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HOW TO STUDY ARCHITECTURE

BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS




NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1917
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Copyright, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
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The author gratefully acknowledges the critical assistance given to him on certain points by Professor William H. Goodyear, W. Harmon Beers and William Warfield; and his indebtedness to Caroline Caffin for compiling the index and to Irving Heyl for several architectural drawings. For some of the illustrations he has put himself under obligations to the following publications, through the courtesy of the Librarian of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—“Histoire de l’Art,” by Perrot et Chipiez; “Assyrian Sculptures,” by Rev. Archibald Paterson; “Monuments Modernes de la Perse,” by Pascal Coste; “Ruins of the Palace of Diocletian at Spalato” by R. Adams, and “The Annual of the British School at Athens.{vii}{vi}”

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Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting share the distinctive title of the Fine Arts, or, as the Italians and French more fitly call them, the Beautiful Arts; the arts, that is to say, of beautiful design. They are known by their beauty.

By their beauty they appeal to the eye and through the eye to the mind, stirring in us emotions or feelings of pleasure—a higher kind of pleasure than that which is derived solely from the gratification of the senses—the kind which is distinguished as æsthetic.

The term æsthetic is derived from a Greek word, meaning perception. Originally it described the act of perceiving “objects” by means of the senses—“objects” meaning anything that can be perceived through the senses. But the term æsthetic has come to have another meaning, especially in respect to sense-perceptions derived from seeing and hearing. It means that the perception gives us pleasure, because it stirs in us a sense of beauty. It may do so without any conscious activity on the part of our mind. We may be absorbed in the delight of the sensation; or it may appeal to our mind—to our memory or imagination—in such a way as to set us{4} thinking and feeling not only about the immediate “object” but also about something which our mind associates with it.

For example: by simple sense-perception we discover that one tree is taller than another, or that one tree is an elm, another a silver birch. Our perception may stop there; but not if we are in a mood to contemplate. Then the perception that one tree is taller than the other may be followed by the feeling that the taller tree gives us more satisfaction. It may seem to us to be a better proportioned tree: its parts are more pleasingly related to the whole mass; or it may seem to be in a fitter relation to the spot it occupies and to the other “objects” near it. Again, having ascertained by pure sense-impression that one tree is an elm and the other a silver birch, we may find ourselves thinking about the qualities of difference presented by the two trees. With what splendid assurance the elm trunk rears up! How majestically the branches radiate from it and bear their glorious masses of abundant foliage! On the other hand, how dainty are the stems and branches of the silver birch, how delicately graceful the sprays of tiny leaves! “How sensitive!” perhaps we say. For to our imagination the slender tree may seem to be endowed with senses that respond to every movement of the air, to every glancing of the sunlight.

In all these cases we have gone beyond mere sense-perception. We are no longer interested only in the “object.” Our interest has become subjective. We are interested in the subject not the object of the verb, to perceive—the subject who perceives, in this case, ourself; how the thing affects oneself; how it stirs in one a sense of beauty. By this time our thoughts may have been{5} withdrawn from the concrete object and have passed on to “abstract” ideas, suggested by the object. It is grandeur of growth, as embodied in the elm, fragile tenderness, as expressed in the birch, that absorb our thought; and the wonder also how qualities so different can survive the rude shocks of nature, and find, each its special function in the scheme of nature’s beauty.

In thus feeling external objects through our own experience of life and our own sense of beauty, we are employing the sense-perception that is specially called æsthetic. And it is in the degree to which objects of architecture, sculpture, or painting have the capacity of stimulating this æsthetic appreciation that they properly belong in the company of the Fine Arts.

Architecture is the science and art of building structures that, while in most cases they serve a useful purpose, are in all cases designed and built with a view to beauty. Their motive is beauty as well as utility.

In certain instances, as, for example, the triumphal arch, the motive may seem to have been solely one of beauty. On the other hand, when we recall that the arch was erected as a memorial to some great man or some great exploit—the Arch of Titus, for example, commemorating this general’s capture of Jerusalem—the imposing dignity of the structure, by compelling attention and exciting admiration, would actually serve the purpose for which it was erected.

Indeed, the distinction which people are apt to draw between the useful and the beautiful is not necessarily so sharp as is supposed and is largely founded upon ignorance or a mistaken attitude toward life. The tendency to be satisfied with the utility of a thing and to{6} regard beauty as a fad, impractical and wasteful, shows that, although our civilisation may have progressed in some respects, it has fallen back in others. For there is nothing more surely certain in the history of human progress, than that, while primitive man had to exercise his ingenuity in providing for the necessities of life and in the making of tools, implements, utensils, and so forth to achieve his needs, he was not satisfied that his work should be merely useful. He had a mind to make it pleasing in shape and by means of ornament. And this attention to beauty grew as men grew in civilisation, becoming most conspicuous as their civilisation reached its highest point; and continued through the ages, until machinery began to replace the individual craftsman.

For the individual craftsman, responsible for making a thing from start to finish, must, if he is worth a hill of beans, take a personal pride in making it as well as he can. As the Bible relates of the Supreme Creator, “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” And the craftsman, so long as he is free to create out of his own knowledge and his own feeling, must be able to feel this, because there is an instinct in him, an imperative need of his own nature, that he shall be proud of his work. It is a wonderful fact of human nature that when it works freely, putting forth all its capacities, it is prompted by this instinct, not only to make useful things but also to make them well and as beautiful as may be.

But gradually machinery took away the workman’s control of his work. He ceased to design, lay out, and carry through all the details of his work to a finish. He has come to be intrusted with only a part of the opera{7}tion, and that is performed under the control of a machine that turns out the work with soulless uniformity. The craftsman has degenerated into a repeater of partial processes; he has become the servant of a machine; a cog in a vast mechanical system. And, with the development of high power machines the output of production has been increased, until quantity rather than quality has tended to become the ambition of the system.

It has followed as a logical result of this taking away from millions of men and women the privilege of being individual craftsmen, creators of their own handiwork, that they have grown indifferent to the quality of the work turned out; taste, which means the ability to discriminate between qualities, has diminished and a general indifference to the element of beauty has ensued.

Of all the Fine Arts, Architecture is closest to the life of man. It has been developed out of the primitive necessity of providing shelter from the elements and protection against the assaults of all kinds of aggressors. And chief among the aggressors against which primitive man sought to defend himself were the mysterious forces of nature which his imagination pictured as evil spirits. To ward off these and to enlist the support of kindly spirits represented a necessity of life that developed through fetish worship into some positive conception of religion. This need was embodied in structures, which, originating in the selection or erection of a single stone, gradually became composed of an aggregation of stones variously disposed, in heaps, in geometric groups of single stones, or in the placing of stones horizontally upon two or more vertical supporting stones.

In these crude devices to mark the burial places of{8} dead heroes and to provide for the necessities of religion, primitive man used the stones as he found them, with a preference for those of enormous size, to ensure permanency. Meanwhile, in the huts that he erected for the living, it is reasonable to suppose that, when available, the more perishable material of timber was employed. And here, again, he would use at first the smaller limbs, planting them in the ground in a circle or square and drawing them together at the top, so that they took the shape of a heap of stones; and covering them with skins, so that they became the prototype of the tent. Then gradually he would employ stouter timbers, planting them upright and keeping them in place at the top with horizontal timbers. On these would be laid transverse beams to form a roof; the spaces between the beams, as between the uprights of the walls, being filled in with wattles of twigs or reeds and rendered still more impervious to weather by a coating of clay or mud.

The efforts of primitive builders, it is true, are rather of archæological than of architectural significance, yet they have this much to do with architecture, that in them are to be discovered the rudiments of the art. For by the time that man had superimposed a stone horizontally upon two vertical ones, he had hit upon the principle of construction, now variously styled “post and lintel” or “post and beam” or “trabeated,” that is to say, “beam” construction. The embryo was conceived that in the fulness of time would be developed into the trabeated design of the Egyptian temple and the column-and-entablature design of Classic architecture. From the colossal, monolithic form, still preserved, for example, in Stonehenge, there is a direct progression to the highly organised perfection of the Parthenon.{9}

It is this fact that makes the study of architecture so vitally interesting. Its evolution has proceeded, stage by stage, with the evolution of civilisation. Having its roots in necessity, it has expressed the phases of civilisation more directly and intimately than have the other Fine Arts; while the comparative durability of the materials in which it has been embodied has caused more of its records to survive. Even out of the fragments of architecture it is possible for the imagination to visualise epochs of civilisation long since buried in the past; while the memorials that have been preserved in comparative integrity stand out through the misty pages of history as object lessons of distinct illumination.

Accordingly, one purpose of this book represents an attempt to study the evolution of architecture in relation to the phases of civilisation that it immediately embodied; to find in the monuments of architecture so many “sermons in stone”—discourses upon the character, conditions of life, the methods and the ideals of the men who reared and shaped them.

And this involves the second purpose, that we shall try to study architecture as it actually evolved in practice. Remembering that it originated in the need of making provision for certain specific purposes, in a word, that its motive primarily was practical, moreover, that from the first it has been the product of invention, we will try to study it in relation to man’s gradual mastery of material and the processes of building. We will regard architecture in its fundamental significance as the science and art of building; tracing, as far as is possible, the stages by which man has met the problems imposed upon him by the purpose of the structure and by the{10} conditions of the material available; how he gradually surmounted the difficulties of building, step by step improving upon his devices and processes and thereby creating new principles of construction, and, further, how the practical operations of one race and period were carried on, modified, or developed by other races, under different conditions and in response to differences of needs and ideals.

And, while thus studying architecture as the gradual solution of practical problems of construction we will also keep constantly in mind the stages by which as man’s skill in building progressed, so also did his desire to make his structures more and more expressive of his higher consciousness of human dignity. How age after age built not only to meet the needs of living but also to embody its ideals of the present and the future life; how hand in hand with growing skill in workmanship was evolved superior achievement in artistic beauty.

Our methods of study shall follow, as far as possible, the architect’s order of procedure. Given a site and the commission of erecting thereon a building for a specific purpose, the architect first concerns himself with the plans: the ground plan, and, if the building be of more than one story, the several floor plans. He lays out in the form of a diagram the lines that enclose the building and those that mark the divisions and subdivisions; indicating by breaks in the lines the openings of doors and windows and by isolated figures the position of columns or piers which he may be going to use for support of ceilings and roofs. The disposition of all these particulars will be determined not only by the purpose of the building, but also by the character of the site and by the{11} nature of the materials and method of construction that the architect purposes to employ.

Then, having acquired the habit of thinking of a building as having originated in a plan, we will follow the building as it grows up out of the plan, taking vertical form in what the architect calls the elevation, or, when he is speaking specifically of the outside of the building, the façades. Sometimes we shall study one of the diagrams, which he calls a section, when he imagines his building intersected by a vertical plane that cuts the structure into two parts. The one between the spectator and the cutting plane is supposed to be removed, and thus is laid bare the system of the interior construction-work.

In studying the exterior of a building, therefore, we shall keep in mind the interior disposition, arising out of the planning, and acquire the habit of looking on the outside of a building as logically related to the interior. The design of a building will come to mean to us not a mere pattern of façade, arbitrarily invented, but an arrangement of vertical and horizontal features, of solid surfaces and open spaces, that has grown out of the interior conditions and proclaims them.

In a word, we shall regard a work of architecture as an organic growth; rooted in the plan, springing up in accordance with constructive principles; each part having its separate function, and all co-ordinated in harmonious relation to the unity of the whole. For we shall find that unity of design is a special element of excellence in architecture; a unity secured by the relations of proportion, harmony and rhythm established between the several parts and between the parts and the whole. And, since architecture is primarily an art of practical utility,{12} all these relations are equally determined by the principle of fitness; in order that each and every part may perform most efficiently its respective function in the combined purpose of the whole edifice. For this is the first and final criterion of organic composition.

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The various remains that exist of prehistoric structures, though scattered widely over different parts of the world, present a general similarity of purpose and design.

The earliest examples of domestic buildings are the lake-dwellings which have been discovered at the bottom of some of the Swiss lakes, as well as in other countries both in the Eastern and Western hemispheres. They consist of huts, rudely constructed of timber, erected on piles, sometimes in such numbers as to form a fair-sized village. Their purpose was apparently to afford security against sudden attacks of enemies, the danger of wild beasts and snakes and the malaria and fever of the swampy shores, while bringing the inhabitants nearer to their food supply and offering a crude but ready means of sanitation. The system still survives among the natives of many tropical countries and has its analogy in the boat-houses that throng the Canton River in China.

More important, however, archæologically as well as in relation to the subsequent story of building, as it gradually developed into the art of architecture are: the single huge stone, known as a Menhir; the Galgal or Cairn of stones piled in a heap; the Tumulus or Barrow, composed of a mound of earth and the Cromlech.

The single stone seems to have been regarded as an object of veneration and a fetish to ward off evil spirits. It may have been the primitive origin of the Egyptian{14} obelisk, the Greek stele and the modern tombstone. From the galgal and barrow may have been developed the pyramids of Egypt and the truncated pyramid which we shall find to be the foundation platforms of temples in various parts of the world while the cromlech is the prototype of temples.

Two stones were set upright and a third was placed upon the top of them. This represents in rudimentary form the so-called “post and beam” principle of temple construction. Sometimes two or four uprights were surmounted by a large flat stone. It had the appearance of a gigantic table and is called a Dolmen. It is conjectured that this was a form of sepulchral-chamber, in which the corpse was laid, being thus protected from the earth that was heaped around the stones into a mound. If so, the Dolmen is the origin of the sepulchral chamber that was embedded in the Egyptian pyramid.

Meanwhile, an intermediary stage between the highly developed pyramids and the primitive dolmen is represented in the Altun-Obu Sepulchre, near Kertsch in the Crimea. Here the mound is faced with layers of shaped stones, with which also the chamber and the passage leading to it are lined. The ceilings of both are constructed of courses of stone, each of which projects a little beyond the one beneath it, until the diminishing space is capped by a single stone. In the angle of masonry thus formed is discoverable the rudimentary beginning of the arch.

It is also convenient here to note, though it anticipates our story, the more elaborate example of this principle of roofing which is shown in the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenæ in Greece. In this instance, moreover, there is a farther approximation toward the arch, since the{15} projections of the stones have been cut so as to present a continuous line. And these contour lines are slightly concave and meet at the top in a point, for which reason this class of tomb is known as bee-hive.

Another form of this method of angular roofing is seen in an Arch at Delos, which is part of a system of masonry that is known as Cyclopean, after the name of the one-eyed giant whom Ulysses and his followers encountered in Sicily, during their return from Troy. For the masonry is composed of large blocks of unshaped stone, the interstices of which are filled in with smaller stones. Here, too, the actual arch is composed of a repetition of huge, upright monoliths, supporting a series of single blocks, set up one against the other at an angle.

While, however, these primitive forms of roof construction prefigure the later development of the true arch, the student is warned in advance that they represent rather a feeling of the need of some such method of construction than any approach to a solution of the problem. For the latter, as we shall find later, consisted in discovering how to counteract the thrust of the arch; its tendency, that is, to press outward and collapse; whereas in the primitive construction this danger was evaded by embedding the roof in a mass of masonry or earth that made lateral strains impossible. The system, in fact, was more like that employed in shoring up the excavations in modern tunnelling and mining.

Meanwhile, this rude method of spanning an opening with more than one piece of stone was the primitive germ of the later development of arch, vault, and dome construction, just as the placing of a single horizontal stone on two upright ones is the prototype of columns and entablature. Thus the instinct of man, in earliest times,{16} reached out toward the two fundamental principles of architectural construction.

The most interesting examples of primitive structure are the so-called Cromlechs, of which that of Stonehenge, in England, is the best preserved. The unit of this and like remains is the “post and beam” formation, composed of a block of stone, supported on two uprights. In the case of Stonehenge this formation was repeated so as to form a continuous circle one hundred feet in diameter. Within this was a concentric circle, composed of smaller slabs, which enclosed a series of five separate post and beam structures on a horse-shoe plan. The latter is repeated by another series of slabs and in the centre stands the flat altar stone. Seventeen stones of the outer circle, varying from sixteen to eighteen feet in height, are still standing and in part connected by their beam slabs.

This impressive memorial stands on Salisbury Plain, eight miles north of the cathedral city of Salisbury, in the neighbourhood of which are many barrows. Was it then the temple of a burying place of mighty chieftains or was it erected in memory of some great victory in honour of the dead heroes and the nation’s god? According to Geoffrey of Monmouth (A.D. 1154) who is supposed to have compiled much of his history from Celtic legends, Stonehenge is a Celtic Memorial, erected to the glory of the Celtic Zeus.

Rhys, in his “Celtic Heathendom,” accepts the probability of this account and adds: “What sort of temple could have been more appropriate for the primary god of light and of the luminous heavens than a spacious open-air enclosure of a circular form like Stonehenge? Nor{17} do I see any objection to the old idea that Stonehenge was the original of the famous temple of Apollo in the island of the Hyperboreans, the stories about which were based in the first instance most likely on the journal of Pytheas’ travels.” Pytheas was a Greek navigator and astronomer of the second half of the fourth century B.C., who was a native of the Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles) and visited the coasts of Spain, Gaul, and Britain.

Situated some twenty miles to the north of Stonehenge is the Abury or Avebury monument. Its remains comprise two circles, formed of menhirs, which are enclosed within a large outer circle of monoliths, about 1250 feet in diameter. This was further surrounded by a moat and rampart, which suggest that the structure may have served at once the purposes of a place of assembly and a stronghold.

At Carnac, in the old territory of Brittany, in France, are the remains of about 1000 menhirs, some of which reach a height of 16 feet, disposed in parallel straight rows, forming avenues nearly two miles long. They are unworked blocks of granite, set in the ground at their smaller ends. The neighbourhood also abounds with tumuli, dolmens, and later monuments that belong to the Polished Stone Age.

