Greek Temples

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With the orders as their chief decorative element the Greeks built up a splendid architecture of religious and secular monuments. Their noblest works were temples, which they designed with the utmost simplicity of general scheme, but carried out with a mastery of proportion and detail which has never been surpassed. Of moderate size in most cases, they were intended primarily to enshrine the simulacrum of the deity, and not, like Christian churches, to accommodate great throngs of worshippers. Nor were they, on the other hand, sanctuaries designed, like those of Egypt, to exclude all but a privi- leged few from secret rites performed only by the priests and king. The statue of the deity was enshrined in a chamber, the naos, often of considerable size, and accessible to the public through a columnar porch, the pronaos. A smaller chamber, the opisthodomus, was sometimes added in the rear of the main sanctuary, to serve as a treasury or depository for votive offerings. Together these formed a windowless structure called the cella, beyond which was the rear porch, the posticum or epinaos. This whole structure was in the larger temples surrounded by a colonnade, the peristyle, which formed the most splendid feature of Greck architecture. The external aisle on either side of the cella was called the pteroma. A single gabled roof covered the entire building.

The Greek colonnade was thus an exterior feature, surrounding the solid cella-wall instead of being enclosed by it as in Egypt. The temple was a public, not a royal monument; and its builders aimed, not as in Egypt at size and overwhelming sombre majesty, but rather at sunny beauty and the highest perfection of proportion, execution, and detail.

In antis ; with a porch having two or more columns enclosed between the projecting side-walls of the cella.

Prostylar (or prostyle); with a columnar porch in front and no peristyle.

Amphiprostylar (or -style); with columnar porches at both ends but no peristyle.

Peripteral ; surrounded by columns.

Pseudoperipteral ; with false or engaged columns built into the walls of the cella, leaving no pteroma.

Dipteral ; with double lateral ranges of columns.

Pseudodipteral, with a single row of columns on each side, whose distance from the wall is equal to two intercolumniations of the front.

Tetrastyle, hexastyle, octastyle, decastyle, etc.; with four, six, eight, or ten columns in the end rows.

The Greeks also occasionally erected circular temples or shrines, though the majority of these belong to the Macedonian age: e. g., the Philippeion at Olympia.

CONSTRUCTION

All the temples known to us are of stone, though it is evident from allusions in the ancient writers that wood was sometimes used in early times. The finest temples, especially those of Attica, Olympia, and Asia Minor, were of marble. In Magna Gnecia, at Assos, and in other places where marble was wanting, limestone, sandstone, or lava was employed and finished with a thin, fine stucco. The roof was almost invariably of wood and gabled, forming at the ends pediments decorated in most cases with sculpture. The disappearance of these inflammable and perishable roofs has given rise to endless speculations as to the lighting of the cellas, which in all known ruins, except one at Agrigentum, are destitute of windows. It has been conjectured that light was admitted through openings in the roof, and even that the central part of the cella was wholly open to the sky. Such an arrangement is termed hypaæthral, from an expression used in a description by Vitruvius; but this description corresponds to no known structure, and the weight of opinion now inclines against the use of the hypœthral opening, except possibly in one or two of the largest temples, in which a part of the cella in front of the statue may have been thus left open. But even this partial hypœthros is not substantiated by direct evidence. It hardly seems probable that the magnificent chryselephantine statues of such temples were ever thus left exposed to the extremes of the climate, which are often severe even in Greece. In the model of the Parthenon designed by Ch. Chipiez for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a small clerestory opening through the roof admits a moderate amount of light to the cella; but this ingenious device rests on no positive evidence (see Frontispiece). It seems on the whole most probable that the cella was lighted entirely by artificial illumination; but the controversy in its present state is and must be wholly speculative.

The wooden roof was covered with tiles of terra-cotta or marble. It was probably ceiled and panelled on the under side, and richly decorated with color and gold. The pteroma had under the exterior roof a ceiling of stone or marble, deeply panelled between transverse architraves.

