In addition to the temples described above, some remains of tombs, notably that of the huge Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in memory of King Mausolus, who died in 353 B.C., and several theatres, including that of Dionysos at Athens, with a well-preserved one of larger size at Epidaurus, bear witness to the general prevalence of Doric features in funereal monuments and secular buildings, but of the palaces and humbler dwelling-houses in the three Greek styles, of which there must have been many fine examples, no trace remains. There is however no doubt that the Corinthian style was very constantly employed after the power of the great republics had been broken, and the Oriental taste for lavish decoration replaced the love for austere simplicity of the virile people of Greece and its dependencies.
CHAPTER III
ROMAN ARCHITECTURE
After the Golden Age of Greek architecture properly so called was over, a kind of aftermath prevailed for some little time in the peninsula and the outlying colonies of Greece, to be succeeded by a transition time to which the name of the Hellenistic has been given, during which is supposed to have been inaugurated the use of the arch and the vault, which were in course of time to revolutionise the art of building.
It has long been customary to give to the Etruscans, an Asiatic people who in very early times occupied a considerable portion of Italy, the credit of the first introduction of the arch in Western Europe. It is however now more generally believed that the Roman style of building was an offshoot of the Hellenistic, in which the dome was certainly employed, though no existing examples of its use can be quoted. The city of Alexandria, founded about 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, is known to have had four principal colonnaded streets leading from a four-arched central building, and many are of opinion that much of the town was built over arched cisterns. The dome may possibly have been in the first instance introduced into western Europe as a cover for the hot baths in which the wealthy delighted, and its form was probably the same as that of the one preserved at Pompeii. The famous arched drain at Rome, known as the Cloaca Maxima, so constantly referred to as the greatest masterpiece of the Etruscans was not, it has now been proved, built until after their subjugation and extinction as a nation. For all that they were without doubt most skilful architects and engineers; the walls of their cities were of cyclopean masonry and were entered from arched gateways, a good example of which is to be seen at Volterra, constructed of wedge-shaped stones fixed without cement. Their rock-cut tombs, such as those at Corneto, Vulci, and Chiusi, are divided into many chambers, the walls adorned with paintings, the roof upheld by columns, and the façades resembling those of Egyptian temples, whilst the tumuli in which they sometimes buried their dead are surmounted by pyramids of earth resting on stone foundations.
From whatever source Roman architects got their inspiration, they very soon absorbed all external influences and stamped the buildings they erected with a character of their own. From the first sun-dried bricks, sometimes combined with stone, were the chief materials used, even the grander structures of the best period such as the huge palaces and halls were of plastered brickwork, stone having been as a general rule reserved for such works as temples, theatres, and triumphal arches. Concrete was also largely employed, and timber in many cases was turned to account for roofing. The most distinctive peculiarity of the architecture of the Romans is the vaulted roof, which they employed in an infinite variety of ways, introducing it at every possible opportunity. The simplest form, known as the waggon or barrel vault, is a semicircular arch spanning two walls, whilst a more elaborate contrivance consists of two intersecting vaults of the same height crossing each other at right angles, which was used in Rome as early as 75 B.C. These two forms were sometimes supplemented by what are distinguished as conches or half-domes over external semicircular recesses, of which the apse is a characteristic example. With the aid of these three varieties of vaulting, that were occasionally combined with consummate skill, the Romans were able to roof in large or small circular spaces, and in some few cases, as in the Baths of Caracalla at Rome, they even to a certain extent anticipated the clever contrivance known as the pendentive, a triangular piece of vaulting springing from the corners of a right-angled enclosure, that was later brought to such perfection in Byzantine architecture.
With their wonderful system of vaulting the Romans combined the columnation and entablature of the Greeks, introducing innovations however that were in many cases anything but improvements. Thus they sometimes supplemented the foliage of the Corinthian capital with the volutes of the Ionic; whilst what is known as the Tuscan style is really merely a modification of the Doric, and is wanting in the simple dignity that characterised the latter, the metopes being adorned with sculptures very inferior to the beautiful figure subjects of the Parthenon and other Greek temples. Roman architects were in fact rather skilful engineers and adapters of the æsthetic conceptions of others than original designers of new forms of beauty, but they were unrivalled in their power of harmoniously co-ordinating in a single building an infinite variety of structural features. They were moreover exceptionally successful in the laying out of cities, as proved by the wonderful groups of buildings in the fora or public squares in which courts of justice and markets were held, of the capital and other cities, and by the fine continuous vistas of their streets, in which irregularities were masked by clever contrivances, adding greatly to the symmetry of the general effect. Temples, basilicas, baths, bridges, aqueducts, triumphal arches, palaces, and private houses were all set in the environment most suitable to them, and even tombs were ranged according to a definite plan, not, as in most modern cemeteries, dotted here and there in an arbitrary manner.