All the Greek temples resemble one another in their general plan of construction; and yet the architectural combinations might be very numerous, inasmuch as they all differ in the nature of the material employed and the ornamentation which decorates them, in the number of the columns and the size of the intercolumniations, which determine the proportions of the edifice, above all in the character peculiar to each of the three orders—the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. A single member of the structure, the column with the portion of the entablature which it supports, determines this character.
Ruins of the Parthenon
The first temples worthy of the name were in the Doric style. The walls were large and heavy, the columns short and stunted without any base, like the stake which had been the primitive support, but with flutings, a capital, and a double pediment stretching above a wide face, like an eagle with outstretched wings—the expression is Pindar’s. The whole edifice, built of ordinary stone, was hidden, as in the case of many of the Egyptian temples, under a coat of stucco which displayed vivid colours. The remains of this are to be seen at Assus, on the coast of Asia; at Corinth, Delphi and Ægina in Greece; at Syracuse, Agrigentum and Selinus in Sicily; at Metapontum and especially at Pæstum in Italy, where the grandest ruins in the ancient Doric order are to be found. The common characteristic of these buildings, which nearly all belong to the seventh or sixth century, was their sturdy but heavy and thick-set appearance. The columns have a height of only four diameters—four and two-thirds at most; and the stucco in coming off has displayed the poverty of the material employed. Even the temple of Olympia was built of a hard and porous tufa which the stucco had concealed under a brilliant covering. That of Ægina was also of stone, not marble; there remain of it at least some beautiful ruins.
We must go to Athens to find Doric architecture in its severe elegance. Even in the temple of Ægina the column is higher: five and a third diameters; at the Theseum it is five and a half; at the Parthenon, six, and this is the proportion which is most pleasing to the eye. Of these three temples the first, in which we can still find traces of an archaic character, belongs to the sixth century; the second, which has better proportions, to the first half of the fifth; the third is the architectural triumph of the age of Pericles.
The Parthenon, built entirely of Pentelic marble, is not the most vast of the Greek temples, but its execution is more perfect and it is this which made it the masterpiece of Hellenic art. A very small detail will show the finish of the work. It is with difficulty and by the assistance of eye and hand that one succeeds in discovering the joints of the tambours forming the colonnade which surrounds the building, so skilfully have these enormous masses been adjusted. Even in her masons Athens possessed artists.
The interior of the Parthenon contained two halls: the smaller at the back, the opisthodomus, enclosed the public treasure; the larger, or cella, contained the statue of the goddess born without mother from the thought of the master of the gods, and who was as the soul of which the Parthenon was the material casing. Figures in high relief, about twice life size, adorned the two pediments of the temple. The frieze, which ran round the cella and opisthodomus at a height of thirteen metres (42 ft., 8 ins.), and to a length of more than one hundred and sixty metres (525 ft.), represented the procession of the great Panathenæa.
The work was finished in 435 B.C. It is neither the centuries nor the barbarians that have mutilated it. The Parthenon was still almost intact in 1687, when on the 27th of September Morosini bombarded the citadel. One of the projectiles, setting fire to the barrels of powder stored in the temple, blew up a part of it; then the Venetian desired that the statues should be taken down from the pediment and he broke them. Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tore down the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the metopes: this was another disaster. The Ilissus or Cephisus, the Hercules or Theseus, the Charities, “vernal goddesses”—called by some the Three Fates, by others Demeter, Core, and Iris—are still, though somewhat mutilated, the most precious of our relics of antiquity. In 1812 some other Englishmen carried off the frieze of the temple of Phigalia (Bassæ), built by Ictinus. All these fragments of masterpieces were sold for hard cash, and it is under the damp and gloomy sky of England that we are reduced to admiring the remains of that which was the imperial mantle which Pericles wrapped about Pallas Athene. Thus to understand the incomparable magnificence of the Parthenon, we must render back to it in imagination what men have taken away, then place it on its lofty rock, one hundred and fifty-six metres (512 ft.) high, whence a magic panorama is unrolled before the eyes, and surround it with the buildings of the Acropolis; the Erechtheum, which exhibited all the graces of art, beside the severe grandeur of the principal temple; the bronze statue of Athene Promachus, “she who fought in the front rank,” to which the artist gave a colossal height, so that the sailors arriving from the high sea steered by the plume on her helmet and the gold tip of her lance, maris stella; and lower down, at the only place by which the rock was accessible, the wonderful vestibule of the Propylæa and the temple of Victory which formed one of its wings; but, above all, it must be seen wrapped in the blazing light of the eastern sky, compared to which our clearest day is but a twilight.
One thing has been observed in the Parthenon which proves the profound artistic sense the Greeks possessed and how well they understood how to correct geometry by taste. In all the Parthenon there is no surface which is absolutely flat. As the columns owe their full beauty only to the fact that they exhibit towards their centre a slight outward curve, of which the eye is not aware, so the entire building, colonnades and walls, is inclined slightly inwards towards an invisible point which would be lost in the region of the clouds, and all the horizontal lines are convex. But all with such delicacy that it is sufficient to allow the eye and the light to wander gently over the surfaces and to give the monument at once the grace of art and the solidity of strength; but not enough for it to assume the compressed and heavy aspect of a truncated pyramid like the Egyptian temples. On the southern façade the rise of the curve is only one hundred and twenty-three millimetres (about 4½ inches).
The Propylæa, the masterpiece of civil and military architecture, belonged, like the Parthenon, to the Doric order, and stood at the only accessible point of the Acropolis. The architect Mnesicles disposed its various parts in such a manner as to give an aspect of grandeur to the entrance to the Holy of Holies of pagan Athens and also to secure its defence. Epaminondas would have transported it to Thebes to adorn the Cadmea: six centuries after, Pausanias admired it more than the Parthenon, and Plutarch said: “These works have preserved a freshness, a virginity which time cannot wither; they appear still bright with youth as if a breath would animate them and as if they had an immortal soul.”