Furthermore, remains of such monuments as we have been describing are found in Scandinavia, Ireland, North Germany (in Hannover and the Baltic Provinces); also in India and Asia Minor, in Egypt, on the northwest of Africa and in the region about the Atlas Mountains. This fact, assuming that the monuments are of Celtic origin, testifies to the wide-spread migrations of this im{18}portant branch of the Indo-European family which in prehistoric times swept westward in successive waves. It is known that this race also overflowed into Northern Italy and Spain. That none of their monuments of the Rough Stone and Polished Stone ages exist in these countries seems to point to the migration thither having been made at a later period.

From the time that the Celtic race finds its way into recorded history it has been recognised as pre-eminently characterised by artistic genius. The rude menhirs, under the combined influences of Christianity and art were in time replaced by Stone Crosses that in form closely approximate the thickset simplicity of the monolith, but are embellished with carved ornament. And the latter in its detail is evidently akin to the motives of decoration found upon the weapons and earthenware of the Bronze Age, combined with the interlace of lines, suggested by the example of weaving, and the use of motives derived from plant forms. These same principles of decoration were applied to the metal-work in which the Celt excelled and later to the decorated manuscripts in which he reached so high a degree of artistry. The Celtic artists in time also introduced human and animal figures into their designs, but always treated them solely as motives of decoration and never with the purpose of representing them naturally.

The prevalence of these decorative motives in ancient Asiatic and European ornament may have been due to the extended migrations of the Celts. But not necessarily; for they are equally to be found in the primitive ornament of the South Sea Islanders, North American Indians, and the inhabitants of Peru, Mexico, and Central America. Primitive man, in fact, shows a tendency to{19} similarity of motives and methods at corresponding stages of his evolution.

In the last three countries have been discovered some of the most remarkable remains of the Polished Stone Age and the Bronze Age. For it was to this stage—after how many centuries of development is only a matter of conjecture—that the mighty nations of the Incas, Aztecs, and others had attained, when the Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century overcame them and wiped out their civilisations.

Hitherto the most famous example has been the ruins of Cuzco, the imperial city of the Incas in Peru, which was captured by Pizarro; but the exploration of Professor Hiram Bingham has recently unearthed, also in Peru, Machu Picchu, a city of refuge, perched almost inaccessibly on the heights of the Andes. It is the belief of the explorer that this is the traditional city of Tampu Tocco, to which a highly civilised tribe retreated, when they were hard pressed by barbarian enemies and from which, legend says, they descended later to conquer Peru and found the city of Cuzco, under the leadership of “three brothers who went out from three windows.” Now Tampa means a place of temporary abode and Tocco means windows; and in the principal plaza of this newly discovered city has been found a temple with three windows.

Thus it is possible that it was actually a deserted city at the time of the Spanish invasion, held in reverence as the cradle city of the Incas. Anyhow, it escaped the knowledge and the ravages of the Spaniards and retains to-day its primitive state, unmixed with the additions of any subsequent civilisation.{20}

It occupies an immense area, only rivalled by that of Cuzco, and is constructed of stones, many of which weigh several tons, hewn into shape with stone hammers. Large portions of the mountain sides are built up with terraces, which were used for agricultural purposes and suggest an analogy with the “hanging gardens” of Babylon. No less than a hundred flights of steps connect the various parts of the city, which is divided into wards or “clan groups” by walled enclosures, enclosing houses and sometimes a central place of worship. The typical design of the houses is much like that of an Irish cabin—a ground story and a half story with gabled ends, each pierced by a small window. The wooden roofs have disappeared, but the stones, bored with a hole, to which the timbers were lashed, are still in place. In the burial caves bronze objects of fine workmanship have been discovered.

Among other noted remains of early buildings is the Teocalli or “House of the God” of Guatusco in Costa Rica. It shows a truncated pyramid of masonry, rising in steps, the top forming a platform on which the temple stands. A still more important example of this form of structure must have been the Teocalli of Tenochtitlan, the ancient name of Mexico City. Built about 1446, it was destroyed by the Spaniards and part of its site is now occupied by the Cathedral. According to accounts it comprised a truncated pyramid, measuring at the top, which was 86 feet from the ground, 325 by 250 feet. In the ascent it was necessary to pass five times round the structure by a series of terraces. On the platform were several ceremonial buildings, the terrible image of the god Huitzilopochtli, supposed to be the one that is now in the Museum of Mexico City, and the sacrificial stone.{21} Upon the latter were sacrificed immense numbers of human victims; report saying, though no doubt with exaggeration, that at the dedication of the temple seventy thousand were slaughtered to appease the sanguinary appetite of this hideous idol.

The exteriors of the latest remains of Central America and Mexican primitive civilisation are embellished with ornament, the motives of which exhibit curved and rectangular meanders and interlacings, derived from the example of weaving and plaiting, as well as vegetable and animal forms. Often, as in the Casa de Monjas in Yucatan, the ornament is so profuse that it obscures the character of the structure, while the forms are fantastic and extravagant and in some instances horribly grotesque. Their intention apparently was to strike awe into the spectator.

Most of what we have been studying in this chapter comes under the head of archaeology rather than of art. Nevertheless, since it represents the gradual approach of civilisation toward the artistic conception, it is well worth attention.{23}{22}

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The most ancient civilisation known to us is that of Egypt, and the knowledge of it is mainly derived from its architectural remains and the sculpture, painting, and inscriptions with which they are decorated. In addition, there are the records written upon papyri, the Biblical books of Exodus, and the history of Manetho, an Egyptian priest, who lived about 250 B.C. By this time Egypt had been subdued by Alexander the Great and had passed under the rule of the Ptolemies. So Manetho wrote in Greek, but only fragments of his work have survived, through quotations made from it by Eusebius, Josephus, and other historians.

It is from all these materials that scholars have endeavoured to piece together some sort of connected history of the period covered by Manetho; the difficulty being increased by the fact that the Egyptian system of chronology reckoned by dynasties and computed the time by the years of the reigning sovereign, beginning anew with each succession. Furthermore, the inscriptions omit references to any interruptions that occurred in the sequence of the dynasties; recording only the periods of Egyptian supremacy and leaving out those in which the country suffered from the domination, short or long, of foreign conquerors.

Accordingly, while Manetho names the first ruler of the First Dynasty as Menes, there is nothing but the conjecture of scholars as to the date; and the latter has been{26} variously estimated as from 3892 to 5650 years before Christ.

It will be a help at the outset to summarise the Dynasties under two heads: (A) those of Independent Egypt; (B) those of Subject Egypt.

A. Dynasties of Independence.

1. I-X—The Ancient Empire; Capital, Memphis in Lower Egypt. Lasted about 1500 years.

2. XI-XIII—The Middle Empire, or First Theban Monarchy; Capital, Thebes in Upper Egypt. Lasted about 900 years.

3. XIV-XVII—Hyksos Invaders occupy Lower Egypt; the Egyptian princes rule as vassal princes in Upper Egypt: from 400-500 years.

4. XVIII-XX—The New Empire or Second Theban Monarchy. The Great Epoch of Egyptian power and art. Lasted about 600 years and ended about 1000 B.C.

B. Dynasties of Subjection.

5. XXI-XXXII—The Period of Decadence under various foreign rulers; sometimes called the Saitic Period, because the first conquerors, the Libyans, made their capital at Sais. Lasted from about 1000-324 B.C.

6. XXXIII—The Ptolemaic Period of Greek rule, following the Conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great; 324-31 B.C.

7. XXXIV—The Roman Rule: Egypt a Province of the Roman Empire; 31 B.C. to 395 A.D. At the latter date it became a part of the Eastern Roman Empire.

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In 389 the emperor, Theodosius, issued an edict proclaiming that Christianity was to be recognised as the religion of Egypt. In consequence of this change all knowledge of the old form of writing gradually disappeared and the antiquities of Egypt remained a sealed book for some fourteen centuries.

The commencement of the modern interest in Egypt, as a mine of historical, archæological, and artistic lore, dates from Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion, for he took with him a body of savants to explore the topography and nature of the country and its antiquities. The results of their labours were published in 1809-13 in twenty-five volumes, illustrated with 900 engravings.

Meanwhile, in 1799, Captain Boussard, an engineer under Bonaparte, had discovered in the trenches a tablet of black basalt, inscribed with three kinds of writing, one of which was Greek. From the name of the village near which it was found it is called the Rosetta Stone and is now in the British Museum. Various attempts were made to decipher through the Greek the other two scripts, which were, respectively, hieroglyphic and the demotic or popular writing-form of ancient Egypt.

Finally, the clue was discovered by the French scholar, Champollion. He found there had been three kinds of characters which represented successive developments of one system of writing: that in the hieroglyphic each letter was represented by a picture-form; that in the hieratic or priestly writing, these forms were represented in a freer and more fluent way, which was further simplified in the demotic characters, used generally by the scribes. Two of these had been repeated as nearly as possible in the Greek text. It is out of this discovery that Egyp{28}tology, or the science which concerns itself with the writing, language, literature, monuments, and history of ancient Egypt, is being gradually developed. Yet the subject is still involved in great uncertainty, owing to the difficulty in discovering principles of grammar, so that the translations of one scholar vary from those of others and all reach only the general sense, without assurance of accuracy.

The civilisation of a country is always largely determined by its geographical character and the latter, in the case of Egypt, is of exceptional significance. Herodotus called Egypt the “Gift of the Nile.” The great river created it and has continued to preserve it. For the country comprises a narrow strip of soil varying from 4 to 16 miles in width, bordering the two sides of the stream, and extending in ancient times, as far as the second cataract, a distance of some 900 miles; approximating, that is to say, the distance from New York to Chicago or from London to Florence. It is bounded by rocky hills, and, as it reaches the Mediterranean, fans out into a delta of flat lands, the various streams being kept in place by dykes. The only thing that has saved this country from being swallowed up in the desert is the annual rise of the river, succeeding the tropical rains in the interior and the melting of the snow in the mountains of Abyssinia. This floods the lowlands and leaves behind an alluvial deposit, so richly fertile that the soil, warmed by constant sunshine, yields three harvests annually. Meanwhile, it is a remarkable fact that the records of ancient times tally with those of to-day, both showing that the amount of the rise varies but little from year to year.{29}

Before considering how these natural features of the country affected the civilisation of its inhabitants, a fact is to be noted. At the point of time when Manetho commenced his history of the Egyptians, variously estimated from about 4000 to about 6000 years before the Christian Era, they appear as a people already possessed of a high degree of civilisation, surrounded by inferior races. An immense interval of progress separates them from the earliest conditions that we considered in the previous chapter. By what stages did they reach this footing of superiority and through what length of time; moreover, what was the origin of their race? To these questions of profound interest there is no answer forthcoming. Some recent scholars are disposed to believe that the civilisation of Egypt, as we first meet with it, had been preceded by a still more remote civilisation in Babylonia; but as yet they have not shaken the accepted view that priority in civilisation belongs to the Land of the Nile. So far as knowledge exists, civilisation appeared first in Egypt and by a wonderful combination of circumstances, continued up to historic times.

The tenacity of the civilisation of the Egyptians is a counterpart of the tenacity of character of the people, as a result primarily of their natural surroundings. Within the limits of Upper and Lower, that is to say of Southern and Northern Egypt, the Nile has no tributaries. Consequently, there was at first no urge to the inhabitants to push outward; and every inducement to cling to their own strip of territory. Moreover, since the periodic river floods were constant, there was every inducement, nay almost necessity, that they should cling to the methods by which they had learned to utilise them. Hence, conservatism was forced upon them and became ingrained{30} in their character and institutions. It was further encouraged by their isolation; for the adjoining country was desert, meagrely occupied by nomad tribes. Accordingly, that tendency of every nation to consider itself the salt of the earth and especially favoured of the gods seemed justified abundantly in their case.

Again, their dependence on the Nile early taught them the habit of noting the seasons, while the necessity of husbanding the water in reservoirs and by irrigation made them skilled in engineering and generally resourceful. And these characteristics of method and constructiveness were reflected in the social organisation.

The King was the supreme head of the whole system, descendant of the Sun-god, Ra, the individual embodiment of the nation’s greatness, while beneath him the people were divided into the official class, middle class, and slaves. The first included generals, high-priests, officers, physicians, overseers, district-chiefs, judges, master-builders, scribes, and many others—officialdom being spun like a web over the life of the people. The middle class, composed of merchants, traders, ordinary priests, artisans, free working potters, carpenters, joiners, smiths, and agriculturists, enjoyed many of the privileges of the upper classes, but were not permitted to erect tombs, though their place of burial might be marked by a stele with inscriptions. The slaves were mere hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Title to all land, except that attached to the temples, was vested in the King and the land was worked for the State by slaves or let out at an annual rental. In connection with this subject compare the story of Joseph, especially Genesis xli.

Each administrative department had its own {31}troops—or, to use the modern word, corvée—of slaves, under an overseer who kept tally of work done and rations distributed. It was the troop, not the individual, that constituted the unit. Agriculturists ranked higher than the artisans; although the work of the latter was highly esteemed. The weavers made baskets, mats, and boats of papyrus leaves and produced linen of the finest quality as well as coarser grades. The carpenter, notwithstanding the scarcity of timber, did creditable work with the simplest kind of tools. Little variation was attempted by the potters in the forms of vessels, which were crude but often finished with fine glazes. The metal workers used gold, silver, bronze, iron, and tin; silver exceeding gold in value. Whence they procured tin is unknown, but the other metals came from the mines of Sinai and Nubia.

The processes of agriculture were of the simplest. The plough was formed of a sharpened stake, dragged by oxen; the crops were cut with sickles, and the grain was winnowed by casting it in the air, after which it was stored in large, tunnel-shaped receptacles, filled from the top by a ladder. While the Egyptians prided themselves on their immense herds of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and asses, the shepherds, living in the remote marshes, were “an abomination unto the Egyptians” (Genesis xlvi, 34).

Their recreations included the hunting of wild animals with dogs, while the men were armed with lasso and spear and occasionally a bow and arrows. In the marshy districts birds were brought down with a boomerang or caught in nets and traps. The people indulged in wrestling matches, gymnastics, ball-playing, quoits, and juggling, while work was performed to the accompaniments of music and singing, and music and dancing enlivened{32} the feasts. The instruments comprised the flute and a kind of whistle, the guitar, harp, and lyre, the last two having sometimes twenty strings.

The school, “bookhouse” or “house of instruction,” was presided over by a scribe and attended by children of all classes. The curriculum included orthography, calligraphy, and the rules of etiquette, together with practice in the technical work of the department for which the children were being trained.

The uniform male garment for all classes was an apron fastened around the loins. To this in early times the King added a lion’s tail and the noble a panther-skin. In the Middle Empire the apron took a pointed, triangular shape in front and became longer, while by degrees a single apron gave way to a short, opaque under-apron with a long, transparent one over it. The short apron, however, continued to be the sole garment of the priest. In time, the costume of the King included garments covering the upper part of the body, a practice which dates from the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the vigorous Queen Hatasu adopted the male costume. The uniform dress of women was a transparent robe hung from the shoulders by straps and reaching from the breasts to the ankles. In later times it was supplemented with a sleeved or sleeveless mantle.

These, and countless other particulars of daily life, are pictured with precise details, in coloured carvings and in paintings on the walls of tombs, so as to continue after death, for the benefit of the Ka or double, the conditions which the deceased had been accustomed to in life. This Ka was believed to be separate from the body, mind, or soul of the individual; an independent spiritual existence which, as long as it was present, ensured “protection, life,{33} continuance, purity, health, and joy.” Hence the care with which provision was made to induce it to remain with the individual when dead. For continuance of life after death was the cardinal principle of Egyptian religion. It was the spiritualised expression of the people’s intense conservatism; and the preservation of the body as a mummy and the taking of measures to ensure that the Ka would abide with it or, at least, visit it frequently, were the chief duties of the priesthood. The homes of the living, therefore, were considered of less importance than those of the dead; and, while few traces remain of dwellings or even of palaces, Egypt abounds with Tombs. These are the memorials of individuals, while the Temples embody the pride and glory of the national, collective life. Indeed, it would seem that during life the individual, except only the King, who represented the union of all, was regarded simply as a factor in the collective organisation of the community, the splendour and power of which was visualised in the Temples.

Hence the importance which was attached to size and beauty of colour in the Temple architecture. Evidence shows the Egyptians were not an intellectual race. That is to say, they were not given to speculation; nor did they carry their mathematical or scientific studies beyond the point at which they were needed for material and practical purposes. And equally devoid of abstract qualities was their imagination. It conceived of “better” in terms of “bigger,” and “best” in terms of “biggest.” Through all their centuries of civilisation they did not progress beyond the crude stage of finding sufficient satisfaction in constructing or possessing “the biggest thing on earth.” And the biggest was constructed by sheer force of numbers of slave-workers, at an immense human{34} sacrifice. It has been computed that every stone in the huge Temples cost at least one life.

Accordingly, the distinguishing features of their Temple architecture are colossal height and the spreading out over vast areas, as succeeding kings added to the original building another Court or Hall to demonstrate the grandeur of his reign.

And, to repeat once more, it was the conservatism, characteristic of the race, that encouraged this repetition of motives, while at the same time establishing conventionalised forms for the details. Individuality of artistic expression was curbed by the canons of form that the priests had laid down and enforced age after age. Meanwhile, in the scenes of life with which they decorated the walls, some latitude was allowed the painters and sculptors in the direction of naturalistic representation; and it was increased when, in later times, the influence of Cretan civilisation penetrated to Egypt.

We will conclude with a brief summary of the part played by the several Dynasties in the art which is discussed in the following chapter.

It is to be noted that no inscriptions survive from the first three Dynasties; but that with the Fourth commence the records which have been recovered from the Tombs or Mastabas.

