115. The Column and Beam
Most early architecture developed the column. Even so superb an architecture as that of the Greeks never rose above it. The æsthetic value of the Parthenon lies in the balance and feeling with which a fundamentally simple plan has been elaborated, not in the daring way in which an inherently ambitious problem has been met.
On account of its essential simplicity, columnar architecture grew up among several historically unconnected nations. In the case of most of them, there can be distinguished an early stage of building in wood, when the column was the trunk of a tree, and a later stage in which the post was replaced by a monolith, or by superimposed drums of stone. This change appears to have taken place somewhat independently in Egypt and in Greece, and wholly so in Mexico. It has been thought that Greek architecture was derived from Egypt, but there was probably little more than a transmission of stimulus, since Greek temples were wooden pillared several thousand years after the Egyptians were rearing huge stone columns. Furthermore, if the Greeks had borrowed their column outright from Egypt, they would probably have copied it slavishly at the outset. Yet their early capitals are without the lotus flower head in which the Egyptian column terminated. Here, then, and still more in Mexico, there was parallel development.
The failure of the Greeks to pass beyond column and lintel architecture may seem strange for a people that showed so unusual an artistic faculty and so bold and enterprising a spirit as they manifested in most departments of civilization. The cause appears to lie not in any internal arrest of their artistic evolution, but in the conditions that prevailed in another field of their culture: their political particularity. The Greek state remained a city. All attempts to establish larger political aggregates, whether on the basis of confederation or conquest, failed miserably and speedily. The Greek was ingrainedly addicted to an outlook that was not merely provincial but literally municipal. The result was that really large coöperative enterprises were beyond him. Paved roads, aqueducts, sewers, and works of a like character were scarcely attempted on any scale of magnitude. With the rather small numbers of individuals which at best the Greeks assembled in one spot, such works were not necessary, and undertaken in mere ambition, they would have encountered public antagonism. Consequently Greek public buildings were, by the standards of many other nations, mediocre in size of ground plan, low in height, without endeavor to impress by sweep of clear space. This fact illustrates the almost organic interconnection existing between the several sides of the culture of any people; it illustrates also the importance of knowing the whole of a civilization before trying to provide an explanation for any one of its manifestations.