Until recently, the standard explanation for the incomplete state of the Segesta temple was one which the great studiosi of Sicilian archaeology had put forward. Scholars, like Biagio Pace, Vincenzo Tusa, and Bernabo Brea, all saw the building as an example of the intense Hellenization that the Elymians, the indigenous inhabitants of this part of Sicily and Segesta, had experienced through their contacts with the Greek cities of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Their theory was that the Elymians, who were said by Thucydides to have been descendants of the survivors of Troy, simply wanted to build an open air enclosure for their local cult center and settled on the Greek persityle as an attractive and distinctively Greek feature to a pre-existing, indigenous place of worship. And since the Elymians of Segesta never intended to build a cella but were content with just a Doric peristyle, scholars like Pace were prepared to say that the Segesta temple had actually been finished, except for the tidying-up work that the masons still had to perform on the steps and the columns.