To Snofru (Greek Soris, as given by Manetho) is attributed the stepped-pyramid at Sakkarah, while the four pyramids at Gizeh are known by the names of their builders Khufu or Cheops; Khafra or Chephren, and Menkara or Mycerinus. The Sixth Dynasty closed with the reign of Queen Nitocris, who is supposed to have faced with granite the Pyramid of Menkara, in which it is believed{35} her funeral chamber was constructed. After her reign a period of darkness intervened during which the power of the monarchy was gradually developed, until, with the beginning of the Eleventh Dynasty, the Government was established in Thebes.

The Kings of the Middle Empire, Usertesen I, II, and III, signalised their rule by reaching out beyond the limits of Lower and Upper Egypt. They conquered Ethiopia to the south and opened up trade to the eastward with Syria, and recovered possession of the mines of Sinai. Temples were built and great public works of irrigation carried out, while changes were inaugurated in writing and education. The process of development seems to have been continued even during the Hyksos usurpation. For these Asiatic invaders, whose race and origin are unknown—the term Hyksos meaning Shepherd Kings or Bedouin Chiefs—confined their occupation to Lower Egypt, while the Egyptian Kings continued to govern Upper Egypt as vassal princes.

It was an attempted interference with Egyptian self-rule that precipitated the expulsion of the Hyksos. The latter’s chief had demanded of the “Prince of the South” that he abandon the worship of Ra-Ammon for that of the Hyksos god. A refusal led to war which was brought to a successful end by Amasis or Ahmes I, first King of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

With the commencement of the New Empire Egypt entered upon an era of prosperity and power that were reflected in the grandeur of her art. It corresponded in Egyptian history to the age of Pericles in Athens; the Imperial Epoch of Rome, and the High Renaissance of the sixteenth century in Italy. Amenophis subdued the Libyans to the westward of the Delta. His successor,{36} Thothmes I, carried conquest as far south as the third cataract and annexed the land of Cush as a province. Having thus consolidated authority in the neighbourhood of Egypt, he invaded Palestine and Syria as far as the Euphrates. His daughter, Queen Hatasu, fitted out an expedition to the land of Punt (South Arabia) and brought back incense, wood, and animals, such as the dog-headed ape; all of which is duly recorded on the walls of her temple at Deir-el-Bahri. But the acme of power was reached by her half-brother, Thothmes III; for this monarch made fifteen expeditions, in the course of which he reduced the rising power of the Hittites and made himself master of the countries west of the Euphrates and south of Amanus. His two successors managed to hold together this great empire; but in time these foreign entanglements necessitated frequent expeditions.

By the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty the federation of the Hittites had been consolidated and Seti I advanced against them, claiming a victory which was at least not final, for they threatened his successor, Rameses II, who, however, made a treaty of peace with them and married the daughter of the Hittite king. Rameses II also invaded Palestine and afterwards penetrated as far as the Orontes. He reigned sixty-six years and it has been estimated that half the buildings in Egypt bear his cartouche; although in many cases he probably followed the practice of adding his own cartouche to buildings already existing.

It was during the reign of his son, Meneptah, that the Hebrew Exodus is supposed to have taken place; an event that indicates the weakening of the central authority, which was continued under this king’s successors. Finally, during the reign of Rameses III, of the Twen{37}tieth Dynasty, mercenaries were not only employed but allowed to settle in the country and during the remainder of the Rameseide Dynasty the monarchs became the tools of mercenaries and priests. Thus set in the decadence of power and art, which marked the Saitic Dynasty.

Then followed a short period of Persian domination, which was so hateful to the Egyptians that they welcomed Alexander as a liberator. He appointed as king one of his generals, Ptolemy, in whose family the succession continued through sixteen rulers of the same name. During this period Egypt became an intellectual centre, its splendid library being the nucleus of scholarship. It was by order or at least permission of Ptolemy Philadelphos, about 270 or 280 B.C., that the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek by seventy scholars, whence the version is known as the Septuagint. The Ptolemies signalised their rule by the restoration of the old temples and monuments, which had suffered from the havoc of invasions.

After the victory of Augustus Cæsar at Actium in B.C. 31 and the death of Cleopatra the following year, Egypt became, as we have already noted, a Roman province.{38}

The remains of monumental architecture in Egypt afford a remarkable opportunity of studying the development from primitive types of structure. The earliest, which comprise the pyramids, mastabas, and two examples of temples, represent developed forms of the tumulus and dolmen, while the later temples, which began to appear in the Twelfth Dynasty, exhibit their origin in the primitive hut of the country.

Great Sphinx.—Meanwhile among the earliest monuments, of uncertain date and origin, is the Great Sphinx of Gizeh. It is the prototype of the sphinxes that were afterwards used to form avenues of approach to the temples, being distinguished from the Greek type of Sphinx by the fact that the recumbent lion body is wingless and carries a male instead of female head and bust. The heads of the later sphinxes represented portraits of the reigning kings, the conception symbolised in the whole figure being the royal power. An inscription, however, upon a small temple, which was erected between the paws of the Great Sphinx in the Eighteenth Dynasty, records that it was made in honour of Harmachis, one of the forms of the Sun-god, Ra.

Hewn out of the living rock, it faces eastward, as if on guard over the pyramids and the entrance to the Nile Valley. The dimensions, when the sand was cleared from

{39}

the body in the nineteenth century, were found to be: length, 189 feet; height, 66 feet. The face, which was originally painted red, has lost part of the nose and beard, as the result of being used as a target by the Mameluke cavalry.

Pyramids.—The Pyramids, numbering over a hundred, were the sepulchres of the kings of the first twelve Dynasties. Some, for example, the one at Sakkarah, attributed to Senefrou of the Third Dynasty, are of the form known as stepped-pyramids, their sides ascending in six bold steps; there is one at Dashour which slopes steeply from the ground and then breaks to a gentler slope; but the usual type is an unbroken pyramid on a square base.

Three of these, situated at Gizeh, are of surprising size and known by the names of their builders: Cheops or Khufu; Chephren or Khafra, and Mycerinus or Menkara; all of the Fourth Dynasty. The largest of these, that of Cheops, known as the Great Pyramid, is 482 feet high, with a side length of 764 feet. It is, in fact, 150 feet higher than St. Paul’s Cathedral, 50 feet higher than St. Peter’s, while it covers an area nearly three times that of the latter.

The evolution of the pyramid form has been traced from the method of burial. In prehistoric times the body was laid in a square pit which was roofed over with poles and brushwood, covered with sand. The kings of the First Dynasty lined the pit with wood. Later a wooden chamber with a beam roof was erected within the pit, descent to which was by a stairway on one side. Still later, the whole was covered by a pile of earth, held in place by dwarf walls. Then, in the Third Dynasty, the earth was replaced by a mass of brickwork with a sloping passage leading down to the mummy chamber,{40} and subsequently stone was employed. The completed development is represented in the pyramids of Gizeh.

They are constructed of limestone upon a foundation of levelled rock and were originally finished on the outside with massive blocks of polished stone. The entrance is on the north side by a passage, which first descends and then rises to the principal chamber, which contained the king’s sarcophagus. This was lined on the east and west sides with immense stones, supporting several layers of horizontal blocks, crowned with a gable, formed of stones, which are so placed that they exert no thrust upon the stones below. A similar gable formed the ceiling of the Queen’s Chamber, which is situated at a lower level, while at a still lower level is a third chamber.

The statues and sculptured reliefs, discovered in the pyramids and mastabas of the Fourth to Sixth Dynasties, exhibit not only a highly developed skill in the cutting of hard and soft stone, and ivory and wood and in beating copper but also remarkable expression of character. The minute statuette in ivory of Cheops, though the face is only about a quarter of an inch in length, is a portrait of extraordinary force, and the life-size figure of Chephren, carved in hard diorite, is equally distinguished for its serenity and power. The character of all the sculpture, even of low-reliefs of everyday scenes, is but little naturalistic, being impressed with a certain grandeur, as of something inevitable and immutable.

The earliest example of wall-painting appears at Sakkarah in the Pyramid of Onas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty; where, amid the record of ritual observances, is depicted the grinding of the god’s bones to make bread.

Mastabas.—From the methods of burial were also de{41}veloped the type of the mastabas or tombs of the royal family, priests, and chieftains, which were erected at Sakkarah, near Memphis, during the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. The name is derived from the Arabian term for a bench, the familiar type of which is a seat, supported upon boards that slope inward. Similarly the tomb has a flat roof and battered, or inward sloping, walls of masonry. It is entered usually on the east side, by a passage that descends to the Chamber of Offering, which contains, to hold the offerings, a sculptured table. Near it a vertical pit, or well, from forty to fifty feet deep, is sunk in the solid rock, communicating with the mummy chamber. Another hidden chamber, often connected with the Chamber of Offering, is known as the Serdab, which was intended to serve as a home for the deceased’s Ka or “double.” It contained a statue of the deceased and sometimes a model of his home and representations of his occupations during life. Thus, in the Mastaba of Thy, with a view to inducing the Ka to overlook the break that has occurred in the life of the deceased, the reliefs depict harvest operations, ship-building scenes, the arts and crafts of the period, the slaughtering of sacrificial animals and Thy himself traversing the marshes in a boat.

Sphinx Temple.—Akin to the mastaba is the earliest type of temple, such as the so-called Sphinx Temple, which although near the Great Sphinx is now attributed to Chephren. Partially excavated out of rock, it is T shaped in plan, with two rows of square piers in the longitudinal portion and one row in the transverse, supporting the stone beams of the roof. The piers are monoliths of polished granite, while the interior walls are veneered with slabs of alabaster. The whole was em{42}bedded in a rectangular mass of masonry. Another temple of the Fourth or Fifth Dynasty is represented as restored in a model in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

With the removal of the seat of government from Memphis to Thebes commenced the First Theban Monarchy or Middle Empire, comprising the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Dynasties. Abydos and Beni Hassan now became the place of tombs.

Two types of tomb distinguish this period. One, frequently found at Abydos, consists of a pyramidal structure with a cubical porch on one side, entered by an arched portal. The latter feature proves that the Egyptians were familiar with the principle of the arch, although they did not employ it in their monumental buildings. It appears later in the elliptical barrel-vaultings which crowned the long tunnel-like cellars that Rameses I (The Great) erected for the storage of grain. The above mentioned tombs were structural, whereas those of the second type were excavated in the vertical rock-wall that forms the west bank of the Nile; their entrance thus being toward the east. At Beni Hassan is a group of thirty-nine such tombs which show a marked progress in architectural design.

The front of each presents a porch, composed of columns supporting a cornice, the latter being surmounted by a row of projections or dentils that resemble the ends of beams. The shafts of the columns are polygonal, with eight, sixteen, or thirty-two faces, and are surmounted by a square abacus. It has been conjectured that these columns may be the prototype of the Doric{43} column and accordingly their type has been designated as proto-Doric. Meanwhile the columns inside the tomb exhibit a stage in the development of the lotus column; the motive of their design having been derived from a post around the top of which had been fastened the decoration of a cluster of lotus buds. The interior walls of these tombs are decorated with pictorial scenes, executed in red, yellow, and blue.

Obelisks.—To the Twelfth Dynasty belongs the earliest Obelisk still in position; that of Usertesen I, in the necropolis of Memphis, its companion having fallen. For these developed forms of the monolithic menhir, regarded by the Egyptians as symbols of royalty and of the Sun-god, Ra, were placed in pairs, usually before the entrance of a temple. Their design was of great refinement, the taper being regulated very carefully in proportion to the width and height. The top was crowned with a small pyramid which in certain instances, at any rate, was capped with metal. The sides of the shaft were given a slight convex curve, or entasis, to offset the effect of concavity which they might have produced if rectilinear, and also to relieve the rigidity of the design. It is one of the instances which prove that the Egyptians understood and practised the principle of asymmetry, or deviation from strictly geometrical formality—a subject we shall study more fully in Hellenic and Gothic architecture.

The two obelisks now known as Cleopatra’s Needles, one of which is on the Thames Embankment, London, the other in Central Park, New York, were removed from Heliopolis to Alexandria by the Romans. They were originally erected by Thothmes III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose half-sister, Queen Hatasu, numbered{44} among her achievements the completion and erection of an obelisk, 100 feet high, in the short space of seven months.

From this period of the Middle Empire survive the fragments of three temples. Amid the ruins of Bubastis have been found examples of the type of clustered lotus columns, while portions of polygonal columns, discovered among the ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak, have been identified as belonging to a temple of the Twelfth Dynasty. The evidence which these remains afford of the fact that such columns were employed in actual construction as well as in rock-cut form, has been corroborated by the recent discovery of a sepulchral temple on the south side of the Temple of Deir-el-Bahri—to be mentioned later—of which it is the prototype. For the earlier was reached by steps that led up to a solid mass of masonry, which in the opinion of some authorities was crowned by a pyramid. It was surrounded by a peristyle, composed of an outer range of square piers and an inner one of octagonal columns.

It is surmised, in fact, that during the Middle Empire, which was a period of great development in the arts of peace, many of the architectural problems were worked out in temples, afterwards destroyed, to make way for the superior developments that were achieved under the Second Theban Empire.

No architectural monuments mark the period of Hyksos usurpation. But the expulsion of the invaders and the restoration of the power alike of the monarchy and of the national religion produced an outburst of patriotic ardour that was fostered by rulers of exceptional great{45}ness. The Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties are brilliant with the prowess and architectural creations that are associated with such names as Thothmes, Amenophis, Queen Hatasu, Seti and Rameses.

The Tombs of the New Theban Empire comprised both the structural and the excavated types. The rock-cut royal tombs are distinguished by the extent and complexity of their shafts, passages, and chambers, designed to baffle the efforts of any possible marauder, while notwithstanding the darkness which fills all the spaces, the walls are brilliantly decorated with coloured reliefs for the propitiation of the Ka. In contrast with the interior is the extreme simplicity of the entrance, of which the main features are the majestic colossal seated figures of the Monarch, which take the place of the statue within the tomb. The grandest example is the Temple-Tomb of Rameses II at Abou Simbel.

An exception to this external simplicity is the Temple-Tomb of Queen Hatasu at Deir-el-Bahri, which, however, presents a combination of the structural and excavated types, for projecting from the face of the rock was an extensive portico, from which steps seem to have descended to a terrace bounded by a peristyle and communicating by another flight of steps with the lower ground—an impressive architectural ensemble, designed, apparently, for ritual ceremonies.

The most magnificent examples of the purely structural Tomb are the Ramesseum or Tomb of Rameses II, near Deir-el-Bahri, and that of Rameses III at Medinet Abou. They may have been rivalled by the Amenopheum or Tomb of Amenophis III, of which, however, scarce a trace remains except the colossal seated figures, fifty-six feet high, of the King and his Queen. The former is{46} known as the “Vocal Memnon,” a name given to it by the Greeks, after that of the son of Eos (Dawn), because of the legend, that when the statue was smitten by the rays of the rising sun, it gave forth a sound as of a broken chord.

The Ramesseum is a sepulchral temple and its plan, involving a sanctuary and ritual chambers, a hall of columns entered between pylons, and forecourts, presents the typal form of Temple plan.

Temples.—The New Theban Empire was the great age of Temple Building. It is characteristic of the conservatism of the Egyptians not only that the style of their monumental architecture was evolved from the rude primitive hut-construction but also that it preserved features of the latter, even though the necessity for them no longer existed. And so persistent was the adherence to these features, now transformed into elements of beauty, that they were continued even in the later temples, built during the period of Roman domination.

It has been suggested that the origin of the style can be discovered in the modelled and sculptured reliefs of the house of the deceased, found in the earliest rock-cut tombs. The house represents a developed stage of the still earlier hut, the character of which was determined by the scarcity of wood. Instead, therefore, of employing poles, connected by wattled twigs or reeds and covered with mud, the Egyptians fashioned the alluvial deposit into bricks, dried in the sun, which they laid in horizontal courses, each layer projecting inwards, until the walls met at the top. Gradually this beehive form of construction was modified in the better class of dwellings, by the adoption of a square plan and the use of the trunks of palm trees to form the lintel of the door and to support{47} a flat mud-covered roof. The representations at Gizeh show that bundles of reeds were used to reinforce the angles of the structure and were also laid along the top of the walls, so as to form a rolled border, corresponding to what is later called a torus. This, through the weight of the roof, had a tendency to be forced outward, so that it formed what was practically a concave cornice along the top of the wall. Hence the so-called cavetto cornice which is one of the marked distinctions of the Egyptian monumental style. Moreover, while the sun-dried bricks acquire a hardness and compactness, they are unable to sustain much pressure, so that it was necessary to make the walls thicker at the bottom than at the top. From this resulted the batter of the walls, which is another distinctive characteristic of the Egyptian style. Further, owing to the intense heat, windows were dispensed with and the walls in consequence were unbroken except by the entrance. To this day the houses of the poorer classes are built as of old and present the rudiments out of which was developed the style of the stone-built temples, so vastly impressive in the embodied suggestion of elemental grandeur and eternal durability.

From the outside were visible only the walls and portal of the rectangular temple enclosure. The walls sloped backward, like the glacis of a fortification. A clustered torus moulding, as of reeds bound together at intervals, so as to produce alternate hollows and swells, ran up each of the angles of the masonry and along the top of the walls, where it was surmounted by a cavetto cornice, terminating in a square moulding. A similar finish crowned the entrance door and its flanking pylons. The door, framed at the sides and top with squared blocks of stone, frankly proclaimed the post and beam principle{48} that also governed the interior construction of the temple.

The door was flanked by pylons, each a truncated pyramid with oblong base; the form, in fact, of a hut grandiosely enlarged into a decorative feature of immense impressiveness. Set into its walls were rings to hold flag-staffs, and the surface of the pylon, like that of the walls, was resplendent with coloured reliefs, extolling the prowess of the King who had erected the temple. His statue flanked the doorway, in front of which soared two obelisks, while the roadway that led to the temple was embellished with an avenue of sphinxes. These avenues were of great length, the one from Karnak to Luxor extending a mile and a half.

