Temple E (Selinus)

[4] It is the best conserved of the temples of Selinus but its present appearance is the result of anastylosis (reconstruction using original material) performed—controversially—in 1959, by the Italian archaeologist Jole Bovio Marconi.

The columns are each 10.19 metres high with numerous traces of the stucco which originally covered them.

There are many of the optical illusions typical of the Doric order: the strong tapering of the columns at their ends (entasis), contraction at the corners, and widening of the final metopes, for example.

[5] A Doric frieze at the top of the walls of the naos consisted of metopes depicting people, with the heads and naked parts of the women made of Parian marble and the rest from local stone.

[6] Four metopes are preserved: Heracles killing the Amazon Antiope, the marriage of Hera and Zeus, Actaeon being torn apart by Artemis’ hunting dogs, Athena killing the Giant Enceladus, and another more fragmentary one perhaps depicting Apollo and Daphne.