Fig. 1. LION GATE, MYCENAE
The Treasury of Atreus is still more remarkable, not only because it shows more skill in building, but because its design is based on a structural motive which seems to have been wholly abandoned by the successors of the Mycenaean builders. The Treasury of Atreus (or Tomb of Agamemnon) was excavated in a hill, and consists of a long passage about 120 ft. by 21 ft. wide, with retaining walls of megalithic masonry on either side, terminating in a great entrance doorway. This doorway is flanked on either side by columns tapering downwards, and decorated with chevrons in a manner very similar to Norman work of the eleventh century, and apparently intended solely for ornament.[130] The entrance opened into a circular domed chamber about 48 ft. 6 in. in diameter, 45 ft. 4 in. high, out of which opened another smaller chamber. The dome, in section, is built on the curve of a parabola, formed with courses projecting over one another, and not set out radial to the curve of the dome—in other words it is not a true dome or arch, but a succession of corbels. The internal face of the dome is dressed down, and was covered with ornament of some sort, whether metal rosettes, or enamelled terra-cotta, or wholly in metal, possibly the famous gold of Mycenae, is not known. The whole of this chamber was covered in with a mound of earth, in accordance with the primitive custom of concealing the chieftain’s grave. It is impossible to find, in this extremely interesting monument or in the domed chamber of Orchomenos in Boeotia, any trace of future developments in Greek architecture. Both in intention and in its psychological background it seems almost as remote from the Doric Temple as the Great Pyramid itself. In point of fact architecture was still in a rudimentary stage. It has been proved abundantly that Architecture comes late in the sequence of the Arts. People could draw well, long before they could design. Among the cavemen, for example, there were admirable draughtsmen, but they had to make their drawings on the sides of caves. That there existed in the Minoan and Mycenaean ages skilful potters and metal-workers, is shown by the vases of Knossos and the gold cups found at Vaphio near Sparta; that they built habitable buildings and decorated them to the best of their ability is also proved, as, for example, the palace of Tiryns, but it has not yet been shown that their builders reached the degree of skilled design, at which building becomes architecture. Architecture had not yet found itself in Greece.
Then somewhere about 1000 B. C. came the Dorian invasions, and the art of Crete and Mycenae vanished into space—possibly the legend was right which said that the conquered people of the mainland carried it away with them to Asia. Anyhow, the three or four centuries following the Dorian invasions are a blank which future research may fill out for us, and so far as art is concerned, there appears to have been a détente, during which the new race was settling down to its conquest, finding itself, and assimilating something at any rate of the older civilization. The survival of such buildings as the Treasury of Atreus show that the Dorians were not simple barbarians, destroying all that came in their way. Even Sparta in its earlier days was not a mere military machine. Discoveries made in 1906-9 suggest that from the ninth to the seventh centuries B. C. Sparta had some sort of an art of its own showing traces of Asiatic influence in its pottery—a little later Sparta concluded an alliance with Croesus, King of Lydia, and Bathycles, an artist of Magnesia in Ionia, was treated with honour in Sparta. The Dorians were something more than fighters, they seem to have possessed some sort of civilization, and to have been endowed with a natural capacity for the arts, which after two or three centuries of experiment will find its own splendid expression within very definite and original lines. The legend of the return of the Heracleidae was to be justified by their later history. No merely imitative race could have evolved the perfect manner of the great Doric temples from the scraps of Egypt and the East, and the rudimentary buildings of Crete and Mycenae.
Greek architecture for the purpose of this study is Dorian architecture, and its elements are simple. It was evolved in the design of their temples, and with the exception of their theatres it was summed up in these temples. From the period during which Greek architecture was being built up to its maturity, say from the seventh century B. C. to the completion of the Parthenon in the fifth century B. C., the whole life of the Greek was coloured and dominated by his religion and its observances; and his religion was not the sinister mystery of Egypt, but on the whole a cheerful open-air Pantheism that gloried in the life and beauty of the visible world in which he lived. He himself was content to live in a poor house, so long as he had his market-place, his ceremonial theatre, and the glorious temples of his Gods. Moreover, to whatever depths the Athenians may have sunk in the time of St. Paul, in the heroic days of Pericles they were remarkable for constancy of purpose and the steadfastness of their ideals. They stood on the ancient ways, and it never occurred to them to abandon the tradition of their fathers, their business was to carry it forward to perfection. The result was that the architecture of their temples proceeded on lines that long use had made sacrosanct; and its technique is summed up in the history of two orders, the Doric and the Ionic.[131]
Now, the order, its character, dimensions and disposition, with the wall of the Cella (or enclosed shrine) within the colonnade, summed up the elements, the vocabulary, if one may so put it, of Greek architecture; and we come here at the outset on a curious quality of the Greek genius, and one that differentiates it from the Roman. The properties of wood and stone as materials are clearly different, things can be done with the one which are impossible with the other; but the Greeks either did not realize this or did not trouble their heads about it. They found that the post and lintel was a simple means of building, and they adopted it as their permanent method of construction. If the span became too wide, they thickened the posts (the columns of Paestum are 7 ft. in diameter) and increased the strength of the beam (the architrave). Hence the vast solidity of the Doric order of the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia. The Greek was incurious about construction qua construction. He found, in the column and the lintel, means perfectly adequate to realize his ideal of high unalterable beauty, and he was content. The Romans, who for a time were satisfied with these simple methods, became impatient of the constructive limitation of the post and lintel. They wanted to cover in great spaces, and to leave the floor unencumbered; and concentrating on this they arrived at the arch, the vault, and the dome, and so became the greatest builders of the world. To them, the orders were a mere appanage of decoration, which they never properly appreciated, of which they mistook the intention, adopted the worst elements, and often enough made a gross misuse. The Greeks took another line. They adopted the column and lintel once for all as the only possible method of construction, and devoted all their labours to the incessant refinement of this type, eliminating the unessential, arriving by constant selection at the most perfect expression of their purpose, and their purpose was not that of the Roman and the modern architect, mainly utilitarian, it was directed entirely to the aesthetic appeal, the appeal to the emotions through beauty of line, of form, and in a less degree of colour. ‘The whole fabric of Greek art goes to pieces when it is brought into contact with a purely utilitarian nation like Rome.’[132]
Of the two orders, the Doric and the Ionic, the Doric seems to me the purest embodiment of the true Greek spirit, in its faultless form, and its austere restraint and rejection of the unessential. It was, moreover, the order par excellence of the Greek temple of the mainland. The Erechtheum was the only Ionic temple of first-rate importance in Greece, and the employment of the Ionic order in Greece was confined to interiors and minor buildings. As for the Corinthian order, the favourite order of the Romans, it was scarcely recognized by the Greeks. In all their great temples, in Greece, in Sicily, and Magna Graecia, they used the Doric order.
