Location in the Malibu Times.

Why had I resisted visiting Cape Sounio on repeated visits to Athens? Is not its iconic 5th century BC Temple of Poseidon, with 15 of the 36 original Doric columns still standing some 200 feet above the Aegean Sea, a must on any traveler’s checklist?

The German philosopher Heidegger visited the Temple of Poseidon in 1962 and wrote, “These few standing columns were the strings of an invisible lyre, the song of which the far-seeing Delian god let resonate over the Cycladic world of islands ... this single gesture of the land suggests the invisible nearness of the divine.”

This is wrong on several levels. In that quote from Sojourns, Martin's talking about the temple of Zeus in Nemea, a valley where athletic games were held on years that didn't have an Olympiad.

Nemea, the other place of the Greek athletic games, present as well in the Victory Odes of Pindar. The wide floor of the valley, where the lone village of Nemea is nestled, is surrounded by terraced slopes; flocks of sheep stroll leisurely through its pastures. The entire region itself appears as a single Stadium that invites festive games. Only three columns are left standing that still speak of the temple of Zeus that once was: in the breadth of the landscape they are like three strings of an invisible lyre on which perhaps the winds play songs of mourning, inaudible to mortals-echoes of the flight of the gods.

Pp. 19-20

Martin's "Temple of Poseidon", the one in OWA, is in Paestum, up the coast from Elea, above the Tyrrhenian Sea. Maybe there's another.   ¶ 1:50 AM