One system: platform, columns, beam
Strip a Greek building down and you find the logic of a table: vertical supports and a horizontal top. Architects call it post and lintel. The platform, the krepis, rises in steps; its top step, the stylobate (from stylos, column), carries the columns; the columns carry the entablature, the band of horizontal blocks that holds up the roof.
The columns follow one of three orders. The Doric belongs to mainland Greece and the western colonies, fluted and without a base; the Ionic to the cities of Asia Minor and the Ionian islands, on a base and with a scrolled capital; the Corinthian, with its leafy capital, appeared in the late Classical period and became common only in Hellenistic and Roman times.
The material changed over time. In the earliest temples the columns were wood; then came local limestone, sometimes coated with stucco as on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and finally marble. The Parthenon and the Temple of Hephaistos in Athens are built in Pentelic marble, quarried on Mount Pentelikon. Nor was it all white: painters were employed to decorate architectural elements, and at Delphi the round building of Athena Pronaia mixed white marbles with grey stone from Eleusis. The best architects also refined the straight lines. On the Parthenon the platform and the entablature curve slightly upwards in the middle, a correction whose purpose is still debated.
Temples: the most complete version
The temple is where the system reached its finished form, because it was the house of a god. The sequence of surviving examples shows the rules settling. At Corinth the Temple of Apollo (around 560 BCE), one of the earliest Doric temples on the mainland, has columns carved from single blocks of limestone more than 7 metres tall. The Temple of Aphaia on Aegina (about 500-490 BCE) stands on a three-stepped krepis with 6 columns on the front and 12 on each side. In Athens the Temple of Hephaistos (460-420 BCE), on the hill above the Agora, has 6 columns on the front and 13 on the sides.
Theatres: a hillside turned into seats
A Greek theatre needed a slope more than a building. The audience sat in the theatron (the place for watching, from theaomai, to watch), seats cut into or laid on a hillside; the chorus danced in the orchestra, the flat dancing floor at the bottom; behind it stood the stage building. Tragedy grew out of an Athenian spring festival, that of Dionysos Eleuthereios, but theatres spread to sanctuaries and cities across the Greek world.
The Theatre of Epidaurus, built around 340-330 BCE in the sanctuary of the healing god Asklepios, has an orchestra that is a perfect circle 20 metres across, a little less than the length of a tennis court. The 34 lower rows were extended in the mid-second century BCE with 21 more, raising the capacity to 13,000-14,000 people, who came for the games held in honour of Asklepios. At Delphi the theatre sits inside the sanctuary of Apollo; in its present form, restored in 160/159 BCE with funds from King Eumenes II of Pergamon, it seated 5,000.
Stoas and stadiums: buildings for crowds
The stoa is a long roofed colonnade, open on one side, where people could walk, meet and shelter from sun and rain. One of them gave its name to a school of philosophy: the followers of Zeno met in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa, in the Agora of Athens, and so were called Stoics.
Stadiums were even simpler. At Olympia the stadium, in its fifth-century BCE form, is a track 212.54 metres long between two banks of earth, with no stone seats; about 45,000 spectators sat on the banks. Two stone markers stand 192.27 metres apart, one Olympic stade (600 Olympic feet), a little less than two football pitches end to end. The word stadium comes from that unit.
Cities: walls, grids and houses
A Greek city often grew around a high point, the acropolis (from akros, highest, and polis, city). In Athens it was a fortress first, with a defensive wall in the thirteenth century BCE, and a sanctuary of Athena from the eighth. Below it lay the agora, the open square of the polis, and around both, the houses and the walls. From about 458 BCE Athens built the Long Walls, a protected corridor about 7 kilometres long (40 stades) down to its port at Piraeus, so the city could be supplied by sea even under siege.
New towns could be planned from scratch. Aristotle credits Hippodamus of Miletus with inventing the division of cities into regular blocks, and says he laid out Piraeus; the grid is still called the Hippodamian plan. Inside the blocks stood Greek houses built around a courtyard, many with an andron (men’s room), a dining room for the symposium, the drinking party, with space for 7 to 15 couches.
A system that outlived Greece
The rules were never frozen. The tholos at Delphi (about 380 BCE), a round building that Vitruvius attributes to Theodoros of Phocaea, combines a ring of 20 Doric columns outside with 10 Corinthian half-columns inside. And the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens tells the whole story in one building: begun in 515 BCE, left unfinished for about four centuries, resumed by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in 174 BCE with Corinthian columns, and completed by the Roman emperor Hadrian in 124/125 CE. Rome took the system from there and spread it across an empire.
Where to see it
In Athens: the Acropolis, the Temple of Hephaistos in the Ancient Agora and the Olympieion. In the Peloponnese: the theatre of Epidaurus, the stadium and temples of Olympia, and the Temple of Apollo in Ancient Corinth. At Delphi, the theatre in the sanctuary of Apollo and the tholos in the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, a short walk down the road. Opening hours change with the season; check the official site of each before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003); “Theater in Ancient Greece”; “The Symposium in Ancient Greece”; chronology of Ancient Greece.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Theatre of Epidaurus, Theatre of Delphi, Tholos of Athena Pronaia, Stadium of Olympia, Temple of Hephaistos, Temple of Apollo at Corinth, Temple of Aphaia, Olympieion.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Acropolis, Athens (404); Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus (491); Archaeological Site of Delphi (393); Archaeological Site of Olympia (517).
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.107.1 and 2.13.7; Aristotle, Politics 2.1267b (Perseus Digital Library).
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Stoicism”.
