Here is an artist’s rendition of what the eastern end of Temple C once looked like. Since the Greeks of Selinus were surrounded by non-Greeks, like the Elymians, they decorated their temples with apotropaic symbols, like the gorgon head that decorates the pediment. When Greeks lived among non-Greeks, their temples were one of the ways they staked out their land as theirs and proclaimed their ethnic identity. The decorated metopes accomplished a similar purpose as they showed to the barbarian world what happens when they come into conflict with Greeks.