The naos and opisthodomus being in the larger temples too wide to be spanned by single beams, were furnished with interior columns to afford intermediate support. To avoid the extremes of too great massiveness and excessive slenderness in these columns, they were built in two stages, and advantage was taken of this arrangement, in some cases, at least, to introduce lateral galleries into the naos.

SCULPTURE AND CARVING

All the architectural membering was treated with the greatest refinement of design and execution, and the aid of sculpture, both in relief and in the round, was invoked to give splendor and significance to the monument. The statue of the deity was the focus of internal interest, while externally, groups of statues representing the Olympian deities or the mythical exploits of gods, demigods, and heroes, adorned the gables. Relief carvings in the friezes and metopes commemorated the favorite national myths. In these sculptures we have the finest known adaptations of pure sculpture--i.e., sculpture treated as such and complete in itself--to an architectural framework. The noblest examples of this decorative sculpture are those of the Parthenon, consisting of figures in the full round from the pediments, groups in high relief from the metopes, and the beautiful frieze of the Panathenaic procession from the cella-wall under the pteroma ceiling. The greater part of these splendid works are now in the British Museum, whither they were removed by Lord Elgin in 1801. From Olympia, Aegina, and Phigaleia, other master-works of the same kind have been transferred to the museums of Europe. In the Doric style there was little carving other than the sculpture, the ornament being mainly polychromatic. Greek Ionic and Corinthian monuments, however, as well as minor works such as steles, altars, etc., were richly adorned with carved mouldings and friezes, festoons, acroteria, and other embellishments executed with the chisel. The anthemion ornament, a form related to the Egyptian lotus and Assyrian palmette, most frequently figures in these. It was made into designs of wonderful vigor and beauty.

DETAIL AND EXECUTION

In the handling and cutting of stone the Greeks displayed a surpassing skill and delicacy. While ordinarily they were content to use stones of moderate size, they never hesitated at any dimension necessary for proper effect or solid construction. The lower drums of the Parthenon peristyle are 6 feet 6½ inches in diameter, and 2 feet 10 inches high, cut from single blocks of Pentelic marble. The architraves of the Propylæa at Athens are each made up of two lintels placed side by side, the longest 17 feet 7 inches long, 3 feet 10 inches high, and 2 feet 4 inches thick. In the colossal temples of Asia Minor, where the taste for the vast and grandiose was more pronounced, blocks of much greater size were used. These enormous stones were cut and fitted with the most scrupulous exactness. The walls of all important structures were built in regular courses throughout, every stone carefully bedded with extremely close joints. The masonry was usually laid up without cement and clamped with metal; there is no filling in with rubble and concrete between mere facings of cut stone, as in most modern work. When the only available stone was of coarse texture it was finished with a coating of fine stucco, in which sharp edges and minute detail could be worked.

The details were, in the best period, executed with the most extraordinary refinement and care. The profiles of capitals and mouldings, the carved ornament, the arrises of the flutings, were cut with marvellous precision and delicacy. It has been rightly said that the Greeks "built like" Titans and finished like jewellers." But this perfect finish was never petty nor wasted on unworthy or vulgar design. The just relation of scale between the building and all its parts was admirably maintained; the ornament was distributed with rare judgment, and the vigor of its design saved it from all appearance of triviality.

The sensitive taste of the Greeks led them into other refinements than those of mere mechanical perfection. In the Parthenon especially, but also in lesser degree in other temples, the seemingly straight lines of the building were all slightly curved, and the vertical faces inclined. This was done to correct the monotony and stiffness of absolutely straight lines and right angles, and certain optical illusions which their acute observation had detected. The long horizontal lines of the stylobate and cornice were made convex upward; a similar convexity in the horizontal corona of the pediment counteracted the seeming concavity otherwise resulting from its meeting with the multiplied inclined lines of the raking cornice. The columns were almost imperceptibly inclined toward the cella, and the corner intercolumniations made a trifle narrower than the rest; while the vertical lines of the arrises of the flutings were made convex outward with a curve of the utmost beauty and delicacy. By these and other like refinements there was imparted to the monument an elasticity and vigor of aspect, an elusive and surprising beauty impossible to describe and not to be explained by the mere composition and general proportions, yet manifest to every cultivated eye.