DOJBIC.] AECHITECTUEE 403 these light wooden structures we see the origin of the orders, by the earliest stone columns known being the most massive and if we turn to Egypt, the mother of the arts and sciences, we shall find many things in some of the most ancient structures which may have furnished an idea of the Doric arrangements to the fertile imagination of the Greek. Allusion has already been made to the well-known facade at Beni Hassan, on the Nile, as giving us a very likely prototype of the Grecian Doric column. Of the triglyph, the most distinguishing part of the Doric entablature, there are many indications in the early works of Upper Egypt ; and in the structures of the Ptolemies they are still more evident, though it may be objected that in them the indications were borrowed from the Greeks after the Macedonian conquest. But it must be borne in mind that the Egyptian nation did not change its character, religion, or usages by the change of its governors ; and the Egyptians were, through the whole period of their existence as a nation, an originating and not an imitative people ; whereas the Greeks seized on a beauty wherever they found one, and made it their own by improving it. To the question, why the Greeks cannot be allowed to have originated that beautiful style of archi tecture which they brought to the perfection it displays in their works, it may be sufficient to answer, that it would be against the common course of events if it were so. It is remarkable that, in Greece, the earliest specimen of columnar architecture that presents itself displays the chief characteristics which are found in works of periods when learning and civilisation were at their acme in that country. It will be convenient to give here at the outset a list of the principal Greek buildings. Tabular List of Principal Greek Temples, dec. 1 Site of Temple, !tc. Date. B.C. C< 1
8 d 8 6 6 6 8 B e 6 (, 7 4 <) li. 1 S Order. Assos ~ f c.COOJ to ( 500 I (480) 1400; 480 470 460 438 435 (finis.) (CA36[ 420 410 336 836 353 j- 335 T. of Jupiter Minerva Do Jupiter Juno Concord Jupiter On the Ilissus 18 14 I.: 14 14 ]> 14 IS 18 13 l;i 14 Doric .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Do. .. Ionic .. Do. .. Peripteral Peripteral Dipteral Peripteral Do. Do. Do. Pseudodipteral Peripteral Do. Do. Engaged Amphiprostyle Do. Peripteral Do. Do. Do. Do. Dipteral Irregular Dipteral Corinth Selinus (3d Temple) . Do. Segesta Syracuse PiEstum (Hypsethral) Do Do Do Do Athens Do Do Theseum Parthenon ... Propyljcura ... Jupiter Apollo Do Minerva 6 8 6 g 111 (i i :i 17 18 _ ] Doric .. Do. .. Do Do Do Ionic Do Do. (finished) Do Olympia Bassjas (Phipalia) .... BraLehidse, Ionia Erechtheum (Athens) Priene Ephesus Diana Mausoleum ... s L II Ionic Do Corinthian nalicarnassus C. of Lysicrates, Athens The Grecian Doric (Plates VIII, IX., X.) Vitruvius gives several accounts of the origin of the Greek Doric order. He states first that " Dorus (the son of Hellenus and of the nymph Orseis), king of Achaia and of all the Peloponnesus, having formerly built a temple to Juno iu the ancient city of Argos, this temple was found by chance to be in that manner which we call Doric." In 1 Tlie c,ngle columns are counted each way. another place he deduces the arrangements of the order from thoseof a primitiveloghut, scttlingwith the utmost precision what, in the latter, suggested the various parts in the former. But he also tells us that the Doric column was modelled by the Grecian colonists in Asia Minor in the proportions of a human figure, and was made six diameters in height, because a man was found to be G times the length of his foot. But this story, even supposing it to be rational, does not coincide with the Greek Doric at all, but, if with anything, with the Roman. In the Greek examples, this order may be divided into three parts, stylobate, column, and entablature (Plate VIII. fig. 4). The stylobate is from two-thirds to a whole diameter of the column in height, in three equal courses, which recede gradually the one above from the one below it, and on the floor or upper step the column rests. That graduation, it may be remarked, does not appear to have been made by the ancients to facilitate the access to the floor of the stoa or portico, but on the principle of the spreading footings of a wall, to give both reol and apparent firm ness to the structure, both of which it does in an eminent degree. The column varies in height in different examples, from four diameters, as at Corinth, to six diameters, as at Suniuni. Of this the capital, including the necking, is rather less than half a diameter : in those cases in which a necking does not exist, the capital itself occupies nearly the same proportion (Plate VIII. figs. 4 and 9; Plate IX. fig. 4). The shaft diminishes in a slightly curved line, called an entasis, from its base or inferior diameter upwards to the hypotrachelium, where the diameter is from two- thirds to four-fifths of that at the base. It is the iii- ferior diameter that is always intended when the term is used as a measure of proportion. The capital consists of a necking, an echinus or ovolo, and an abacus; the necking is about one-fifth of the height of the capital, and the other two members equally divide the remaining four- fifths; when there is no necking, the ovolo occupies the greater proportion of the whole height. The abacus is a square tablet, whose sides are rather more than the inferior diameter of the column. The corbelling of the ovolo adapts it to both the diminished head of the shaft and the extended abacus, flowing into the one, and forming a bed for the other by means of a graceful cyma-reversa ; but its lower part is encircled by three or four rings or annulets, which are variously formed in different examples, and which give the echinus form to the great moulding, although it is, as we have said, part of a cyma-reversa. (Figs. C and 7 of Plates VIII. and IX.) The shaft is divided generally into twenty flutes ; but there are several examples with sixteen, and there is one with twenty-four. The flutes are sometimes segments of circles, sometimes semi-ellipses, and sometimes eccentric curves (Plate VIII. fig. 12; Plate IX. figs. 8, 14.) They always meet in an arris or edge, and follow the entasis and diminution of the column up through the hypotrachelium to the annulets, under which they finish, sometimes with a straight and sometimes with a curved head. At the base they detail on the pavement or floor of the stylobate. In one ex ample at Segesta the columns are not fluted at all, and in two others, at Cnidus and Delos, the flutes are marked at top and bottom only, but in these examples the columns were possibly not finished. The third part of the order, the entablature, ranges in various examples from one diameter and three-quarters to rather more than two diameters in height, of which about four-fifths is nearly equally divided between the architrave and frieze, while the cornice occupies the remaining one- fifth : this is in some cases exactly the distribution of
the entablature. (See Plate VIII. fig. 5; Plate IX. fig. 0.)