Fig. 2. TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE AT PAESTUM
How this order was arrived at we do not really know. Ingenious conjectures have been made as to its origin in wooden construction, and though some of these conjectures are more probable than others they leave us pretty well where we were in regard to the stages by which it reached its final form. It has been suggested that the Doric column originated in the wooden post of the earliest temples, such as are supposed to have existed in the Heraion at Olympia. The square post would have its angles taken off, and become an octagon, and the further elimination of the angles would gradually produce a form nearly circular in plan, in which the arrises of the chamfered angles would remain, and this might easily suggest to artists so sensitive as the Greeks, their further refinement and definition by a slight hollow between the arrises which would constitute the flutings of the Doric column. Its derivations from the Minoan and Mycenaean columns seems most improbable. There are two essential parts in the Doric column, the shaft and the capital (the Greeks did not use any base for this order). The Minoan columns taper downwards instead of upwards, an utterly unconstructional form, and though in the palace of Knossos and at Tiryns columns of this shape appear to have been used to carry lintels, the stone columns on either side of the entrance to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae were used for decorative and not for structural purposes. On the other hand columns of great massiveness tapering upwards had been used long before in Egypt; and though there is evidence against it, it still seems probable that the suggestion of the shaft of the Doric column may have come from Egypt. We first find it in Greece in the seventh century B. C. at the period when Psammetichus I (671-617 B. C.) opened Egypt to Greek trade and settlement. The Greek colony of Naukratis on the west side of the Nile delta was founded by Milesians about 650 B. C. and by the middle of the sixth century B. C. definite trade relations were established between Naukratis and the mainland of Greece. The Greek settlement at Daphnae on the eastern arm of the Nile appears to have been founded at about the same time as Naukratis, in both cases with the sanction and encouragement of the Egyptian king. The earliest Doric temples in Greece, Sicily, and Magna Graecia date from the end of the seventh century and early part of the sixth century. The nearness of date makes it probable that the shaft of the Doric order had its origin in the Egyptian column seen by some quick-witted Greek when trading in Egypt. When we come to the capital of the column, the rôles seem to be reversed, for we find nothing in Egyptian architecture to suggest the echinus moulding under the square abacus of the Doric column; whereas the Mycenaean column had a rudimentary capital which may have suggested the idea of the Doric capital. But the notable thing about it is that when we first come across the Doric capital in Sicily and Greece, it is already far in advance of anything that had gone before it in Greece, and it is quite different from the columns of Egypt. In the Doric temple of Corinth (650-600 B. C.) the columns have already reached the type form, the tapered shaft with its entasis or slight convex curvature in outline, its massive solidity (the ratio is one of diameter to four and a quarter of height), and the bold parabolic curve of the echinus moulding under the abacus of its cap. In this form, the Doric column was an absolutely fresh note in architecture. Archaic though they were, these columns at Corinth show that the Greeks were already on the track of those refinements of form, those optical corrections and compensations, which differentiate Greek architecture from that of any other race. The exaggeration in the entasis of the archaic column disappears, its tapering was diminished, its height increased, and the overhang of the capitals reduced, till in the Theseion (465 B. C.) and the Parthenon (450-438 B. C.) we reach the final inimitable type. The column, which at Paestum was not much over four times the height of its correct diameter, is now over five times, the great overhanging capitals are reduced to reasonable dimensions, the depth of the entablature is diminished, the axis of the column is slightly inclined inwards to give the impression of stability, the shafts have the slight curve or ‘entasis’ just sufficiently marked to prevent the outline of the column looking incurved; the lines of the stylobate, or continuous base, on which the columns stand, and the entablature which they carry, have a slight rise toward the centre in order to correct the impression of the lines sinking in the middle; the columns at the angles are thickened, because standing free with the light all round them they would otherwise appear smaller than the columns standing against the background of the building. Nothing was left to chance; every aspect of the building, the relation of every part to the whole, and of the whole to its part, was studied profoundly, so that there should be no failure in its perfect harmony. Except in Egyptian architecture, and there to a much smaller extent, nothing like this had been done before. What the Greeks did, was to formulate a rhythmical architecture, in which each part stood in a definite and considered relation to the whole, so that even in their ruined state these Doric temples give an irresistible impression of a great idea, a great architectural epic, in which each detail, however beautiful, was subordinated to the unity of the conception as a whole. It is this abstract quality which lifts Greek Doric so far above the ambitious art of later ages, and indeed above all but the very finest work of any period of architecture.