcrowding’, or with the renovation of the sacred area. At Foce del Sele, three types of votive pit were discovered, which indicate different techniques of, and reasons for, deposition (Fig. 4; Dewailly 1997). Two deep pits (Fig. 4, ‘a’) were located near to small altars; the excavators dubbed these pits bothroi – an ancient Greek term signifying a pit or hole dug in the earth, generally used for libations, sacrifices and other offerings to the dead or chthonic ‘underground’ deities. The more southerly bothros, located at the south-east corner of the temple, was 3.52m deep and contained mainly ceramic vessels, together with animal and bird bones (dog, goat, cat, cockerel, dove) as well as wood and earth showing signs of combustion. The second bothros, further north towards the stoa building, was 4.23 deep and had similar contents. Both bothroi appear to have been dug out at the end of the fourth century BCE, and used for a series of sacrificial rituals over a period of 100-150 years before being sealed. Meanwhile, a large stash of votives was found to the south of the temple, in a pit divided into five ‘ditches’ or loculi (Fig. 4, ‘b’). The closure of this pit has been dated to the end of the second century BCE, but the finds inside (terracotta statuettes, miniature vases, incense burners, cups and more) cover a very long period, from the sixth to second centuries BCE. This chronology suggests that the pit may coincide with the clearing out of the building(s) where the votives had previously been on display, perhaps one that had its function changed and/or needed to be refurbished. Three further findspots (‘c’ on the plan) consisted of shallow ‘votive ditches’ (Fig. 4, ‘c’), which contained the majority of the Hellenistic votive terracottas. The two ditches on the south of the temple appear to have been made at some point during the fourth and third centuries BCE, but the largest pit, in between the temple and ‘treasury’ building, was constructed much later, around the second century CE: it contains approximately six thousand terracotta objects, dating from between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE, and again may indicate a reorganisation or destruction of a sanctuary building which previously housed the votives.
Figure 5. Reconstruction of the votive pit with five ‘loculi’ (compartments) in the Paestum museum. This pit contained terracotta statuettes, miniature vases and other votive material dating from the sixth to the second centuries BCE. It seems to have been constructed around the start of the second century BCE, and may coincide with the ‘clearing out’ of one of the sanctuary buildings.
The diverse forms of ‘ritual burial’ in ancient sanctuaries like Foce del Sele is one of the most compelling aspects of Gods’ Collections in classical antiquity. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate some of the ways in which such buried objects – which frequently include broken architectural terracottas, as well as votive dedications – continued to have agency and meaning for the users of the sanctuary, even when they were removed beyond the sensory grasp of visitors. Claudia Moser has used case studies from Republican Rome to show how the burial of votive material played a dynamic role in the formation of sacred space, helping to create and renegotiate boundaries within and around the sanctuary. She notices, for instance, how ‘the frequent use of temple steps as a location for votive deposition suggests a widespread tendency to construct notional boundaries separating the house of the god from the realm of the human ritual participants’ (Moser 2019, 20). Moser’s observations on the use of votives to create a ‘virtual temenos’ (sanctuary boundary) may help us to understand some of the deposition practices at Foce del Sele, especially the location of the four pits on the southern edge of the temple. Katharina Rieger has also seen ancient votive deposits in terms of memory and the ‘archive’, arguing that, at places where votives were completely or partially buried, ‘the soil is somehow charged with religious significance through the remains of offerings and sacrifices of the former visitors’ (Rieger 2016, 327). And these subterranean collections suggest many other fascinating avenues of investigation. For example, how do the functions of ‘archiving’ and ‘safe-keeping’ square with other aspects of the Greco-Roman imaginary, in which the subsoil is a dynamic, animated place inhabited by the dead, and by chthonic, earthy deities awaiting sacrifices? Was there a tension between these different understandings of the earth and what lay beneath its surface, when it came to storing temple collections? Did the digging of pits and holes sometimes serve to rupture, rather than consolidate, sanctuary boundaries, and to destabilise and expand space, as much as to root the temple into place and time? Questions like this hint at how the theme of Gods’ Collections might deepen our understandings of the societies we are studying, as well as enabling some interesting cross-cultural comparisons, and observations about historical trends and developments.
References
Cantone, Francesca (2015), ‘The ‘Flower-Women’ figurines from the Foce del Sele sanctuary. Ancient coroplastic digital data management, analysis, and sharing’, Archeologia e Calcolatori 26: 95-114.
De la Genière, J. and G. Greco (eds.), Il santuario di Hera alla foce del Sele. Indagini e studi 1987-2006, Atti e Memorie della Società Magna Grecia, serie IV, 2008-2010.
Dewailly, M. (1997) ‘L’Héraion de Foce del Sele: Quelques aspects du culte d’Héra à l’époque hellénistique d’après les terres cuites’, in J. de La Genière, (ed.) Héra. Images, espaces, cultes. Actes du Colloque International du Centre de recherches Archéologiques de l’Université de Lille III et de l’Association P.R.A.C. (Lille, 29–30 novembre 1993), Naples: 201–210.
Dignas, Beate (2007), ‘A day in the life of a Greek sanctuary’, in Daniel Ogden (ed.) A Companion to Greek Religion, Oxford, Blackwell: 163-77.
Giacco, Marialucia and Marchetti, Chiara Maria (2017) Hera as protectress of marriage, childbirth, and motherhood in Magna Graecia. Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 57 (2-3): 337-360.
Glinister, Fay (2000) ‘Sacred Rubbish’. Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy: evidence and experience: 54-70.
Graham, Emma-Jayne (2017) ‘Partible humans and permeable gods: anatomical votives and personhood in the sanctuaries of Roman Italy’, in Jane Draycott and Emma-Jayne Graham (eds) Bodies of Evidence: Anatomical Votives, Past, Present and Future, Routledge, London and New York: 45-62.
Hughes, Jessica (2017) Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moser, Claudia (2019) The Altars of Republican Rome and Latium. Sacrifice and the Materiality of Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Rieger, Anna-Katharina (2016), ‘Waste matters: life cycle and agency of pottery employed in Greco-Roman sacred spaces’, Religions of the Roman Empire, 2: 307-339.
Sofroniew, Alexandra (2011) ‘Women’s work: The dedication of loom weights in the sanctuaries of southern Italy’, Pallas https://journals.openedition.org/pallas/2155
