Built to be approached from the front
Walk round the Greek temple and every side looks much the same: a ring of columns, low steps on all four sides, no obvious back. A Roman temple has a back, and a very clear front. It stands on a podium, a high platform of stone, with a single staircase at the front leading up to a porch of free-standing columns. Behind the porch is the cella, the room that held the statue of the god. You climb towards it, face it, and enter it from one direction only.
That idea came from central Italy before it came from Greece. Etruscan temples already faced one way, with a deep columned porch in front and the rooms of the gods behind, and Rome’s earliest great temple on the Capitol followed that plan. From Greece, Rome took the columns, the capitals, the entablature and the decoration, and combined them with the Italian plan.
Columns that are only half there
Look at the side of a Roman temple and you will often see columns that stick out from the wall by only half their thickness. Architects call this layout pseudoperipteral, from the Greek for “false” (pseudo) “surrounded by columns” (peripteros): the building looks as though it has a colonnade all round, but only the porch has real, free columns. The rest are engaged, that is, built into the wall of the cella. The result keeps the look of a Greek colonnade on a building that is mostly wall.
Two temples that show it best
The Temple of Portunus, the god of river ports, stands near the Tiber in the old cattle market of Rome, the Forum Boarium. The building you see dates from about 80-70 BCE, on the site of an older temple of the late fourth or early third century BCE. It has four Ionic columns across the front, a podium faced with travertine, and half-columns along the walls, some in travertine and some in tufa from the Aniene. It survived because in the ninth century it became a church, later called Santa Maria Egiziaca, until it was deconsecrated in 1916 and restored as a temple.
The Maison Carrée at Nîmes, in southern France, is the best-preserved example. It was built in the first century CE in the forum of the Roman colony of Nemausus and dedicated to Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the intended heirs of Augustus, who both died young. Six Corinthian columns stand across the front, the rest of the colonnade is engaged, and the whole temple turns its face to the square. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 2023, as one of the earliest temples of the imperial cult in the provinces.
Why face only one way?
Because a Roman temple usually stood in a city square. In the forum, temples stood around the open space where people met, went to court and did business, and a temple raised on its podium and turned towards the square was seen by everyone. At Nîmes the Maison Carrée still faces what was once the forum.
The most famous Roman temple stretches the type almost to breaking point. The Pantheon keeps the porch of Corinthian columns and the pediment of a traditional temple, then puts behind it a round hall under a concrete dome.
Where to see it
In Rome, the Temple of Portunus stands in the open on Piazza della Bocca della Verità, and the Pantheon is in Piazza della Rotonda. In France, the Maison Carrée is in the centre of Nîmes.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Maison Carrée of Nîmes” (1569).
- Ministero della Cultura, “Tempio di Portunus” (Giornate Europee dell’Archeologia 2025); Turismo Roma (Roma Capitale), “Tempio di Portuno”.
- Ministero della Cultura, “Pantheon”.
.jpg){kind=link}