On the lintel over the door was the winged globe, symbol of the Sun’s flight through the sky to conquer Night. Other symbolic ornaments adorned the jambs and the various cornices, while historic pictures, recording the achievements of the monarch’s rule, covered the surfaces of walls and pylons. All were executed in the same way as the symbolic ornament and the pictures in honour of the deity, which covered the walls, columns, beams, and ceiling of the interior of the temple. The forms were either cut down in very low relief or enclosed by incised lines, the edges of which on the side nearer to the form were slightly rounded, in order to give a sense of modelling. In both cases the designs were filled in with the primary colours, blue, red, and yellow. Thus the decoration, derived from the method of drawing patterns in the mud of a wall while it was still damp, was inset, its higher parts being in the same plane as the wall’s surface—a method distinctively mural which also maintained the avoidance of projections. This avoidance of{49} projecting members, except in the cornice, was a marked characteristic of the Egyptian use of the post and beam principle, as compared with the use of it by the Greeks and Romans.

The essential feature of the temple within the enclosure was the sanctuary of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, around which were grouped chambers for the service of the priests in connection with the ritual. Entrance to this Holy of Holies and its subsidiary cells was through a hypostyle hall, so called because its ceiling of slabs of stone was supported upon stone beams that rested upon columns. The latter, to withstand the weight of the superincumbent mass, were of great girth and closely ranged, so that an effect as of the depths of a forest was produced, rendered more mysterious and apparently limitless by the dim and fitful light. This penetrated through clerestory windows, covered with pierced stonework and set in the sides of the central portion of the roof, which, supported on higher columns, rose above the side roofs, as the nave of a Gothic cathedral rises above the level of the aisles. When one recollects that the interior was completely covered with symbolic ornament and pictures, one can imagine no mode of lighting better adapted to produce a phantasy of effect, to preclude distinctness of vistas and promote a suggestion of limitless immensity, according with the idea of the eternal continuity of the soul’s existence, on which the religion of the Egyptians was founded.

The only approximation in architecture to the mysterious grandeur of the hypostyle hall, leading to the sanctuary, is the nave and aisles and choir of a Gothic cathedral. But the latter presents a great difference, since it was arranged for the congregational service of{50} crowds of worshippers and, partly for this reason and partly because it was a product of the comparatively sunless north, it is flooded through its numerous and large stained-glass windows more abundantly with “dim religious light.”

It remains to note the approach to this hall through an open court which was surrounded on two or three sides by a colonnade or peristyle, while an avenue of columns frequently led through the centre from the main entrance of the pylons to the portal of the hall.

This combination of Court, Hall, and Sanctuary with its Chambers, already present in the Ramesseum, formed the essential of every temple plan, even during the period of Roman occupation. But while the nucleus of the plan was organically complete, unity of effect was abandoned in actual practice owing to the additions made to the original temple by successive kings, who would contribute another hall of columns or another court and sometimes erect another temple as an annex. The most remarkable example of this gradual accretion of additional features is to be found at Karnak; a group of temples in honour of the Sun-god Ra-Ammon, the building of which extended throughout the period of the New Empire.

Temples of Karnak.—The nucleus of the scheme was the granite sanctuary and chambers erected by Usertesen I of the Twelfth Dynasty. In the Eighteenth Dynasty Thothmes I added to the west front of this a columned hall with pylon entrances, surrounding the interior wall with Osirid statues, seated statues of Osiris, the wise and beneficent ruler of the Second Dynasty, who after his death was honoured as the King of the Dead in the nether world. Later a third pair of pylons was built by Rameses I; and this was utilised as one of the sides{51} of the Great Hypostyle Hall begun by Seti I and completed by Rameses II. It communicated through another pair of immense pylons with the Great Court of Sheshonk.

In the northwest corner of the latter Seti II of the Nineteenth Dynasty erected a small temple, while, protruding into the court on the opposite side was the temple of Ammon, built by Rameses III of the Twentieth, who also built the adjacent temple of Chons, connected with the main group of buildings by an avenue of Sphinxes. It was from this temple that the long avenue of sphinxes, already mentioned, extended to the Temple of Luxor.

Meanwhile, during the Eighteenth Dynasty, Thothmes III had erected at some distance to the eastward of Usertesen’s original sanctuary, a large hall and adjoining chambers. These are supposed to have been his palace, though it is urged to the contrary that they offered but little accommodation for the retinue of servants and officials which distinguished an oriental court, besides being gloomy as a residence. Possibly, however, Thothmes under the spell of religious feeling may have used this palace for occasional occupation, even as Philip II of Spain built a palace in connection with a monastery, a school of priests and a great church and mausoleum—the aggregate of functions represented in the Escoriál.

The climax of the architectural ensemble at Karnak is Seti’s Great Hypostyle Hall, the most imposing example known of post and beam construction. It is 338 feet wide with a depth of 170. A double row of six mighty columns 70 feet high and nearly 12 in diameter support the central nave, on each side of which the flat roof is supported by 61 columns, each about 42 feet high and 9 wide. The capitals of the taller columns are of{52} the so-called bell type; those of the lower ones, lotus bud.

Column Types.—Reference already has been made to the lotus-bud type of columns found in the interior of some of the tombs at Beni Hassan. These represented a conventionalised design as of four buds with long stems bound around a circular post. The later columns, however, of the lotus-bud type were no longer only a decorative feature but had to support the immense weight of the beams and ceiling slabs, consequently the diameter was increased to about one sixth of the height. The capital suggests either one bud with numerous petals crowning a smooth circular shaft or a cluster of buds and stalks bound at intervals with rows of fillets; the design in both cases being more conventionalised than in the early examples.

The bell, or campaniform type is distinguished by a smooth shaft crowned with a conventionalised single blossom of the lotus, the petals of which flare or curve outward so as to resemble the shape of an inverted bell.

Another example of the flaring capital is that of the palm column, the fronds of which are bound by fillets to a smooth shaft. It is a type that appears in the later temples and was varied by the architects of the Ptolemaic period, who substituted for the palm other motives derived from river plants.

An exceptional form, which appears in Temples of Isis, as at Denderah, Edfou, and Esneh, is the so-called Hathor-headed column, which has a cubical capital, embellished on each side with a face of the goddess and surmounted by a miniature temple. The latter takes the place of the impost block which in the other types of column sustains the weight of the beam and protects the carving of the capital.{53}

In certain instances the columns were superseded by piers with rectangular shafts, which sometimes were unadorned in their impressive simplicity, at other times ornamented with lotus flowers and stalks or heads of Hathor. In the so-called Osirid pier a colossal statue of the god projects from the face of the pier, being the only example of a feature added to a pier or column for purposes solely of symbolic ornament and without any structural function.

Next to Karnak in magnificence and extent is the neighbouring Temple of Luxor. Another important example of the period is the temple erected at Abydos by Seti I dedicated to Osiris and other deities. In consequence it is distinguished by seven sanctuaries, ranged side by side and roofed over with horizontal courses of stonework, each of which projects inward over the one below it, until they meet at the top, the undersides being chiselled into the form of a vault.

A few examples are found of the peripteral type of temple, consisting of a cella or sanctuary, surrounded on the four sides by columns. In one instance—the temple erected by Amenophis III at Elephantine—the columns are confined to the front and rear, while at the sides are square piers. These structures are small, and, in two cases, at Philae, are unaccompanied by a cella; which suggests that they were used as waiting places in connection with the adjoining temples.

During the period of political decadence the building of temples declined, but it was renewed under the rule of the Ptolemies and continued during the Roman occupa{54}tion. While, notwithstanding foreign domination, the Egyptian type was in the main adhered to, an important change of detail was adopted in the manner of lighting the hypostyle hall. The light was admitted from the front, over the top of screen walls, which were erected between the columns to about half their height. A celebrated example is at Edfou, the most perfectly preserved temple of this period, which also conforms most closely to the old type. For in other instances there was a growing tendency to introduce novelties of detail, characterised by greater elaboration and ornateness. It is signally represented in the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, for here the shape of the site has produced irregularities in the planning of the various buildings, which enhances the general picturesqueness of the whole group. Unfortunately, in consequence of the erection of the Assouan Dam, these temples at Philae are submerged for the greater part of the year.

How far the Egyptians studied orientation, or the placing of a temple with reference to the points of the compass, is uncertain. But there are grounds for supposing that in some cases they orientated the principal entrance toward the sun or a certain star, the exact position of which on some particular day would indicate to the priests the exact time of year.

Palace and Domestic Architecture.—Of palace architecture the only conjectured remains are the buildings erected in the rear of the Temple of Karnak by Thothmes III and the pavilion of Medinet Abou on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes; the unsuitability of which as royal residences has already been noted.

A clue to the laying out of a town and the character of{55} domestic buildings has been found at Tel-el-Amarna and at Kahun, in the Fayoum. On the latter site Petrie discovered the walls of a town which was erected for the overseers and workmen employed in the construction of the pyramid of Illahun (2684-2666 B.C.) and abandoned after the completion of the work. The streets ran at right angles; and the houses were built around open courts, whence the light was derived, for there were no windows giving on to the streets. The houses varied in size from the one room hut of the labourer to the group of rooms with their own court occupied by the overseer, while a still larger group in the centre of the town was the residence of the governor.

From these remains and from pictures of “soul houses,” found in the tombs, it is concluded that the houses of the richer classes corresponded to a Roman villa; consisting that is to say of detached buildings built within enclosures, which were surrounded on the interior with colonnades and were laid out with groves, fishponds, and other ornamental features. The material employed in the walls and buildings was sunburnt brick which was overlayed with stucco decorated in bright colours. The walls in the case of the residences were carried up through two or three stories with windows in the upper ones and a verandah under the flat roof. The latter, constructed of timbers, supporting smaller beams, filled in with mud, was reached by a staircase in the rear. When the rooms exceeded nine feet or so in width, their ceilings were supported by columns or posts.{56}

Rooted deep in the recesses of the past was the ancient civilisation that flourished in Mesopotamia. Some latest scholars are disposed to believe that it even preceded the civilisation of Egypt, with which it has some features in common. For this strip of territory, extending from near the Persian Gulf in the south to the mountainous country of Armenia in the north, is an alluvial plain, made and nourished by its rivers—the Tigris on the east and the Euphrates on the west. The latter is a shallow stream, except at the annual flood, when it sweeps over the low banks and innundates the flat lands. Thus the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, like the Egyptians, early learned to control the river with drains and dykes and to construct canals and systems of irrigation. And on a par with their engineering prowess became their achievements in building.

Like Egypt also, Mesopotamia came to have its upper and lower kingdoms. The former, the Biblical Padan-Aram, became associated with the history of the Assyrians; the latter, the Plain of Shinar, with that of the Chaldæans and Babylonians. It was the lower or southern part that seems to have been first occupied, by a people apparently of non-Semitic stock, whose origin is unknown. Named by different scholars Akkadians or Sumerians, they were an unwarlike race which early attained a considerable degree of civilisation. Their chief city was{57} Babylon, whence the country derived the name of Babylonia. It is supposed that these people invented the cuneiform system of writing, which was later employed by the Babylonians and Assyrians, while its use spread to the other nations from Persia to the Mediterranean.

This wedge-shaped script was in its origin a form of pictorial or ideographic writing and developed its peculiar character from the fact that the writing was done on tables of soft clay. Pressure was needed to make the marks and accordingly the stylus came to be formed of three plane surfaces, meeting at a point like the angle of a cubic triangle. As the system grew the ideogram from merely picturing the object was used to denote the first syllable of its name and then by degrees to denote that syllable in whatever word it might occur.

The clue to the reading of the cuneiform script was discovered in 1802 by a German, Georg Friedrich Grotefind, whose work was carried farther by Christian Lassen of Bohn. Meanwhile, the Englishman, Henry Rawlinson had mastered the secret through a study of Persian cuneiform script. Thus an immense mine of knowledge was opened up to the scholars, for the kings of Babylonia and Assyria kept most extensive records, not only of their wars and personal prowess in the chase, but also of commercial transactions, while many of them epitomised the history of past periods. For example, it is from one of these records, made by Napa-haik, the last native king of Babylonia (555-538 B.C.), that we get the earliest date of the so-called Akkadians. For he caused it to be written that, while he was restoring an ancient temple at Sippar, he found among the foundations a record of Sargon I—not to be confused with the later Assyrian king of the same name—which dated back 3200{58} years before its discovery. Moreover, an Assyrian scribe makes this Sargon relate of himself that he was born in secret, exposed as an infant in a basket of rushes on a river, rescued and brought up by a shepherd, chosen the leader of a band in the mountains and finally became a king. It would be interesting to know the date of this record, but presumably it was after the Jews had been carried captive to Assyria.

The prosperity of this early race and its unwarlike character invited invaders. For, it is in this particular that the fortunes of Mesopotamia differed from those of Egypt. While the latter was isolated by great deserts and its people in early times were neither disturbed from the outside nor tempted to stray beyond their borders, the deserts surrounding Mesopotamia were broken up with frequent spots of fertility. On these subsisted nomad tribes of Semitic origin, which early must have looked with covetous eyes upon the superior abundance of the river-enclosed lands. Thus the non-Semitic inhabitants became involved with Semitic peoples: Chaldæans, Elamites, and Assyrians.

Fortunately it is not necessary for our purpose to attempt the difficult task of unravelling the stages of this obscure story. A few particulars will suffice.

The Chaldæans appeared in the South and established a capital at Ur of the Chaldees, extending their sway over what was called later Babylonia. But so far from crushing the original inhabitants, they seem to have assumed toward them the attitude of protectors. They were the strong men, as it were, that kept the house armed against aggression, while the peaceful occupants{59} continued to pursue their industries and arts. Thus ensued that period distinguished as the Early Chaldæan (about 2250 to 1110 B.C.) which produced those treasures of art, especially in glazed pottery, that recent exploration has been discovering.

And just as this older civilisation was respected by the warlike Chaldæans, so also it was borrowed and imitated by the warlike Assyrians who gradually gathered power in upper or northern Mesopotamia. They founded a city and called it Assur, after their national god, in whose honour they erected a temple in 1820 B.C. This is the first definite date of this people, based on the authority of King Tiglath-Pileser (about 1120-1100 B.C.), who relates that, while restoring the temple, he found the ancient record of its founding. It is significant of the general attitude of the Assyrians toward the civilisation of Babylonia that they also borrowed the latter’s national god, Marduk. The first extensive records of the Assyrians are derived from the “library” of this Tiglath-Pileser, found among the ruins of Assur. They describe his wars and hunting expeditions and how he killed with his own hands ten elephants and nine hundred and twenty lions. This monarch, by the capture of Babylon, brought to a conclusion the rivalry that had existed since the fifteenth century B.C. between Assyria and the Chaldæan-Babylonian kingdom. We may date from his reign, namely about 1110 B.C. the supremacy of the Assyrian Empire which lasted until 606 B.C.

Meanwhile, the city of Nineveh, now marked by the mounds of Koyunjik and Nebi Yanus had been in existence as early as 1816 B.C. A palace was erected there by Shalmaneser I (1330 B.C.) and at some date unknown a{60} temple to Ishtar. She was the goddess of Love and War and in her voluptuous aspect corresponds to Ashtoreth or Astarte of the Syro-Phœnicians. This cult characterised her shrine at Nineveh, while in her warlike aspect she was worshipped at Arbela.

For a time the prestige of Nineveh waned, as Assurnazar-pal (885 B.C.) and Shalmaneser II erected palaces at Nimroud, the ancient Calah. The latter monarch was the first, so far as known, to come in conflict with Israel. He conquered Ahab and exacted tribute from Jehu.

With Tiglath-Pileser III (also called Pul by the Hebrews) who carried a portion of Northern Israel into captivity (2 Kings xv), began the period of Assyria’s greatest glory. The last dynasty commences with Sargon (722-705 B.C.) who built himself the famous palace at Khorsabad. He conquered Samaria and carried the whole of northern Israel into captivity, replacing them with men “from Babylon and from Cuthah and from Ava and from Hamath and from Sepharvaim” (2 Kings, xvii, 24). This allusion to Babylon is significant. It points to Sargon’s policy of reducing the rival power of the city, which was destroyed by his son and successor, Sennacherib. It was the latter who “came up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them,” afterward suffering the loss of his army in the siege of Jerusalem, as chronicled in 2 Kings, xviii, xix; though this disaster is not mentioned in the cuneiform records. He revived the grandeur of Nineveh, which was added to by his son Esarhaddon (680-668 B.C.). This monarch’s reign represented the high-water mark of Assyrian supremacy. Among his exploits was the conquest of Egypt, whereby he added to his titles that of “King of Kings of Lower and Upper Egypt and Ethiopia.” He was also a great{61} builder, restoring Babylon and erecting for himself a superb palace at Nineveh, the materials for which were supplied by twenty-two subject kings.

Under his son Asurbanipal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks (668-626 B.C.), the last of the Sargon Dynasty, Assyrian prosperity reached its culmination. Being, as he said, “endowed with attentive ears,” Asurbanipal was inclined to the study of “all inscribed tablets” and caused the collecting and re-editing of the whole cuneiform literature then in existence. A great part of his “library” has been recovered from the ruins of Koyunjik and is now in the British Museum.

In the year following this monarch’s death Nabopolassar (625-604 B.C.) who seems to have been the Assyrian vice-roy of Babylonia, entered into alliance with the Medes and through their help destroyed the supremacy of the Assyrians and became the first king of the New Babylonian Empire.

