connection it may be noted that the buildings of the Ionic style offer other and very curious exceptions to the more usual treatment of sculpture when applied to buildings. Thus in the Erectheion itself, the principal frieze was of dark gray marble in smooth slabs, upon which were fixed figures in white marble in vigorous action, the scale small, and the whole composition much more nearly pictorial than anything in the Parthenon. Again, in the balustrade built about the little temple of Victory on the edge of the cliff at the west of the Acropolis, reliefs of moderate projection are treated with singular vivacity: draped goddesses in active and easily understood movement.
There is also in Greek architecture the beginning of the Corinthian[21] style, of which the best example known to moderns is the totally ruined Tholos[22] near Epidauros in the Morea, and the most familiar, that little monument in Athens, called the Choragic[23] Monument of Lysicrates: but for this style we must refer to the Roman buildings in which it reached its highest development.
When we come to consider more especially the traditional repute of Grecian architecture, and the influence which it has had in shaping the opinions of what we call the taste of sixty generations throughout all the European lands, we are brought at once to the work of the Roman imperial times. All the nationalities--all the peoples--which take their recent and existing social form and opinions in art and literature from the same common source, the all-embracing empire of Rome, have taken up Greek art as they have taken up Greek literature, as their chief and original guide to thought. Indeed it has been shown, and is accepted as true, that the chief mission of the great Roman empire was in preserving Hellenic thought in art and literature for the future. It is because of this, as has been truly said, that the works of Homer and Æschylus and of the Greek sculptors are plants growing in our own garden. They might have been, and but for the Roman empire they would be, as foreign to the modern world as are the thought and literature of Persia and India. It is therefore necessary to consider what Greek architecture was to the five or six centuries which followed its greatest epoch, and again what it was to the five or six centuries which followed the Middle Ages, in Europe. From 450 B. C. to 400 A. D., and again from 1400 A. D. to recent times, Greek thought in these matters of fine art was the central thing, the spring of life. To the peoples of antiquity Greek architecture was a guide and inspiration, even under the much altered conditions of a foreign and irresistible rule: it was constantly and uniformly the model. To the peoples who have built and designed since the fourteenth century, Greek art has been of weight generally as acting through the Roman styles of design, for it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the actual buildings of the Greek peoples in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Italy, and in Sicily, came to be known at all: but it was the Greek part in Roman imperial art that interested those Moderns. At the time of the first explorations and discoveries of Stuart, Revett, Penrose, Cockerell, Pennethorne, Texier, Renan, and the other explorers of the years from 1760 to 1850, the Greek buildings were in ruins. Not one single roof remained in place. Not one single building was so far preserved that the question could be definitely answered whether the temples had openings in the roofs for light in all or in any cases: so that the hypæthral[24] theory remains a theory only, and is apparently incapable of verification. On the other hand, the details, not only the mouldings and flutings and channelings, but also the carving in conventionalized leafage, were plainly to be seen and were capable of exciting the most enthusiastic interest. Thus Plate VIII shows the order and some other details of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor: the drawings having been made about 1766 under the direction of Dr. Richard Chandler and the architect Nicolas Revett. The general plan remained doubtful, but as it was evident that the buildings had received the most careful thought, with a view to their artistic character, and as, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proportion in the larger distributions of the building was esteemed the most important element of architectural greatness, it was taken for granted that the Greek buildings would be found to have also such excellence of proportion; and it was believed that this particular beauty could be enjoyed and judged by those who were patient and shrewd enough to combine the shattered ruins and deduce from them the original form of the buildings which they represent.