Corinthian Temples.
The Corinthian order is as essentially borrowed from the bell-shaped capitals of Egypt as the Doric is from their oldest pillars. Like everything they touched, the Greeks soon rendered it their own by the freedom and elegance with which they treated it. The acanthus-leaf with which they adorned it is essentially Grecian, and we must suppose that it had been used by them as an ornament, either in their metal or wood work, long before they adopted it in stone as an architectural feature.
As in everything else, however, the Greeks could not help betraying in this also the Asiatic origin of their art, and the Egyptian order with them was soon wedded to the Ionic, whose volutes became an essential though subdued part of this order. It is in fact a composite order, made up of the bell-shaped capitals of the Egyptians and the spiral of the Assyrians, and adopted by the Greeks at a time when national distinctions were rapidly disappearing, and when true and severer art was giving place to love of variety. At that time also mere ornament and carving were supplanting the purer class of forms and the higher aspirations of sculpture with which the Greeks ornamented their temples in their best days.
In Greece the order does not appear to have been introduced, or at least generally used, before the age of Alexander the Great; the oldest authentic example, and also one of the most beautiful, being the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (B.C. 335), which, notwithstanding the smallness of its dimensions, is one of the most beautiful works of art of the merely ornamental class to be found in any part of the world. A simpler example, but by no means so beautiful, is that of the porticoes of the small octagonal building commonly called the Tower of the Winds at Athens. The largest example in Greece of the Corinthian order is the Temple of Jupiter Olympius at Athens. This, however, may almost be called a Roman building, though on Grecian soil—having been commenced in its present form under Antiochus Epiphanes, in the second century B.C. by the Roman architect Cossutius, and only finished by Hadrian, to whom probably we may ascribe the greatest part of what now remains. Its dimensions are 135 ft. by 354 ft., and from the number of its columns, their size and their beauty, it must have been when complete the most beautiful Corinthian temple of the ancient world.
135. Ancient Corinthian Capital. (From Branchidæ.)
Judging, however, from some fragments found among the Ionic temples of Asia Minor, it appears that the Corinthian order was introduced there before we find any trace of it in Greece Proper. Indeed, à priori, we might expect that its introduction into Greece was part of that reaction which the elegant and luxurious Asiatics exercised on the severer and more manly inhabitants of European Greece, and which was in fact the main cause of their subjection, first to the Macedonians, and finally beneath the iron yoke of Rome. As used by the Asiatics, it seems to have arisen from the introduction of the bell-shaped capital of the Egyptians, to which they applied the acanthus-leaf, sometimes in conjunction with the honeysuckle ornament of the time, as in Woodcut No. [135], and on other and later occasions together with the volutes of the same order, the latter combination being the one which ultimately prevailed and became the typical form of the Corinthian capital.