His son, Nebuchadnezzar, or Nebuchadrezzar, conquered Jerusalem and carried its inhabitants captive to Babylon. To him this city owed its final magnificence. Occupying both banks of the Euphrates, it was now surrounded by two fortified walls, the outer one being fifty-five miles in circumference, with a height of 340 feet and a thickness of 85. It was further protected by 250 towers and pierced with a hundred gates of brass. Numerous temples adorned the city, the grandest being that of the national god, Marduk (Merodach). Near this was the royal palace, now represented by the ruins of Al Gasr, “the Castle.” Sloping down from it to the river were the terraced gardens laid out by the king for the pleasure of his Median wife, Amytis. They are better{62} known as the hanging gardens of Semiramis, from the Greek account that attributed various Oriental wonders to this mythical queen. Nebuchadnezzar also restored the temple of Nebo in a suburb of Babylon, now called Borsippa. This famous shrine was constructed in the form of a stepped-pyramid and from its seven terraces was called “The Temple of the Seven Spheres of Heaven and Earth.” Included in Assyrian temples was frequently a tower, and the one belonging to this temple of Nebo is assumed to have been associated with the story of the “Tower of Babel” (Genesis xi).

Nebuchadnezzar was succeeded by his son, Nabonidus, whose eldest son, Belshazzar, was co-regent with him and governor of South Babylon. This is the cuneiform record, which varies from that of Daniel (Chapter v), who makes Belshazzar the son of Nebuchadnezzar and last king of Babylonia. In 538 B.C. Cyrus the Great took Babylon by storm and the country passed under the Persian rule. Darius I razed the fortified walls and Xerxes stripped the temples of their golden images and treasure. The city fell into decay, until in 300 B.C. much of it was demolished to provide material for building the neighbouring city of Seleucia. By the time of Pliny (23-72 A.D.) the once proud city was a place of desolation.

While the Assyrians and Babylonians were religious peoples, their temples were insignificant, as compared with those of the Egyptians nor have they left any tombs of architectural importance. Their religion was of an eminently practical kind, devoted to securing benefits in this world and concerned little with a future life. Thus their gods were representative of natural phenomena or{63} of their own pursuits: gods of the sun, moon, the heavens, earth (Bel), weather; of water and canals, the chase, war, invention of writing and literature; and unfriendly gods of pestilence and fire.

As may be seen in their sculptures, they valued the qualities of energy and physical prowess. Their kings are not represented, like those of Egypt, as of slim, svelte figure, or wrapped in monumental composure. They are giants of exaggerated muscular development, engaged in conflict with wild beasts of corresponding strength. They were mighty captains of war and in times of peace, mighty hunters and builders.

While Assyria borrowed its culture from Babylonia, the character of the two nations was very different. Babylonia was a country of merchants and agriculturists; Assyria, an organised camp. The latter’s dynasties were founded by successful generals; while in Babylonia it was always a priest whom a revolution raised to the throne and the king remained to the last a priest under the control of a powerful hierarchy. The Assyrian King, on the contrary, was an autocratic general, supported in earlier times by a feudal nobility and, from the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, by an elaborate bureaucracy. In each country there was a large body of slaves.

In Assyria education was confined to the ruling class; whereas in Babylonia every one, women as well as men, learned to read and write. Most of the Babylonian cities and temples had their libraries and the genius of the people displayed itself most characteristically in literature. Among works which have been discovered, whole or in fragments, were the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” consisting of twelve books each of which recounts an adventure in the hero’s career; another epic, that of the Creation,{64} and the “Legend of Adapa,” the first man. In astronomy and astrology the Chaldæans and Babylonians from early times were adepts; observatories being attached to the temples from which reports were regularly submitted to the King. They were also skilled in mathematics and mechanics. For example, a glass lens, turned on a lathe, was discovered by Layard at Nimroud, among the remains of glass vases which bear the name of Sargon.

While the Chaldæans in time had become mingled with the Babylonians, so that the latter name was used to designate both peoples, the term Chaldæan came to be used in a special sense. The “Wisdom of the Chaldæans” continued to be recognised, and it was probably to the pure race of Chaldæans that the priests, “astrologers” and “magicians” belonged. And their distinction as wise men even survived the overthrow of Babylon. In all likelihood they were Chaldæans, those “Wise men from the East,” who saw and interpreted the star and followed it to Bethlehem.{65}

Brick Construction.—In its principal features and general character of construction, the architecture of each of these three civilisations is similar, being based upon the methods that originated with the Chaldæans. These methods were the direct result of the geographic and climatic conditions of the country they inhabited. For Lower Mesopotamia, Babylonia proper, is an alluvial plain, interrupted by a single ridge of limestone hills which were sparsely covered with small trees, especially the scrub-oak. Timber and stone were scarce, while everywhere clay abounded. Accordingly, the chief material of construction was brick, shaped in wooden moulds and sun-dried. The limited amount of fuel permitted only the making of burnt bricks for special purposes: namely, the facing of the structures and the paving of the floors. And these superior bricks or tiles were frequently glazed and decorated with ornament in bright colours.

Meanwhile, in Upper Mesopotamia, Assyria proper, the ground was comparatively arid and plentifully supplied with limestone. Yet such was the habit of the Assyrians to imitate the Southern kingdom in matters of civilisation, that they also relied upon sun-dried brick for construction, and employed glazed earthenware for decoration. In time, however, they came to employ stone for facing as well as for the sculpture, which was a characteristic decorative feature of the palaces.

Platforms.—We shall see presently how the fierce heat{66} affected the principles of architectural construction, noting in advance the means taken to provide against the periodical inundations due to the torrential rains and the overflow of the Tigris. From earlier times all important buildings were erected upon platforms, constructed of sun-dried bricks and faced with fired bricks or stone, the walls having a batter, that is to say, sloping inward. Approach to the summit was either by flights of steps or an inclined roadway that paralleled the wall—technically known as a ramp. Intersecting these mounds or platforms was a system of arched culverts, designed, as in modern railroad embankments, to carry off the water.

In course of time, as buildings fell into decay or were replaced with newer ones by later builders, the height of the mound increased. The result is that the plain of Babylonia for 220 miles is studded with immense mounds, some of them a mile in diameter and attaining 200 feet in height, crowned with the remains of towns. Beneath these, the modern explorer, cutting down into the interior of the mound, comes upon successive stages of foundations, representing the remains of various epochs.

Temple at Nippur.—The earliest example, so far disclosed, is a temple at Nippur, which bears a close resemblance to the oldest pyramid in Egypt, Medum, before the latter had been faced. It is on the principle of the stepped-pyramid, consisting of several stories, each of which sets back from the one below it, while the walls of all have a batter. The terraces on one side are of extra width to allow for the stairways. This old type of stage-temple, called in the East ziggurat (holy mountain), derived probably from the ancient custom of worshipping in “high places,” was still preserved in the famous

{67}

Temple of Nebo, rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar at Borsippa. Only four stages of the latter survive, but a record discovered in the ruins shows that the original number was seven, dedicated to the seven planets and decorated with the colours sacred to each. The ground story of this temple was 272 feet square and 45 feet high, while the total height of the structure was about 160 feet. It is noteworthy that the tomb-pyramid of Medum also consisted of seven stories.

In a ziggurat at Tello, opened up by the French savant, de Sarzac, was discovered a magnificent collection of statues of diorite—a mixture of granite, felspar and hornblende—dark grey in colour—which is now in the Louvre. One of these, which has lost its head, represents a certain Gudea, priest-king and architect of Lagash. He is seated and carries on his lap a tablet, on which a fortified enclosure is engraved, while in the corner appear a dividing scale and a stylos.

Sargon’s Castle.—The oldest palace remains have been discovered at Nimroud, the ancient Calah. They belong to the palace of Assur-nazar-pal (885-860 B.C.). Ten miles to the northeast, at Khorsabad, the French explorer P. E. Botta, discovered in 1843 the remains of a tower and palace, which subsequent excavations have proved to be the ruins of Dur-Sharrukim, “Sargon’s Castle,” built by Sargon as a royal residence (705-702 B.C.). The remains of the palace, being the most extensive of those hitherto explored, can be studied as a type of Assyrian palace architecture.

The platform on which the palace stood, constructed of sun-dried bricks and faced with cut stone, reaches the immense size of nearly a million square feet, raised forty-eight feet above the surrounding level country. The to{68}tal platform, therefore, measured about 23 acres, as compared with the 3½ acres occupied by the Capitol at Washington, or the 8 acres occupied by the Houses of Parliament in London. Making allowance for the fact that the Assyrian Palace did not extend over the whole of the platform space, its actual dimensions must have been approximately twice as large as the Houses of Parliament and four and a half times those of the Capitol.

Leading up from the level on the northeast side appears to have been a double ramp, for the use of chariots and for general service, while the state entrance was at the southeast by a double flight of steps. These mounted to a terrace that extended the whole length of the palace front, some 900 feet. In the centre of this façade was the principal gate, which was small in actual size, but flanked by two tower-like projections of masonry. These, for the moment, may recall the pylons that flanked the entrance to an Egyptian temple. But the latter stately structures, built with a batter and crowned with a cavetto cornice, were designed for monumental dignity. On the other hand, the towers of Sargon’s Castle were pierced near the top with loop-holes and surmounted by battlements. They were designed to serve the purpose of warlike defence and suggest appropriately that the entrance is not only to a palace but also to the castle or stronghold of a feudal chieftain. The same suggestion is prolonged in the battlemented walls, free of windows and only occasionally pierced with loopholes, which seem to have surrounded the entire structure.

Gateway.—The towers were embellished with a notably structural decoration, a system of rectangular panelling, filled with semi-circular shafts. The ornamental details were derived from the Chaldæan use of glazed tiles,{69} decorated with rosettes, palmettes, lotus-flowers and the guilloche or repeat of intertwined bands, arching round a central button. Similarly decorated is the archivolt which surrounds the arch of the entrance, the latter being a barrel- or semi-circular-vaulted passageway, carried right through the thickness of the walls.

Colossal Bulls.—In Egypt the entrance to the temples was made solemn and magnificent by colossal statues of the monarch. Here, the beholder must have been filled with awe by the colossal monsters that stood as guardians of the portal, projecting from the side-posts of the gateway and ranged in pairs at the foot of each tower. These monsters, which are now in the British Museum, fitly embody the warlike ideals of the Assyrian nation. They loom up in height to twelve feet. Their bodies are those of bulls, mighty in bulk and thews; yet they are quick to attack, having eagle’s wings, while dominating them is the head of a man, large-eyed, thick-lipped, square of jaw and hairy, implacably sensual and cruel.

The modeling of these monsters is for the most part as broad as a Barye bronze; though minute detail is attained in the sculpturing of the beards, hair and head-dresses. But, while their treatment is in the main naturalistic, their motive is not representation of nature, but the representation of an idea through natural suggestion. Accordingly, each embodiment has five legs; the two forelegs, planted side by side, being supplemented by another in the act of walking; so that whether the monster be viewed from the front or the side, the full significance of the legs is emphasised—the forelegs representing firmly established power; the side view showing the legs in free and powerful movement.

No Columns.—The arched entrance leads into a large{70} open court that corresponds to the great court of an Egyptian temple, although here the sides are not embellished with colonnades. For, nowhere in Assyrian architecture has the column been found as a structural member. The single example which has been excavated, measured only three feet four inches in height and, it is conjectured, was used for a pavilion, possibly to support an awning. The absence of columnar construction in the early buildings of the Lower Kingdom is easily accounted for by the scarcity of stone; and the northern builders in dispensing with columns were only following their usual habit of imitation.

No Windows.—Meanwhile, another reason for the absence of columns may be found in the fierce heat of Mesopotamia, against which colonnades would prove no protection. The same cause explains the absence of windows in Assyrian palaces, for none have been found or shown in any of the bas-reliefs. It has been considered possible that such light as was needed was admitted through terra-cotta pipes or cylinders, for many of the latter have been come upon in the ruins and this method is still employed in the East for the lighting of domes.

?Barrel Vaults?—Another feature of the interior construction was the immense thickness of the walls, which varied from nine to twenty-five feet in solid brickwork. The object may have been to secure additional coolness, but this reason will scarcely afford a complete explanation of the extreme measurement. It is significant that the latter occurs in the halls of state which are also distinguished by their great length of 150 feet as compared with the width, 30 feet. When the narrow width of the halls is considered in relation to the immense thickness of the walls, it seems reasonable to conclude that the{71} latter were intended to support the downward strain of barrel-vaulted ceilings. Additional probability is given to this conclusion by La Place’s discovery of great blocks, curved like the soffits of a vault, which had apparently fallen from a height. Moreover, in a bas-relief found by Layard in Koyunjik some of the buildings are shown to be roofed on the outside by domes. Accordingly, it is now the generally accepted belief that the usual style of ceiling employed by the Assyrians, was the barrel-vault.

The origin of the latter may be found in the culverts by which the mounds were drained; but how, considering the scarcity of timber, it was possible to construct vaults of thirty feet span, is purely a matter of conjecture. It has been suggested that, while timber was costly, slave-labour was cheap, and it is possible that temporary structures of brick were erected as an underpinning to support the vault while in process of construction. On the other hand, we shall note later on that the architects of Gothic cathedrals, in countries where timber was scarce, adopted the method of rib-vaulting. Can it be possible that this invention was anticipated by the Assyrians?

Decorations.—The walls of these halls of state were decorated up to a height of nine feet with sculptured slabs of delicate white alabaster or brilliantly yellow limestone, on which traces of paint have been discovered. As in the case of the Egyptian temples, scenes of everyday life, as well as of war or hunting, are represented, with a vividness that shows how closely nature had been studied by the sculptors, who, however, were more intent upon representing the spirit of the scene and preserving the feeling of decoration than in imitating nature.

Thus, when they represented an archer, stretching his bow, neither the string nor the arrow was allowed to cut{72} the lines of the figure. Both were shown as if the hand which held them were on the opposite side of the body. It is needless to say that this could not have been due to ignorance or negligence on the part of the sculptor, who otherwise proved his knowledge and observation of nature; but was a deliberate kind of conventionalisation, adopted, like the five legs of the colossal bulls, for a well-considered purpose—perhaps, not to interfere with the action of the figure.

Above the dado of sculpture the walls were embellished with glazed tiles, decorated with winged figures of the King, and occasionally with animals, especially lions, framed with borders of rosettes. The usual colours were yellow, blue, green, and black. Coloured tiles also, as well as slabs of alabaster, formed the paving of the floors, which, in the case of smaller rooms, were formed merely of stamped clay, covered, no doubt, while in use, with mats or rugs.

Wall paintings of figures and arabesques seem to have been an exceptional form of decoration, found at Khorsabad only in the larger rooms of the harem.

Yet for all this brilliance of decoration, the effect of the interiors must have been one of subdued richness. The imagination, indeed, pictures the vast palace with its labyrinth of seven hundred rooms, surrounding three sides of the entrance court, where the glare of sunshine would be pitiless, as a sort of subterranean arrangement of tunnel-like passages and chambers.

Their distribution can be studied in the ground plan restoration. There were three groups, each disposed around its own central court. On the left of the main court lay the harem, with its separate provision for four wives, while on the opposite side was accommodation for{73} the service, including kitchen, bakery, wine cellars, and stables. Fronting the main entrance were the King’s suite of rooms and the quarters of his official staff, beyond which were the halls of state. In the open space, adjoining the royal rooms, rose the ziggurat, or terraced temple, the three lower stories of which still exist, connected by a winding ramp.

The conception that one gathers of this huge pile is, externally, of a stronghold, somewhat forbidding; internally, of a crypt-like maze, offering perhaps comfort, but little beauty—the lair of the absolute monarch of a race to whom the market-place and fields of battle and hunting represented the chief ideals of existence.{74}

The name Iran, by which the Persians still call their country, preserves the origin of their race. They were Aryans, as distinguished from the Semitic peoples; a branch of the race which migrated from the country now called Southern Russia and Turkestan into the rich lands of the South. One branch pushed on to the Ganges and became identified with India; the other settled about the Indus, whence they gradually pushed their way westward. This branch comprised many tribes which in time developed into peoples.

The most powerful of these at the period when the Aryans first came into conflict with the Semitic race, was the Medes, who occupied the northern part of the west side of what is now Persia, while the Persians, who rose to supremacy later, occupied the southern part. This western division of the country, separated by a desert from the eastern, entirely differs in character from Mesopotamia.

For a distance of 50 miles from the Persian Gulf it is flat, swampy, and unhealthful. Then it rises to a system of mountain ranges that average five thousand feet in height, broken up with valleys, lakes, and countless streams. It was a country admirably adapted to rear a hardy and industrious race of men and fine breeds of cattle and horses. The Aryans seem to have always been cattle breeders, from which fact is supposed to be derived the reverence of the cow, which still exists in India.{75} They were also great lovers of the horse and it was not until after 1700 B.C. when advanced posts of the Aryan migration came in touch with the Semitic nations of the West, that the horse made its appearance in Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece. But, while the bas-reliefs of the Egyptians after this date show the horse used only in chariots, its general use among the Persians was for riding purposes. So the love of the modern Aryan races for the horse and horse exercise is an inherited instinct that knits them like their language to their earliest ancestors.

Of the Assyrian Kings, Shalmaneser II was the first to come in conflict with the Medes, and from this date (836 B.C.), the Medes are frequently mentioned in Assyrian records as paying tribute. Finally, in 626 B.C., the fortunes of war began to be reversed. The Median King, Cyaxares, as we have seen in a previous chapter, formed an alliance with Nabopolassar that resulted in the ousting of the Assyrian domination from Babylon and the establishment of the New Babylonian Empire. The Medes followed this up by a vigorous campaign against Assyria which resulted, in 606 B.C. in the taking and destruction of Nineveh. New capitals were built at Susa and Ecbatana and the sway of the Medes extended over Northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Cappadocia.

Then in 550 B.C. the Median supremacy ceased. Cyrus, King of Persia, of the clan Achæmenian, rebelled against his suzerain, Astyages, the son of Cyaxares, conquered him in battle and became the founder of the Persian Empire. He captured Babylon in 538 B.C. and gradually extended his sway from the Indus River to the Ægean Sea and the borders of Egypt. In his homeland of Persia he founded the city of Pasargadae, the modern Murghab, where he built himself a palace and a tomb. For it was{76} here that his Persians, urged on by their women-folk, had struck the final blow that conquered the Medes. Accordingly, each king of the Achæmenian dynasty was here, in the temple of the warrior goddess, invested with the garb of Cyrus and partook of a meal of figs, terebinth, and sour milk; and, whenever he visited the city, gave a gold piece to every woman.

