Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/278

 24fi GRECIAN ARCHITECTURE Part 1. much of its purely Asiatic character, and assumed certain forms and tendencies borrowed from the simpler and purer Doric style. If any temple in the Asiatic Greek colonies escaped destruction in the Persian wars, it was that of Juno at Samos. It is said to have been built by Polycrates, and api)ears to have been of the Doric order. The ruins now found there are of the Ionic order, 346 ft. by 190 ft., and must have succeeded the first mentioned. The apjiarent archaisms in the form of the bases, etc. which have misled antiquarians, are merely Eastern forms retained in spite of Grecian infiuence. More remarkable even than this was the celebrated Temple of Diana at Ephesus, said by Pliny to have been 425 ft. long by 220 ft. wide. Recent excavations on the site, however, carried out by Mr. T. Wood, prove that these dimensions apply only to the platform on which it stood. The temple itself, measured from the outside of the angle pillars, was only 348 ft. by 164, making the area 57,072 ft., or about the average dimensions of our mediaeval cathedrals. Besides these, there was a splendid decastyle temple, dedicated to Apollo Didymseus, at Miletus, 156 ft. wide by 295 ft. in length ; an octastyle at Sardis, 261 ft. by 144 ft. ; an exquisitely beautiful, though small hexastyle, at Priene, 122 ft. by 64 ft. ; and another at Teos. and smaller examples elsewhere, besides many others which have no doubt perished. Corinthian Temples. The Corinthian order is as essentially borrowed from the bell- shaped capitals of Egypt as the Doric is from their oldest pillars. Like everything they touched, the Greeks soon rendered it their own by the freedom and elegance with Avhich they treated it. The acanthus- leaf with which they adorned it is essentially Grecian, and we must suppose that it had been used by them as an ornament either in tlieir metal or wood work, long before they adopted it in stone as an archi- tectural feature. As in everything else, however, the Greeks could not help be- traying in this also the Asiatic origin of their ai"t, and the Egyptian order with them was soon wedded to the Ionic, whose volutes became an essential though subdued part of this order. It is in fact a composite order, made up of the bell-shaped capitals of the Egyptians and the spiral of the Assyrians, and adopted by the Greeks at a time when national distinctions were rapidly disappearing and when true and severer art was giving place to love of variety. At that time also mere ornament and carving were su]i])lanting the purer class of forms and the higher asjiirations of sculpture with M^hich the Greeks ornamented their temples in their best days. In Greece the order does not a})pear to have been introduced, or at