A gymnasion at Segesta? A Review of the Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence

Despite numerous inscriptions related to gymnasia and their magistracies in Sicily, our knowledge of their architecture is still fragmentary because safe identification of gymnasia is difficult and often debated. This exemplarily regards the Hellenistic city of Segesta, where excavations of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa since the 1990s have exposed epigraphic evidence relating to a gymnasion and a peristyle building, next to the bouleuterion, that has been attributed to a gymnasion. This paper critically reviews this epigraphic and archaeological evidence and investigates what the sources really reveal and whether they can rightly be correlated. It is argued that currently only one single inscription testifies to the existence of the gymnasiarchy in Segesta, and that the peristyle building did not belong to a gymnasion, but to a coherently planned and built complex of political-administrative buildings.