Darius I, fourth of the Achæmenian dynasty, founded Persepolis, about forty miles northeast of the modern Shiraz, commenced building the famous palace and constructed for himself a tomb. Xerxes I added a palace and a tomb of his own, while tombs also were built by Artaxerxes III and Darius II. But, while Persepolis remained the favourite resort of the Persian Kings, it was too remote a spot to be the seat of government, which continued to be divided between Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana.

Meanwhile, under Xerxes I the Persian power came into conflict with the Hellenic and was worsted in the battles of Platæa and Thermopylæ and the sea-fight at Salamis. Henceforth the advance of the Persian Empire was checked; dissensions began to weaken it; the central authority relapsed into feebleness, with lurid intervals of cruelty, until finally it succumbed to the rising tide of Macedonian conquest. In 331 B.C. Alexander the Great crushed the army of Darius III near Arbela; took in turn the cities of Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana and stripped them of their treasure, finally capturing Persepolis, and setting fire to it.

This act of vandalism has been variously explained. One story, which forms the subject of Dryden’s “Ode to Saint Cecilia’s Day,” had it that the wanton act was instigated by the courtezan, Thais. Another story is that it{77} was an act of revenge for the destruction of Greek temples by Xerxes I; while still another relates that in this destruction of the very heart of Iran, Alexander wished to impress the Oriental imagination with the absoluteness of his supremacy.

After being subject to the rule of the successors of Alexander and to the domination of the later Parthian Empire, Persia once more became an empire under the Sassanian Dynasty, Ctesiphon being one of its chief cities. In the seventh century A.D. it was conquered by the Saracens and entered into the Mohammedan civilisation, which we shall discuss in a later chapter.

The rapid rise of the Persian power was due to the hardiness of this mountain race and its highly organised preparation for war. Every Persian able to bear arms was bound to serve the King: the great landowners on horseback, the commonalty on foot. The army, therefore, unlike those of the Oriental nations it encountered, was composed of cavalry as well as infantry; and, while the latter, armed with bows, kept the enemy at a distance and harassed them with storms of arrows, the cavalry, operating on their flanks and rear, completed the rout. It was only when the power had become unwieldy by its very vastness, that this method of warfare proved useless against the Greek hoplites and the massed formation of the Macedonian phalanx.

In its beginning the Persian system was a beneficent feudalism. The nobles, excused from personal cultivation of the soil, were pledged to appear at Court as frequently as possible. Their children were brought up in company with the princes “at the Gate of the King,” instructed in riding, hunting, and the use of weapons, edu{78}cated to the service of the State and a knowledge of the law, as well as to the commandments of religion. Under Darius, who completed the vast structure of empire which Cyrus had founded, the organisation of government and society was on broad and free lines; an empire established in righteousness, following the precepts of Zoroaster.

It is concluded from various testimony that this great prophet of the Aryan peoples lived about 1000 B.C. He taught that in this world there is a continual conflict between the Powers of Good—Light, Creative Strength, Life, and Truth—and the Powers of Evil—Darkness, Destruction, Death, and Deceit. At the head of the Good Powers is the Great Wisdom Ahuramazda, whose helpers are the six powers of Good Thought, Right Order, Excellent Kingdom, Holy Character, Health, and Immortality. At the head of the Evil, Ahriman. Midway between these Powers is Man, who has to make his choice on which side he will take his stand. He is called to serve the Powers of Good; to speak the truth and fight a lie; to obey the command of law and true order; to tend his cattle and fields; to practise the Good and True in thought, word, and deed, and to keep from pollution the elements of the earth, water, and particularly fire. For Zoroaster preserved the old Aryan belief in the element of fire. Altars were erected upon the hills, tended by fire-kindlers, who were the ministers of the true religion and the intermediaries between God and man.

Moreover, Zoroastrianism was a proselytising religion. Ahuramazda, whom king and people alike acknowledged, had given them dominion “over the earth afar, over many peoples and tongues.” Yet, while they felt it to be their destiny to rule the whole world, the Persians believed that it was the will of Ahuramazda that they must govern{79} it aright. Hence they treated the conquered with clemency and employed their leaders as administrators and generals. Cyrus, for example, permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and restored to them the temple vessels of gold and silver which had been taken by Nebuchadnezzar.

Thus, the religion of Iran had to do with practical life, this world and the joy thereof, and moral conduct; and as long as it retained its character of plain living and high thinking—of which the simple coronation ritual of the kings was symbolical—the Empire continued strong. Luxury, however, gradually crept in; the Persian Kings vied with the Kings they had conquered in magnificence of living and slowly but surely the strength of the Empire was sapped.

Cruelty also became part of the Persian religion, as indicated by remains of human sacrifices taken from ash-heaps that stood beside Zoroastrian altars. This also caused a degeneration to devil-worship, which in some localities survives to-day.{80}

Combination of Style.—In the days before their supremacy the Persians, as agriculturists and breeders of cattle and horses, preserving their simple existence, had no desire or need of monumental architecture. But when Cyrus had overthrown the domination of the Medes, made himself master of Mesopotamia and extended his conquests to the shores of the Ægean Sea, he too was minded to immortalise in architecture the might of the Persian Empire. Accordingly, as his race had no traditions in building, he borrowed from the methods and styles of the nations he had conquered. Thus Persian architecture represents a mingling of Median, Assyrian, Asiatic Greek and, in a small degree, Egyptian.

The boyhood of Cyrus was spent at the court of Astyages the Mede, so that the Median palaces at Susa and Ecbatana were familiar to him. Those of the latter city, according to Polybius consisted of porticoes and hypostyle halls, the columns being of cedar or cypress, overlaid with plates of silver. These have long since disappeared, and the remains which now exist at Ecbatana are of columns of stone, which are supposed to be part of the restoration of the palace under the Persian Kings. For the substitution of stone for wood in the columns distinguishes everywhere the Persian architecture.

Tombs and Palaces; No Temples.—The remains of Persian architecture comprise tombs and palaces. The

{81}

Zoroastrian religion had no use for temples made with hands. Its temple was the universe; the floor of it the mountain tops of Persia from which countless altars, tended continually by the Fire-Kindlers, sent up flames in worship of the element of Fire. Meanwhile it was the desire of every Persian Monarch whom war and government obliged to be absent so much from the homeland, that, when they died, their bodies should be brought home “to the Persians.” Accordingly, when Cyrus erected a palace at Pasargadae, the modern Marghab, he also built himself a Tomb, which still exists.

Its style is a singular mixture of Assyrian and Asiatic Greek. Built of large blocks of white polished marble, it consists of a platform of seven steps, on the top of which is a small shrine or cella, rectangular in plan, covered by a pitched roof that terminates in the front and rear, in a gable-end or pediment. It is, in fact, a Greek temple of very rudimentary simplicity, mounted on a ziggurat. The ruins show that the tomb was surrounded on three sides by colonnades.

Following the Assyrian precedent, the Palace of Cyrus occupied a platform, of about 40,000 square feet, which still exists and is known to the natives as “The Throne of Solomon.” But here the terrace is of natural rock, faced round the sides with cut stone walls distinguished by the beauty of the masonry. It is the earliest instance known of the so-called drafted masonry, of which a magnificent example is found in the terraces of Herod’s temple at Jerusalem. It represents a method of cutting, which leaves the surface of the block of stone rough-hewn, as when it left the quarry, but dresses the edges to a “draft,” or smooth, bevelled surface.

Such scanty remains as have been found suggest that{82} Cyrus’s palace was of the simplest kind, including a central hall, the roof of which was carried by two rows of stone columns, thirty feet high, with porticoes in antis. The latter is a feature borrowed from Greek-Asiatic temple-building; the term, in antis, being used when the columns of the portico are set between the prolongation of the side walls of the main building.

It is, however, from the remains of the group of buildings at Persepolis that the magnificence of Persian architecture can be best appreciated. Here, again, is a terrace of natural rock; but of vast size, covering an area of about one million six hundred thousand square feet. This, like the terrace of the Escoriál of the Spanish Kings, projects from the foot of a rocky mountain side. The Escoriál includes a royal mausoleum, built within the confines of the palace; but, at Persepolis, three tombs, one of them unfinished, are excavated behind the palace in the mountain wall. Two are supposed to be the resting places of later kings, Artaxerxes II and III, while the unfinished one is that of Arses, who reigned only two years.

Meanwhile the Tomb of Darius I, the founder of Persepolis, has been identified as one of four tombs, eight miles distant from the palace. These also are excavated in the mountain side, and at such a height from the bottom of the valley, that they corroborate the account which Ctesias, the Greek historian of Persia, gives of the tomb of Darius, that it was on the face of a rock and only to be reached by an apparatus of ropes. The three other tombs of this group are ascribed to Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II.

The Tomb of Darius I is of special interest because it bears upon its face a sculptured representation of the{83} palace which he built at Persepolis. This mode of decorating a tomb was probably derived from the Lycians, whose custom it was to face their rock-cut tombs with a representation of the house which the deceased had occupied while alive. Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the Lycians derived the idea of the rock-hewn tomb from Egypt.

The sculptured front of Darius’s tomb shows the portico of the palace, and above it, upon the roof, the monarch himself upon his throne. The latter is an immense cube, the face of which is decorated with an upper and a lower row of warriors, or perhaps, tribute-bearers, while the corners are buttressed with baluster-shaped columns, surmounted by bulls’ heads. The monarch stands before the altar, with hands uplifted in worship of the sun and moon. This recognition of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians is characteristic of the Persian attitude toward conquered nations, and recalls Cyrus’s proclamation to these nations, guaranteeing them their life and property and designating himself the favourite of their own sun-god, Marduk, Bel-Merodach.

The lower part of the façade of the tomb represents the portico of Darius’s palace. The four columns are set in antis, but we have to imagine the second row of columns as well as the windows which flanked the door, and, like the latter, were constructed, as the ruins of the palace shows, with monolithic jambs and lintels.

The columns suggest two considerations: first, the use of them, as compared with the entire absence of the structural column in Assyrian and Babylonian architecture, and, secondly, the peculiar design of their capitals. The use was derived through the Medes probably from Asiatic-Greek models; but the form of the capital is{84} peculiar to Persian architecture. It is composed of the head and forelegs of two recumbent beasts, which have been called bulls, but bear much more resemblance to horses, and when they have a horn, to the unicorn, a fabled creature that early legend attributed to India. It was identified with strength and fleetness and might well have been used symbolically by a race that derived from the same Aryan source as the Indians; while the use of the horse in decoration would come naturally to a nation of horse-lovers. It is also noticeable that these beasts are embellished with trappings that suggest harness.

However this may be, the tomb carving shows between the heads, the ends of the beams that support the cornice and roof. As these are not found in the case of the columns at Persepolis, it appears that the roofs of the palaces were constructed of wood, which perished in the fire of Alexander. It has been remarked that the character of this whole portico, taken in connection with the wooden columns at Pasagardae, suggests that the style of Persian palace architecture was derived originally from a primitive wooden construction. But, while this may be true, its development into stone construction was not affected by the Persians themselves. They employed Asiatic-Greek workmen whose style of temple-building, like that of the Mainland-Greeks, shows the traces of primitive wood construction.

Before leaving this tomb, there is one other feature to be noticed; namely, that the lintel of the doorway is surmounted by a cavetto-cornice, decorated with rows of conventionalised lotus-petals, derived through Lycia, from Egypt.

The restored plan of the platform of palaces at Persepolis exhibits a monumental approach on the west{85} side, formed of a double flight of marble steps, set in double ramp. The steps are 22 feet wide, with a rise of 4 inches and a tread of 15, so that they could easily be mounted by horses. The stairs led to a terrace, paved, as was the whole platform, with marble, in the centre of which was the entrance gate, or, to use the later classic term, a Propylæa. This was square in plan, with a portal, front and rear, flanked by winged bulls, while the ceiling was supported by four columns. Its walls, like those of the other buildings, built of sun-dried bricks or rubble masonry, set with clay mortar, have long since crumbled into ruins.

The earliest palace of the group is that of Darius I, to the portico of which we have already alluded. Its plan shows a room, right and left of the portico, in which may have been stairs leading to the roof; then a square hypostyle hall of sixteen columns, set in rows of four, with various chambers, along the sides and at the end.

In one building, the Hall of a Hundred Columns, the roof was carried by ten ranges of ten columns; for the hall, as indeed were all the halls at Persepolis, was square in plan. This can scarcely have been a mere coincidence. Is it fanciful to imagine that a people, trained in Zoroastrianism, found in the principle of the square a fitting symbol of “Creative Strength” and “Right Order”?

But the most important building at Persepolis, “one of the most stupendous relics of antiquity,” is the great Palace of Xerxes. Elevated on a terrace of its own, twenty feet high, which was ascended on the north side by four flights of steps, it occupied an area of one hundred thousand square feet, more than double that of the Great Hall at Karnak, and larger than that of any Gothic cathedral in Europe, Milan and Seville alone excepted.{86} Two rows of six columns supported each of the three porticoes, and six times six the ceiling of the Hall: in which combination one may perhaps detect a symbol of the Six Helpers of Ahuramazda, “the spiritual Wise One” or “Great Wisdom.”

The columns, including base and capital, rose to a height of 65 feet, which may be compared with the 69 feet of the central nave columns in the Hall of Karnak. The latter, however, had a diameter of 12 feet, and were separated by intervals of scarcely twice that width; while those in Xerxes’ palace were set at a comparatively far greater distance from one another and measured in diameter only about 5 feet. Moreover, instead of a minimum of light percolating through a clerestory as at Karnak, the light and air streamed freely through the windows in the walls of Xerxes’ palace, so that in every respect the impression produced by the two halls must have been very different.

The grandeur of Karnak was weighted down with mystery and awe, while Xerxes’ “lordly pleasure house” was an exalted symbol of the Zoroastrian belief in the joy of life. For in addition to the grandeur of its structural features, the imagination must picture the accompanying gladness of marble floors, water basins, fountains, and flowers, and varicoloured rugs and hangings. The walls, also, may have been resplendent with brilliantly enamelled tiles as in Xerxes’ other palace at Susa, where the French explorer, M. Dieulafoy, discovered the magnificent frieze of archers, a frieze of lions, and other decorations executed in bright-coloured enamels on concrete blocks. That Xerxes spared no pains to render his palace at Persepolis as superb as possible may be inferred from the columns in the hall and north portico. For in them{87} the double capital of beasts does not rest directly on the fluted shafts, but is supplemented by two lower members; the first a curious arrangement of scrolls or volutes, the second a sort of conventionalised calyx of the lotus, beneath which, in bell-like form, is a conventionalisation of pendant leaves. In the volutes a suggestion of the Ionic capital has been detected, while the lower points to an Egyptian origin.

This medley of motives has a certain decorative value, but lacks the supreme beauty of architectural relationship between the parts and the whole. That is to say, the use of the various parts has not been regulated by constructive logic, necessity, or fitness; but represents a purely whimsical and arbitrary multiplication of motive. The student may assure himself of this by comparing the Persian column with the Doric Order. In the latter he may observe a superior quality of fitness in the relationship of the parts and of the sense of an inevitable logical growth in the composition as a whole.

The fantastic elaboration of the columns at Persepolis, as well as the general conglomeration of motives in Persian architecture, points to the fact that the latter was the work of foreign artists, imported from various parts of the great Persian Empire. It represents the character of the empire—a variety in unity; a unity, however, not of natural growth, but one that, having no artistic traditions of its own, puts the world under tribute to supply motives for the exploitation of its magnificence.{88}

So far our study of ancient civilisation and architecture has been fairly consecutive. We have now to break the continuity of the story and take a leap back into a remote past and explore the origins of a civilisation which was a forerunner of that of Greece. This civilisation had been called “Mycenæan” because its existence was first brought to modern knowledge by Schliemann’s discoveries in Mycenæ. But subsequent exploration has proved that the civilisation was far spread and that Mycenæ was not even the centre of it.

One of the most astonishing results of recent exploration is the knowledge of a civilisation that developed without break from the polished stone age and reached its highest point contemporaneously with the New Empire in Egypt; ending, that is to say, about 1000 B.C. Not the least interesting feature of the discovery is that it throws a new light on the civilisation of prehistoric Greece.

The classical writers of Greece pointed to Mycenæ and Tiryns in Argolis as being the principal evidence of a prehistoric civilisation, which was assumed to belong to the Homeric period or even farther back to a rude heroic beginning of Hellenic civilisation. This opinion continued to be held by scholars until A.D. 1876. In this year, however, Dr. Schliemann, opening up the graves which are just inside the Lion Gateway of the citadel at Mycenæ, came upon a quantity of objects which proved the high state of civilisation to which the prehistoric inhabi{89}tants of the city had attained. Furthermore, they corresponded in character to the vases and gold, silver, and bronze objects which, three years earlier, he had dug from the ruins of the “Burnt City” (Troy) at Hissarlik in the Troad. These objects from the peninsula of Peloponnesus and the mainland of Asia Minor were not only similar in character but also of a fabric and decoration which differed from those of any known art. But a relation between the objects of art described by Homer and these “Mycenæan” treasures was generally allowed.

In 1884-1885 Schliemann and Dörpfeld, exploring the ruins of Tiryns, came upon a building which offers the most complete example in Greece of a palace of the “Mycenæan” age, belonging to a period probably between 1400 and 1200 B.C. During the subsequent years of the nineteenth century, when exploration was extended to other parts of the Peloponnesus and Northern parts of Greece, dome or beehive tombs, such as had been found at Mycenæ, were discovered in Attica, Thessaly, and elsewhere. By degrees, exploration was carried beyond the mainland of Greece to the Ionian Islands and the islands of the Ægean, particularly to Cyprus and Crete and the mainland of Asia Minor. This resulted in further discoveries of objects, related in a common family, distinct from that of any other art division. Meanwhile, objects of similar character were met with in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain.

