Four centuries, however, elapsed, which may appropriately be called the dark ages of Greece, before the new seed bore fruit, at least in so far as art is concerned. These ages produced, it is true, the laws of Lycurgus, a characteristic effort of a truly Aryan race, conferring as they did on the people who made them that power of self-government, and capacity for republican institutions, which gave them such stability at home and so much power abroad, but which were as inimical to the softer glories of the fine arts in Sparta as they have proved elsewhere.
When, after this long night, architectural art reappeared, it was at Corinth, under the Cypselidæ, a race of strongly-marked Asiatic tendencies; but it had in the meantime undergone so great a transformation as to well-nigh bewilder us. On its reappearance it was no longer characterised by the elegant and ornate art of Mycenæ and the cognate forms of Asiatic growth, but had assumed the rude, bold proportions of Egyptian art, and with almost more than Egyptian massiveness.
Doric Temples in Greece.
The age of the Doric temple at Corinth is not, it is true, satisfactorily determined; but the balance of evidence would lead us to believe that it belongs to the age of Cypselus, or about 650 B.C. The pillars are less than four diameters in height, and the architrave—the only part of the superstructure that now remains—is proportionately heavy. It is, indeed, one of the most massive specimens of architecture existing, more so than even the rock-cut prototype at Beni Hasan. As a work of art, it fails from excess of strength, a fault common to most of the efforts of a rude people, ignorant of the true resources of art, and striving, by the expression of physical power alone, to attain its objects.
Next in age to this is the little temple at Ægina.[[131]] Its date, too, is unknown, though, judging from the character of its sculpture, it probably belongs to the middle of the sixth century before Christ.
134. Temple at Ægina restored. No scale.
We know that Athens had a great temple on the Acropolis, contemporary with these, and the frusta of its columns still remain, which, after its destruction by the Persians, were built into the walls of the citadel. It is more than probable that all the principal cities of Greece had temples commensurate with their dignity before the Persian War. Many of these were destroyed during that struggle; but it also happened then, as in France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries, that the old temples were thought unworthy of the national greatness, and of that feeling of exaltation arising from the successful result of the greatest of their wars, so that almost all those which remained were pulled down or rebuilt. The consequence is, that nearly all the great temples now found in Greece were built in the forty or fifty years which succeeded the defeat of the Persians at Salamis and Platæa.
One of the oldest temples of this class is that best known as the Theseion or Temple of Theseus at Athens, now recognised as the Temple of Hephaistos mentioned in the “Attica” of Pausanias. By an analysis of the architectural character of the Temple Dr. Dorpfield contends that it is posterior to the Parthenon and not anterior, as is generally supposed.
Of all the great temples, the best and most celebrated is the Parthenon, the only octastyle Doric Temple in Greece, and in its own class undoubtedly the most beautiful building in the world. It is true it has neither the dimensions nor the wondrous expression of power and eternity inherent in Egyptian temples, nor has it the variety and poetry of the Gothic Cathedral; but for intellectual beauty, for perfection of proportion, for beauty of detail, and for the exquisite perception of the highest and most recondite principles of art ever applied to architecture, it stands utterly and entirely alone and unrivalled—the glory of Greece and a reproach to the rest of the world.