Agrigento

A wealthy, flourishing Greek and Roman city near the southern coast of Sicily, Italy, originally a colony of Gela and founded by Greeks about 580 BC. The plateau site of the ancient city has extraordinarily rich Greek remains. There are extensive walls with remnants of eight gates and the remains of seven Doric temples, but there has been illegal construction in which the ruins were quarried, so little is standing where some of the buildings once were. Agrigento was sacked by the Carthaginians in 406 BC, a disaster from which it never really recovered. It was refounded by Timoleon, a Greek general and statesman, in 338 BC, but Agrigento was on the losing side for most of the Punic Wars. Agrigento returned to some commercial prosperity when textiles, sulfur and potash mining, and agriculture expanded. It was abandoned once again in the Christian era though areas were used as Roman and Christian cemeteries and catacombs. There is some evidence for even earlier settlement, possibly Neolithic.

[Greek Akragas]. Modem Agrigento, on the coast of southern Sicily, partially overlies the Greek colony of Akragas, an aggressively expansive and prosperous trading centre during the 6th and 5th centuries bc. There is some evidence for earlier settlement, possibly Neolithic. The classical settlers further strengthened the defences of the site, which is a natural fortress on three sides, by the construction of extensive walls, original sections of which can still be found. Famous as the home of the pre-Socratic poet and philsopher Empedocles (who, however, was subsequently exiled) Akragas also advertised its prosperity and patronage of the arts by the erection of a whole series of public buildings of an especially magnificent nature. Among the remains of classical temples still to be seen, most remarkable are the Temple of Concord (wrongly so called, the original dedication is lost) and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The Temple of Concord is normally seen as an advanced example of the Doric order, incorporating mainland sophistications such as ‘double contraction’, the subtle adjustment of the distances between columns and between the corresponding decoration above, to avoid what were otherwise felt to be infelicitous asymmetries. The Temple of Zeus, unfortunately now ruined, must have been a bizarre and unique structure. Basically a development of the Doric style again, this temple incorporated strange and adventurous modifications. Built on a gigantic ground-plan, it may perhaps have caused some disquiet to its architects and builders even before construction. The usual arrangement of alternating columns and spaces was replaced by a continuous wall, with halfcolumns of round section at the usual intervals on the outside and of square section on the reverse, thus giving the appearance of the usual Greek peristyle but with walling between the pillars. It is possible that this walling between pillars extended only part way towards the frieze, and that it was in the resulting apertures that 25 gigantic figures were placed to help support, quite literally, the massive entablature. This temple was still incomplete when Akragas was sacked by the Carthaginians in 406 bc. Resettled later in the 4th century bc (c338), Akragas managed to be on the losing side for most of the Punic Wars. There was some return to commercial prosperity later under Roman administration, when trade seems to have expanded to include textiles and sulphur. The Christian era saw the city abandoned once again, and some church use made of the classical temples, while large areas were utilized as Roman and Christian cemeteries and catacombs. Recent excavations have been quite extensive and have revealed, in the vicinity of the new Museo Nazionale, a network of streets and housing laid out on a grid basis that possibly goes back to the 5th century BC.