Finally, the culmination of all this mass of corroborative evidence was reached by the explorations of Dr. A. J. Evans, at Cnossus in Crete, which have been followed up by explorations in Phæstus, and other Cretan sites. The net result is to establish the knowledge that Crete was the centre of a civilisation which had dealings with Egypt{90} and Mesopotamia and extended to the sea-coast of Asia Minor and Phœnicia, the other islands of the Ægean Archipelago, the Ionian Islands, and the mainland of Greece and spread its offshoots along the west shores of the Adriatic, into Sardinia and Spain and took deep root in Sicily. To the far-extending ramifications of this civilisation has been given the comprehensive name of Minoan or Ægean.

In a most remarkable way the discoveries in Crete have corroborated the Greek legends of the Cretan King Minos. It is conjectured that a Minos may have been the founder of a dynasty and that the name passed into a title of all the rulers, corresponding to the title, Pharaoh, in Egypt. Scholars, therefore, have given the name Minoan to the civilisation of Crete; dividing it into Early, Middle, and Late Minoan.

In the Early Minoan Period, represented in the contents of early tombs and dwellings and such objects as stone vases and seal-stones, there is evidence that the Cretans had already reached considerable cultivation and had opened up communications with the Nile Valley. The date of this period is conjectured to have centred around 2500 B.C., and to have corresponded, roughly speaking, with the earlier of the Egyptian dynasties. Most remarkable of Dr. Evans’s discoveries was the finding in 1900 of whole archives of clay tablets in the palace of Cnossus, which prove that the Cretans had a highly developed system of hieroglyphics and lineal script 2000 years before the time when the Phœnicians introduced writing into Greece. Incidentally, this knowledge corroborates the statement of the historian Diodorus, that the Phœnicians did not invent letters, but only altered their forms.{91}

The Middle Minoan Period centres round 2000-1850 B.C., and corresponds with the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt. It was the age of the earliest palace building. Already appears the beginning of a school of wall-painting, while a manufactory of fine faience was attached to the palace at Cnossus.

The Late Minoan Period covers the period of the Hyksos usurpation in Egypt and reached its own culmination about the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty when the New Egyptian Empire or Second Theban Monarchy commenced. We have already noted the appearance in Egypt of this Cretan influence, inducing a habit of naturalistic representation in place of the old conventionalised forms of sculpture and painting. To this late Minoan period belongs the greatest development of palace building, as seen at Cnossus, Phæstus, and Tiryns, while the painting on walls and vases becomes more free and animated than anything of the kind in Egypt.

Toward 1400 B.C. a period of decline becomes apparent in Cretan art, which is reflected all over the Ægean area. The conclusion is that the islands and mainland of Greece had been invaded by less civilised conquerors, who, having no cultivation of their own, adopted the art they found and spoiled it. Probably they came from the North of Greece and were precursors of the later “Hellenes.”

Finally, about 1000 B.C., the palace at Cnossus was again destroyed, never again to be rebuilt; and at the same time the “Bronze Age” of Minoan and Mycenæan civilisation came to an end. It fell before a nation, barbarous, but possessed of iron weapons; probably the tribes which later Greek tradition and Homer knew as Dorians. Then followed a period of several centuries of unrest, as, successively, Achaæn, Æolian, and Doric mi{92}grations came from the North through the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Ægean, while an Ionian migration from Armenia spread to the west shore of Asia Minor. Finally, when the Ægean area emerges into history, it is dominated by Hellenes.

The Ægean Archipelago has been called the ancient bridge between the civilisations of the East and West, and the imagination pictures Crete at the southern end of it, within easy distance of three continents and engaged in peaceful intercourse with all; the head of a maritime confederacy of sea-rovers who planted their trading stations throughout the Mediterranean, their art everywhere following their trade. She herself was protected from aggression by her island walls; while the outposts of culture on the mainland of Greece—Mycenæ and Tiryns—were compelled to erect their palaces within citadels.

From the fact that no remains of Minoan and Mycenæan temples have been found, but only shrines within the precincts of the palaces, it has been concluded that, as in Assyria and Babylonia, the monarchs were also priests. Evidence points to the principal Minoan divinity being a kind of Earth Mother, who was associated with a satellite god. One part of her religious attributes survived in the later Aphrodite, the other in Rhea, the mother of the Olympian Zeus. While images of the deity were made as early as 2000 B.C. the principal objects of worship, or fetishes, in the Minoan age were natural objects: rocks and mountain peaks, trees, and curiously shaped stones, and even artificial pillars of wood and stone. Sometimes, as in the famous instance of the Lion Gate at Mycenæ, the fetish object—here a pillar—was guarded by animals.

A special form of fetish for the two principal divinities{93} was that of the double axes: one double-headed axe above another on the same handle. “It has been discovered,” says the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition), “that the great Minoan foundation at Cnossus was at once a palace and a sanctuary of the Double Axe. We can hardly any longer hesitate to recognise in this vast building, with its winding corridors and subterranean ducts, the Labyrinth of later tradition. It is difficult, also, not to connect the repeated wall-paintings and reliefs of the palace, illustrating the cruel bull sports of the Minoan arena, in which girls as well as youths took part, with the legend of the Minotaur, or Bull of Minos, for whose grisly meals Athens was forced to pay annual tribute of her own sons and daughters.” Actual figures of a monster with a bull’s head and man’s body have been found on seals in Crete, and evidence points to these bull sports being part of a religious ceremony.

Even the smaller houses were of stone, plastered within, while the palaces suggest a luxurious mode of living; being richly decorated, with separate sleeping apartments and large halls, fine stairways, bath-chambers, windows, folding and sliding doors, and remarkably modern arrangements for water supply and drainage. The furniture included thrones, tables, seats, constructed of stone or plastered terra-cotta; a great variety of cooking utensils and vessels of all sorts from stone wine jars, ten feet high, to the tiniest ointment-holders.

Ladies, in curiously modern costumes, formed a favourite subject both for wall-decoration and miniature painting; many of the latter showing groups with architectural and landscape surroundings, done with remarkable spirit and naturalness.

The clay tablets are almost exclusively concerned with{94} inventories and business transactions, and prove that a decimal system of numeration was used.

Next to Cnossus the most important sources of knowledge concerning this ancient civilisation have been Hissarlik, Mycenæ, Phæstus, Hagia Triada, and Tiryns.

{95}

In so far as the prehistoric remains of Minoan or civilisation belonged to the Polished Stone Age and Bronze Age, they are in the phase of development that is represented in the Peruvian remains of the city of Machu Picchu. Meanwhile, in its active consciousness of beauty as a motive, the Minoan reached a perfection within the limits of its possibilities that carried it far beyond the Peruvian.

This may have been partly due to the influence of the neighbouring civilisation of Egypt, and also to the fact that the people of the Ægean area mixed freely in their roving life with one another and with outside peoples, so that there was a free-trade in ideas, and the seed which they planted grew and multiplied. But it must also have been due to something inherent in the race itself. What the race was has not been determined. So far, the examination of skulls and bones in Cretan tombs has established only the fact that the race, while showing signs of mixture, belonged on the whole to the dark, long-haired “Mediterranean race,” whose probable origin lay in Mid-Eastern Africa. The main interest of this is to discredit an Asiatic source for Minoan civilisation. It is apparent from its achievements in engineering and the arts and industries that it was a race of great intelligence, with an active interest in life that led it to strive for the beauty as well as the conveniences of living.{96}

Palace of Cnossus.—The palace of Cnossus occupies an area of about six acres, surmounting the debris of human settlements, which go back, it has been estimated, to a distance of from 12,000 to 14,000 years before the Christian era. The remains show that the palace formed a hollow square, constructed around a central court. The principal entrance was upon the north, though what appears to have been the royal entrance was upon the west, opening on to a paved court.

The west wing contained a small council chamber, or office, in which was found a throne, made of gypsum in a design curiously Gothic, around which were lower stone benches. The walls of this chamber were decorated with sacred dragons represented in a Nile landscape. They were executed, like the other paintings found in these Cretan palaces, in fresco; that is to say, in water colours mixed with some gelatinous medium, laid on the still damp plaster, so that as the latter dried the colour became incorporated in the actual material of the walls. To this council chamber was attached a bathroom, probably for ritual purposes.

Near it was also discovered a small shrine, containing figures and reliefs, exquisitely fashioned in faience, one of which shows a snake goddess and her votaries; this being one of the aspects of the chief divinity. The walls and pillars of these chambers are repeatedly decorated with the sign of the Double Axe, while miniature frescoes on the walls exhibit pillared shrines, with double axes stuck into some of the wooden pillars.

For the remains of the palace itself show that the pillars used in this construction were of wood, rounded like posts. The circular sockets still remain in the stonework and a comparison of the top and bottom ones shows that{97} the pillar tapered downward, the diameter at the bottom being six-sevenths of the top one.

Another feature of this west wing is a series of eighteen magazines or storerooms which contained quantities of clay documents and great stone jars. The latter are decorated with horizontal bands, connected by diagonal ones, like the straw work on a modern ginger jar. This design, wrought upon the stone surface of these colossal jars, is an interesting memento of one of the primitive methods of clay modelling. For, before the invention of the potter’s wheel, the method of shaping, almost universally adopted, was one of the three following: (1) scooping out from a ball of clay; (2) or coiling, in which the clay was rolled out into thin ropes, which were coiled round and round upon one another and then smoothed over; (3) or the building up of the form upon a shape of basket-work or matting.

A large bathroom was discovered in the northwest corner of the quadrangle but the actual residential quarters seem to have occupied the east wing. There are the remains of a Megaron, or great hall of state, approached directly from the central court, near which were found painted reliefs, illustrating scenes of the bull-ring, with female as well as male toreadors. These and other reliefs, some of which also commemorated incidents of bull-fighting, were not carved upon the stone, as in the Egyptian temples, or executed in tiles, as in Assyrian or Persian temples, but applied to the wall with hard plaster. This method, known as gesso work, was used later in Byzantine decoration and by the Italians of the Renaissance, for decorative details; by Pinturricchio, for example, in the Borgia apartments of the Vatican. It has been revived by modern mural decorators; John S. Sar{98}gent, for instance, employing it in some of his panels in the Boston Public Library.

To the south of the great hall a staircase, of which three flights and traces of a fourth are still preserved, descended to a series of halls and private rooms. Attached to one of these, identified as the “Queen’s Megaron,” was a bathroom, decorated with frescoes of flying fish. The drainage system in this part of the palace includes a water-closet and is of a complete and modern kind.

The character and features of this palace are repeated on a smaller scale in those discovered at Phæstus, Hagia Triada, and other spots in Crete, and resemble in the main those of Mycenæ and Tiryns.

A glance at the map of ancient Greece shows that these last two cities, situated at the north of the rich plain of Argolis, commanded the approaches to the peninsula of the Peloponnesus; Mycenæ occupying a strategic position on the highroad; Tiryns, on the sea. They were equally important in resisting invasion from the North across the Isthmus of Corinth, and in the struggle for supremacy that was waged between Argolis and the Peloponnesus. Accordingly, the distinguishing feature of each city was that it occupied an acropolis, the natural strength of which was increased by fortifications built with irregular blocks of stone of great size, in the style known as Cyclopean.

Mycenæ.—Those at Mycenæ surrounded an area which is roughly triangular in plan, the main entrance being through the above mentioned portal of the Lion Gate. Its side posts and lintel are composed of monoliths and surmounted by the famous lion-relief, which fills the triangular space formed by the gradual projection of the{99} stones of the wall. The pillar or fetish-post corresponds to the alabaster columns, now in the British Museum, which flanked the entrance of the Treasury or Tomb of Atreus, just outside the Lion Gate.

The shaft of these columns is without a base and tapers slightly to the bottom. Ornamented with bands of repeated chevrons, which alternately are plain and embellished with flutings, it supports a cushion or echinus, decorated with plain and spiral bands, on which rests a square plinth or abacus. It comprises, in fact, the features which in later times were simplified into the Doric column.

The tomb itself is a subterranean chamber, of the style known as beehive or in Greek, tholos. Its circular plan has a diameter of nearly 50 feet, and the domed ceiling, commencing at the floor and formed of inwardly projecting courses of stone, rises to about the same height. It leads into a small square chamber and is itself approached by a horizontal avenue, 20 feet wide and 115 feet long, the sides of which are of squared stone, sloping upward to a height of 45 feet.

A trace of this subterranean beehive method seems to survive in some of the rock-hewn tombs at Myra, in Lycia. Here the façade represents the front of a house, which is clearly of primitive wood construction. In later instances it is composed of Ionic columns and cornices. In the older examples the entrance is surmounted by a gable, which frequently takes the curves of the beehive.

Intermediate between these Lycian Tombs and the Minoan structures are certain rock-cut tombs in Phrygia which recall the Lion Gate. The façade comprises a cornice supported by columns, above which is a gable, oc{100}cupied by colossal lions. At Arslan, one of these pediments shows two lions, in this instance not rampant, which support a central pillar. Inside, however, two rampant lions flank a nude human figure.

At Mycenæ are earlier tombs than that of Atreus, which consist simply of a deep shaft lowered into the rock. These are situated just inside the Lion Gate, the area which they occupy being enclosed by two concentric circles of thin slabs, set up on end with others laid across the top of them. It is a feature that in its attenuated form seems to recall Stonehenge. Dr. Schliemann reached the conclusion that these were the graves which were shown to Pausanias, as being those of Agamemnon, Cassandra, and her companions.

On the summit of the Acropolis at Mycenæ are the remains of a palace, similar to, but less extensive than, that of Tiryns, which we may therefore examine in preference.

Tiryns.—The palace of Tiryns, which probably dates to a period between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., seems to have combined the luxuriousness of the residence of an Oriental king with the feudal state of a mediæval baron and his crowd of retainers. The acropolis is of oval shape, with its long axis north and south, surrounded by immense ramparts of Cyclopean masonry, from 30 to 40 feet in thickness, while the outside height was about 50 feet and that of the inside 10 feet from the level of the ground. In certain parts chambers were embedded in the thickness of the wall, and round its inner side ran a colonnade, supported by wooden posts.

The area thus enclosed was divided into three successive levels, of which the highest was excavated by Schliemann and Dörpfeld, 1884-1885. The plan shows{101} the entrance situated on the west side, away from the sea, which probably was once fitted with a gateway similar to that at Mycenæ. The approach passes between massive walls to another gate, whence it proceeds to a propylæa, with rooms for the guard. This opens into a forecourt, from which another propylæa gives approach to the actual palace.

The first feature of the Palace is a court bounded on three sides by a post-supported colonnade. An altar or sacrificial pit is in the same position as that occupied by the altar of Zeus in a later Greek house. It may be possible in this connection to see evidence that the principal deity on the mainland of Greece was already, unlike that of Crete, a male; perhaps a terrible prototype of the later benignant Zeus, to whom human sacrifices were made, as to the hideous Mexican divinity, Huitzilopochtli.

On the north side of the court a portico, succeeded by a vestibule, gives access to the Megaron. In the centre of this is the hearth, a feature not needed in the warmer climate of Crete and therefore not found in the palaces of that island. Four columns supported the roof, the centre of which may have been raised to allow openings for light and smoke escape. Adjoining the sleeping chambers on the west side of this hall is a bathroom, about 12 feet by 10 feet, the floor of which is composed of a single slab of stone, sloped so that the water drained out through a pipe in the wall.

Another group of buildings, supposed, though without authority, to be the women’s quarters, lies to the east of the great hall, from which, however, it is completely cut off by a solid wall; it is entered by two circuitous passages, one leading from the first propylæa, the other from a postern gate in the western rampart. Here again{102} the plan shows an open court, without an altar, from which a vestibule admits to a smaller megaron.

The floors of the megara are of stucco, incised with a series of lines, coloured blue and red, while the walls are decorated with frescoes as in the palace at Cnossus, one of the best preserved paintings showing a bull-fight scene. On the other hand, the palace of Tiryns shows part of a frieze of alabaster, sculptured in relief with rosettes and interlacing patterns and studded with jewel-like pieces of blue glass or enamel.

The walls to a height of about three feet above ground were of stone, above which they were continued with sun-dried bricks; the upper story being probably of wood, with roofs of stamped earth. The doorways, though sometimes of wood, were more usually constructed of monoliths. Bronze cup-like sockets, let into the stone thresholds, show that the doors revolved upon a pivot.

It is agreed that while the palace of Tiryns represents the general character of a royal house, as it is pictured in the Homeric poems, it is a mistake to look in it for an explanation of details of arrangement.{103}

{104} 

{105} 

The use of the term Hellenic can be traced back to the seventh century B.C. It was the name under which the various streams of migration—Achæan, Æolian, Dorian, and Ionian—merged their differences in the proud recognition of a common race.

The date and extent of these migrations are clouded with obscurity; but certain points are clear. The Ionians came from Armenia and settled in Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, while the other three penetrated into Greece from the shores of the Baltic. The Achæan was the first to arrive and had maintained a long civilisation before the later migration of Æolians and Dorians. The Dorian invasion seems to have been especially aggressive and after fastening a hold upon the mainland of Greece extended to the Ægean Archipelago, overrunning Crete and wresting supremacy of the Mediterranean from the Minoan Sea-Kings about 1000 B.C.

Hellenic, however, never implied a national bond. The Hellenes were never united as one people under one government. Hellas was a congeries of independent states which even allowed their colonies, from the first, complete self-government. The bond which loosely held them together was the common sense of superiority to all other races; and as their civilisation developed, a common pride in its glory, not that this was sufficient to prevent continuous rivalry and frequent warfare between states and cities. Consequently, there is properly speaking no such{106} thing as Greek history; nor would it be profitable for our purpose to trace the rise and decline of the several states. It is better to consider Hellenism as a principle, the more or less common ideal of a people, not confined to Hellas, but spread over the littoral of the Mediterranean; wherever Hellenes settled—a race of mariners and merchants, thinkers and artists, who lifted themselves to so high a pitch of civilisation, that it became a source of inspiration to all subsequent culture.

