The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

Ruins on Acropolis at Athens

CHAPTER XXVIII. ART OF THE PERICLEAN AGE

ARCHITECTURE

[460-430 B.C.]

Policy united with natural inclination to induce Pericles to patronise the arts, and call forth their finest productions for the admiration and delight of the Athenian people. The Athenian people were the despotic sovereign; Pericles the favourite and minister, whose business it was to indulge the sovereign’s caprices that he might direct their measures; and he had the skill often to direct even their caprices. That fine taste, which he possessed eminently, was in some degree general among the Athenians; and the gratification of that fine taste was one means by which he retained his influence. Works were undertaken, according to the expression of Plutarch, in whose time they remained still perfect, of stupendous magnitude, and in form and grace inimitable; all calculated for the accommodation or in some way for the gratification of the multitude. Phidias was superintendent of the works: under him many architects and artists were employed, whose merit entitled them to fame with posterity, and of whose labours (such is the hardness of the Attic marble, their principal material, and the mildness of the Attic atmosphere) relics, which have escaped the violence of men, still, after the lapse of more than two thousand years, exhibit all the perfection of design, and even of workmanship, which earned that fame.c

But the Greeks had not attained all at once to the architectural perfection which we admire on the Acropolis. They had assigned their gods the crest of the mountains or the deep forests for their first abode; they desired to have them nearer to themselves and, from the earliest times, they built them dwellings, at first rustic and clumsy, but which were gradually embellished and attracted other arts with religious pomp; the poets celebrating the gods and their native country, the philosophers raising the great problems of nature and of the soul. The temple was the centre of Hellenic life.

But the gods, like men, have to reckon with time. Before sending out the radiations of their divine majesty from the midst of the wonders of art, those destined to become the glorious dwellers on Olympus were at first obscure and indefinite personalities, inhabiting the trunk of an oak, then wretched wooden structures, and later on houses of stone and sometimes of brass, like the Athene Chalciœcus of Sparta. It was only with the progress of civilised life that their habitation grew in size and loftiness. The true temples, and the most ancient of them, those of Corinth, Samos, and Metapontum—date only from the seventh century.

The Greeks were acquainted neither with the pointed arch nor the dome. Some have thought to find that at Tiryns and Mycenæ, but if some of the bays and galleries end in a point, it is because the courses draw closer and closer together and end by meeting at the top. The method is therefore clumsy and barbarous; it was abandoned for the lintel and the pediment.

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.