The Temple of Poseidon at Sounion

The burial at the sacred cape

The Temple of Poseidon stands on Cape Sounion, a headland at the edge of Attica, the land around Athens. Its marble columns can be seen from the water. But the cape had a sacred story before the temple was built.

In the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem, Menelaus is sailing home from the war at Troy. His fleet reaches Sounion. At the cape, the god Apollo kills Phrontis, the helmsman who can steer a ship through the worst sea. Menelaus stops to bury him and to perform the funeral rites. The poem calls the place sacred before it says what stands there.

So Homer gives Sounion a life before the marble temple. The cape is a stopping place at the edge of Attica, where a voyage can be broken off and the dead must be honoured. Later worship and building made the same headland the sanctuary, or holy ground, of the sea god Poseidon.

What stood before the marble temple

The surviving temple was built around 444 to 440 BC in marble from Agrileza, a quarry in the nearby Lavreotiki. It replaced an earlier limestone temple. That temple was begun in the early fifth century BC and destroyed during the Persian invasion.

The new building stood on the highest point inside a walled sacred area. Stoas, long covered walks with columns, lined the sanctuary below it. They gave worshippers shelter and guided their approach.

The temple belongs to the years when Athens was rebuilding several major sanctuaries. It is in the Doric style, one of the Greek styles of columns. Its outer row of columns had six across each end and 13 along each side. Part of a frieze, a band of carved scenes, showed a battle between gods and Giants. Another part showed a fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, two peoples of myth. Surviving slabs are in the Archaeological Museum of Lavrio.

How the god was identified

The ancient writer Pausanias saw the temple from the sea in the second century AD. He called it a sanctuary of Athena. But inscriptions found in excavation name Poseidon, and they show that the temple on the headland was his. A separate sanctuary of Athena stood elsewhere on the walled cape.

This matters because a famous ancient witness and the finds disagree. The columns alone cannot name their god. The inscriptions tie the temple to Poseidon. Pausanias keeps the mistake of a traveller looking at Sounion from offshore.

The god suits the cape, though the scenery proves nothing on its own. The historian Herodotus records an Athenian festival at Sounion held every four years. Homer’s burial of Phrontis places a sacred duty there. The inscriptions settle whose sanctuary the standing temple was.

Did Aegeus leap from Sounion?

Today the cape is linked with Aegeus, the father of the hero Theseus. Aegeus is watching for his son’s ship. He sees a black sail, believes Theseus is dead and throws himself from the cliffs. From then on the sea bears his name.

The ancient accounts do not firmly place that leap at Sounion. The Bibliotheca, a book of myths attributed to Apollodorus, has Aegeus throw himself from the Acropolis of Athens when he sees the black sail. Other accounts say only that he threw himself from a rock or into the sea. The cliffs at Sounion make the later local link easy to picture, but they do not settle the disagreement in the texts.

So the cape holds two different kinds of claim. Excavation, inscriptions and the standing remains fix Poseidon’s temple there. The leap of Aegeus belongs to the modern story of Sounion, while an ancient source places it in Athens.

What the headland keeps

The sanctuary joined travel by sea to worship on land. The burial of Phrontis halts a fleet on its way home. The festival held every four years brings Athenians to the cape. The temple faces the sea routes that Poseidon ruled, without needing to stand at the water’s edge.

The remains also keep a correction. Marble columns show a major sanctuary, but it is the inscriptions, and not the outline of the building, that name its god. The same ground holds a secure identification from archaeology and a disputed place in myth. At Sounion the different kinds of evidence can be kept apart: Homer’s sacred cape, Poseidon’s inscribed sanctuary and the later placing of the fall of Aegeus.