City of Roses

On a fertile plain 50 miles south of Naples, where the river Sele winds lazily through vineyards and olive groves to the Tyrrhenian Sea. lies one of antiquity's great archaeological caches: the half-buried, 2,500-year-old city of Paestum. Paestum was founded by Greek traders around 600 B.C. and first named Posidonia, in honor of the sea god Poseidon. Across its bustling wharves merchants bought and sold the products of the civilized world: decorated vases from Sicily, bronze and iron weapons from Sardinia, colored glass from North Africa, cloth from Egypt and Greece. The city's middlemen grew wealthy, built a 310-acre city of 100.000 inhabitants, surrounded it with a wall three miles long, and in leisure moments cultivated a famed species of rose which bloomed twice a year.

Mustached God. Inevitably, the city's wealth aroused the greed of nearby hill tribes. Roses were no substitutes for swords and shields. The fierce Lucanians swept down and conquered the Greeks around 400 B.C., renaming the city Paiston. But the Lucanians soon became peaceful, were assimilated by the people they had conquered; the city prospered even after the Roman legions came in 273 B.C., and called it Paestum. But as the Roman Empire declined and malaria spread from the nearby swamps, Paestum died. By 800 A.D. it was a forest-shrouded ghost city. Forgotten, it was bypassed by war and progress and written off as "nothing but a sun-baked collection of fine columns and a pile of worthless stones."

After World War II, intense, earnest Professor Pellegrino Sestieri, head archaeologist of Salerno and Potenza provinces, convinced a reluctant Italian government that a unique record of Greek and post-Greek civilization might well lie beneath the stones. In 1951, under a $480,000 government grant (made possible by Marshall Plan aid), he started digging with a crew of 46 workmen, and soon found evidence to support his educated guess. Among his rich preliminary finds: a colored, life-size terra-cotta statue of a god, probably Zeus adorned with a thin, Dali-like mustache; a rare, ten-inch nude model of Hera, wife of Zeus and the goddess of fertility, in the squatting position of ancient Greek women in childbirth.

Honeyed Goddess. Last month Digger Sestieri hit real pay dirt. His workers broke into Paestum's "sacred precinct," surrounded by a wall of massive square boulders. Inside they found a small, hut-shaped temple. The interior walls were of stucco; on the floor were a rust-corroded iron bedstead and a set of ornate, gilded bronze water jars. Each jar, decorated with figures of female heads, sphinxes, rams and serpents, was filled with an amber-colored, resinlike substance: solidified honey. Presumably distilled from the nectar of Paestum's famed roses, the 2,500-year-old honey was the classic sacrifice to Hera. The temple was probably devoted to her; Hera's image was laid "to rest" on the bedstead each night.

Sestieri pressed on, uncovered about 25 kennel-shaped tombs, each six feet long by a yard wide. Outwardly identical with Greek tombs elsewhere in Paestum, these sepulchers were distinguished by livelier and peculiarly individualistic interior paintings of chariot races, departing warriors, gladiators. Sestieri's conclusion: the conquering Lucanians not only took over the Greeks' city, but pre-empted their tombs as well. Executed by Greek artists under Lucanian orders, the sepulchral paintings, he believes, indicate the existence of a previously unknown style of early Italian art.

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