In the Minoan and Mycenæan Age the political system was a monarchy that combined the functions of high priest and commander-in-chief. In the Homeric Age there were still kings who led their armies and acted as the intermediaries of the gods, but their power was controlled by a Boule, or consulting assembly. With the Dorians the rule of kings passed to that of oligarchies, chosen from one or more of the noble classes whose claim to government was founded on birth and the ownership of land. They were associated with a Boule, representative of the privileged classes, while the priestly functions were exercised by magistrates, who, however, were drawn from the aristocracy.

In many parts of Hellas the oligarchies gave way to “tyrannoi.” These are not to be understood in the sense that our word “tyrant” has. They were a step in the evolution of popular government, inasmuch as they were a means of breaking up the exclusive authority of the privileged classes. To consolidate their own power, the tyrannoi sought the favour of the populace and made concessions in the direction of popular government. Accordingly, while some of the tyrannoi were succeeded by a return to the oligarchies, in more cases they prepared the way for a democratic form of government.{107}

In order to take religion out of the exclusive domain of the aristocracy, the tyrants established popular cults. Peisistrates, for example, tyrant of Athens, is thought to have established the Great Dionysiac festival and raised the Panathenæa to the position of the chief national festival of the Athenian State. Everywhere the tyrants were the patrons of literature and the arts. To Peisistrates is attributed the first critical edition of the text of Homer, while under the encouragement of himself and his successors (the Peisistratids) which lasted from 560-511 B.C. architecture and sculpture also progressed to a degree that made possible their grandeur in the “Great Age.” He is also said to have encouraged Thespes, the Attic poet, to impersonate characters and thus convert the narrative poem into dramatic form, laying the foundation of Greek drama.

Peisistrates also gave the people a constitution, extended the power of Athens by alliances, and increased its commerce. With the fall of the Peisistratids the rule of the many (hoi polloi) was assured. The government of Athens became democratic.

It is to be noted that while there were various forms of democratic government in Hellas, all differed from our modern conception of democracy. The latter is based upon the principle of doing away with privilege, while the Greek form implied privilege, although it enlarged its area. No foreigner could acquire citizenship, which also was denied to native-born inhabitants who were of foreign extraction, on either the father’s or the mother’s side. Furthermore, the Greeks regarded labour as a disqualification for political rights, and almost all unskilled labour and most of the skilled was performed by slaves. The latter, however, were well treated and not only en{108}joyed personal liberty but also the opportunity of becoming prosperous.

Again, the government under the Hellenic democracy was not representative. The citizen body was so small that all could meet in the Ecclesia and register their vote directly on any question. Appointment to office was by lot and not election, and accordingly the number of citizens who held at one time or another big or little offices included a great majority of the whole body. The result of this was an intimacy on the part of all the citizen body with the machinery of government and the pros and cons of every question as it arose. They voted with intelligence and their votes counted directly; a system which helped immensely to cultivate their intellectual keenness.

The two Persian invasions, the first under Datis and Artaphernes (490 B.C.) in the reign of Darius I, the second by Xerxes in person (480-479 B.C.), had proved the need of closer co-operation among the Hellenic States, and the Delian League was formed under the leadership of Athens and with Athens as the “predominant partner.” An annual tribute was paid by all the member-states for the maintenance of a fleet. Athens was the treasurer and the fleet was mainly Athenian, while the commanders were entirely so. The power thus concentrated in Athens gave her so marked a supremacy that Pericles used the League to form an Athenian Empire. This lasted about thirty years (461-430 B.C.), during which period Athens reached the culmination not only of her power but also of her magnificence. For Pericles spent the money, contributed by the allies for common defence, in beautifying the Acropolis; the excuse being that in doing so he was giving glory to Athena, who was the patron goddess of the League. Pericles also encouraged literature and{109} counted among his friends three of the greatest Greek writers—Sophocles, Herodotus, and Thucydides.

But the power of Athens incited the envy of the other states, which ranged themselves with Sparta. In the Peloponnesian wars, the supremacy of Athens was broken and the Athenian Empire was succeeded by a Spartan Empire, which in time succumbed to the Theban Hegemony. Finally Hellas was conquered by Philip of Macedon and passed into the Macedonian Empire, established by this king and enlarged by his son, Alexander the Great.

Through all these struggles Athens, though despoiled of her supremacy, played a big part until she was conquered by Philip at Chæronæa, in 338 B.C. The latter date is adopted as the end of the Great Age which had lasted since 480 B.C., including within its circumference the age of Pericles. Besides its triumphant achievements in architecture and sculpture, the Great Age comprised in drama the names of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; in history, Herodotus, Thucydides; in oratory, Demosthenes; in philosophy, Aristotle and Plato. Meanwhile, the century preceding it had produced, among the poets, Anacreon and Sappho; and, as representatives of mathematics, astronomy, geography, and metaphysics, Thales, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, and Hecatæus of Miletus.

It is significant that none of these last named poets and thinkers belonged to the mainland of Hellas, but to the islands and cities of the Ionian group or to the adjacent Cyclades. And what is true of literature is equally true of architecture and sculpture. In fact during the fifth century B.C. and also the three preceding centuries, culture had been more developed in Ionia than in Attica.{110} For, through its commerce with the East, Ionia reached a high state of prosperity and borrowed something of Eastern luxuriousness as well as Eastern thought and art ideals, just as in turn the East borrowed from it. Miletus was for a long time the wealthiest and most luxurious of Hellenic cities, rivalled only by Sybaris on the gulf of Tarentum; one of the flourishing cities of the so-called Magna Græcia in the south of Italy.

Similarly Corinth under the rule of her tyrants, Cypselus and his son Periander (657-581 B.C.), had enjoyed a period of great prosperity. She extended her trade from Asia Minor and Egypt to Magna Græcia in the west, and was also a great industrial centre, famous for its pottery, metal work, and other decorative crafts. Moreover, it was reported to have “invented” painting.

These brief references serve to emphasise two points: first, the wide spread of Hellenic culture; and, secondly, the variety that it exhibited. The most cherished sentiment in Hellas, as we have remarked, was that of autonomy. Even under the hegemonies and empires, individual cities and colonies were permitted self-government and, as its corollary, self-development. Hence the variety in unity that characterised Hellenic culture. The unity was strengthened and the variety diffused throughout the whole by the Festival-contests which were held at regular intervals. These originated in local religious festivals, which in time were thrown open to competitors from all parts of Hellas.

The oldest and the greatest was the Olympic Festival, held in the valley of the river Alphæus in Elis, which was celebrated at intervals of four years. The event became so important in the life of Hellas that the interval of four years between one celebration and the succeeding{111} one, called an Olympiad, became the measure for computing time, the first Olympiad being reckoned as 776 B.C. Originally the festival was held in honour of Hera, to whom a temple—the earliest as yet known in Hellas—was dedicated, 1000 B.C. Later the chief honour was paid to the Olympian Zeus. His temple, which in time contained the celebrated chryselephantine statue of the god by Pheidias, stood in a sacred grove, the Altis, which was adorned with statues of the successful athletes, made by the most famous sculptors. The sacred enclosure was surrounded by walls and colonnades, adjoining which, on one side, were the gymnasium, palæstra, and baths for the use of the athletes, whose training in the sacred precincts lasted for ten months, before they could compete in the stadium. The latter adjoined the Altis on the east side.

From all parts of Hellas, states and cities vied with one another in furnishing competitors and, as the date of the Festival approached, heralds proclaimed throughout the Hellenic world the “Truce of God” under which, for the time being, warlike operations were suspended and safe conduct was guaranteed to all visitors to Olympia.

The influence of Sparta had regulated the character of the contests of endurance: running, leaping, wrestling, boxing, to which in time was added chariot racing. But as the spirit of culture spread the Olympian and the other festivals included musical contests, while the poet declaimed his verses and the painter showed his work for the pleasure and profit of the assembled multitudes.

The Olympic festival, in fact, was the supreme realisation of the Hellenic ideal: perfection of physical development, joined to highest intellectual development and the finest development of the senses. It was an ideal that in{112}volved the possible perfection of the whole man, a harmony of body, senses, and intellect—the Hellenic ideal of Beauty.

Olympia, wrote Lysias, is “the fairest spot on earth,” and, surely, in the loveliness of its natural setting, in the embellishments which the architect and sculptor had added, in the glory of the youthful vigour of the competitors and the inspiration of poets and musicians, and, not least, in the joyous enthusiasm of the spectators was realised, as perhaps nowhere else at any time, the Beauty of Life; the idea, as Plato taught, that the Good is the Beautiful, the Beautiful the Good.

Such was the Hellenic ideal. And an ideal, need one add, is not an aim that is actually achieved but one beyond our capacity to achieve wholly, that yet gives continuous incentive to higher and nobler effort. This ideal of the possible perfection of man in all his parts is the highest to which man has ever aspired and the Hellenes of the Great Age came the nearest to achieving it. Hence their example has become to succeeding ages Classic.

Having this ideal, the Hellenes translated it as far as possible into visible form. No athlete could compete at Olympia unless his body and his character were free from blemish; no statue or temple must be erected except as the finest possible expression of organic perfection.

For the beauty involved in the Hellenic ideal is organic beauty. Everything about Olympia, as everything about a Hellenic Temple, must perform its function in the organic beauty of the whole.

Further, it is to be noted that in the pursuit of this ideal the Greeks did not rely upon the feeling of the senses, nor yet upon the judgment of the intellect; but upon a union of the two. They submitted the inspira{113}tion of the senses to processes of reason. In a word, they intellectualised their sensations. It is this which has made the expression of their ideal Classic.

It is not necessary for our present purpose to trace the ebb and flow of the influence of this ideal through the centuries. But we may observe that while the Romans despoiled Hellas of her works of art and imitated, as far as they could, the externals of her ideal of beauty, the Arabs, Moors, and Saracens in later years more intimately imbibed its spirit and gave their own expression to it. Italy, however, in the latter half of the fifteenth century and during the sixteenth, came nearer than any other nation to both the spirit and the form of Hellenic culture. For her scholars and artists were more inclined to emulate than to imitate the example of the Greeks and tried to incorporate the Hellenic ideal into their own lives.

On the other hand, the Classical revival which began toward the end of the eighteenth century and has continued intermittently to our own day, has for the most part made the mistake of imitating instead of emulating. Artists have tried to copy the form, without imbibing the spirit. But form so used is like the letter that killeth; without the spirit that giveth life.

Meanwhile, there are indications that the world to-day is going to approach nearer to the Hellenic ideal than ever before and in some respects to better it. For there was a flaw in the latter. It despised labour and denied workmen a share in government. Its democracy was merely an extended aristocracy and, since those privileged to share in it received payment while filling office, it has been said that “the majority of the Athenian citizens were salaried paupers.” On the other hand, the theory,{114} at least, of modern society is the honourableness of labour, and one of the best recognised problems of to-day is the shaping of conditions in order that labour may in truth be honourable—a blessing and not a curse, enhancing the beauty of the worker’s life instead of starving it. In fact, the modern world in adopting anew the Hellenic ideal of the beauty of the whole life is going to carry it further, to include the whole life of the whole community.

Moreover, our hope in being able to revive the Hellenic ideal and even to carry it farther consists in the fact that the foundation of our progress, as of the Greek, has again become reason, and reason established on a wider and firmer basis, owing to the immense development of modern science. And, while science encompasses every field of human thought and activity, its tendency is more and more directed to promoting the health and happiness of life. It is aiming anew at the Hellenic ideal of physical, moral and mental perfection, not confined to a few, but embracing whole communities and peoples.

There was a further flaw in the Hellenic system. It relegated women to an inactive position in the public affairs of life. Women were excluded even as sight-seers from the Olympic Games. The Greek worshipped the physical in woman, but refused development of her intellectual faculties. Their ideal was, in fact, centred in a single sex; it could not breed and perpetuate itself. But to-day the idea is spreading that this is a woman’s as well as a man’s world, and that to approximate to the ideal of human perfection needs the full, free, and independent co-operation of the woman and the man.

In conclusion let us note how in one respect the Hellenic ideal still transcends our own. There was a logic in the{115} Greek, to which we have hardly yet attained. It practically amounted to this that “a tree is known by its fruits.” If a thing is good physically, morally, and mentally, it must naturally manifest its goodness so that it can be appreciated by the senses. Beauty must be made visible and audible. The possibility of the ideal must be made familiar to all, in literature, song, dance, drama, and the arts of beautiful design.

To the Greeks æsthetics, the study of what is appreciated as beautiful by the senses, was not a separate department of life, as it is apt to be with us, but only another aspect of morality and religion. It was the natural and inevitable expression of the inward spirit of the ideal. How could a man’s life reach its highest possibility if it did not love and seek after beauty; how could a city be truly great unless it were manifestly beautiful?

One can hardly imagine a Hellen, who wished to retain any reputation for intelligence, asserting, as many people are satisfied and even seem proud to do in these days: “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” To this it is on record that an artist retorted, “And so does a cow.” Which would have been the sort of retort that a Hellen might have made to the speaker, whom he would at once determine was a person of low intelligence.

For Greek art, as we have already said, was not an expression solely of the senses; but of the sensations guided by the intellect; and it was just as much a part of a Greek’s intellectual training to know and understand and feel—in a word, appreciate—art, as it was to fit himself for other services to the State. Yet, do not forget it, the Hellenes were a race of traders and manufacturers, like the backbone of our communities to-day.{116}

We have noted in the previous chapter that Hellenic art, like Hellenic culture generally, was a product of the senses guided by the intellect—the expression of intellectualised sensations. To his crude sensations the artist applied very much the same process that the modern scientist has applied to crude oil, until, through experiments guided by observation and reasoning, he has developed refined oil, which gives the purest and intensest possible illumination. Thus the Hellenic artists, through generations, refined upon the forms of their architecture, to create a unity, distinguished by fitness, proportion, harmony and rhythm, until they brought it to the highest degree of expressional capacity; appealing alike to feeling and to reason. It reached its highest expression in the temple, the supreme monument of the community’s civic consciousness.

The developed form of the Hellenic Temple resembled the Egyptian in being a product of the “post and beam” principle of construction; but differed in its purpose that the outside rather than the inside should present superior dignity of design. The chief feature of the latter was the Order, as it is called in Hellenic and Roman architecture, or combination of columns and entablature. It might be confined to a portico at the entrance or supplemented by another portico in the rear, or still further extended by a colonnade that surrounded all

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four sides of the cella or domos, house of the god, in which case it is called a peristyle.

The emphasis of the order as a constructive and decorative feature has been traced back by some students to the Dorian people’s primitive custom of worshipping in groves. The religious ceremonies, which included a procession of the worshippers, would be conducted amid the trees surrounding the altar or shrine, and in time a roofing of cross pieces thatched with boughs may have been attached to the trees. Accordingly, those who adopt this view suggest that when the use of a grove was succeeded by a constructed temple, the original feature was the peristyle. And possibly there is a commemoration of this in the peristyle of the Parthenon, where a procession of worshippers of the goddess is represented in the sculptured frieze that embellishes the outside of the walls of the cella—thus embodying in the most highly developed form of Hellenic temple its origin in primitive religion.

The character of the form seems to have originated in wood construction, certain features of which—to be referred to later—were retained after stone or marble was employed and were translated into details of decoration. The gradual transition to materials of construction, less at the mercy of fire, is hinted at by Pausanias, a Greek geographer and writer on art of the second century B.C., in his description of the Heraion or Temple of Hera (Juno) at Olympia, the oldest known example of a Doric Temple, attributed to 1000 B.C.

The cella wall, he says, was constructed of sun-dried bricks on a lower course of stonework, but the entablature was still of wood, covered with terra-cotta. One wooden column was still standing in the opisthodomos, but else{118}where as the wooden columns decayed they had been replaced by stone ones; the design of their capitals showing that the work of restoration lasted from the sixth century to Roman times. The roof was covered with tiles. The cella was divided into a central nave and side-aisles by two rows of columns for the support of the roof, and the aisles were intersected by small screen walls; thus forming alcoves, corresponding to the side-chapels of a Gothic cathedral. In one of these alcoves German explorers in 1878 discovered the Hermes of Praxiteles, which is probably the only marble statue in existence that was actually wrought by the hands of one of the great sculptors.

Early Doric Examples.—The Dorian migration pushed down through Macedonia and Thessaly into the peninsula of Greece and spread through the islands of the Ægean as far as Crete, afterward planting colonies at Pæstum and other sites in Southern Italy and at Syracuse, Selinus, and Agrigentum in Sicily. Throughout all this wide area they carried their particular style of Order—the Doric. In developing it, they brought into play what has been judged their distinguishing trait of character—sense of proportion.

The earliest known examples of Doric temples, built originally of stone, are at Corinth and that of Phœbus Apollo on the island of Ortygia, at the entrance to the harbour of Syracuse. In these, which are attributed to the seventh century B.C., the columns are monoliths with widely projecting capitals, and set so close together that the intercolumniation was less than one diameter of the column. For the early Greeks appear to have been distrustful of the bearing capacity of stone as compared with wood.

Belonging to the sixth century are the colossal Temples{119} of Zeus at Selinus and Agrigentum and the Temple of Poseidon (Neptune) in Pæstum. In the last the columns are composed of sections or “drums,” and there are still in position in the cella the smaller columns, superimposed on the main ones for the support of the roof.

The temples of the fifth century are distinguished by increased refinement in the matter of proportion and details and by superior skill and workmanship. They include the Temple of Athene (Minerva) on the island of Ægina; the so-called Theseum, supposed to have been dedicated to Heracles (Hercules), in Athens; and the Temple of Zeus which forms one of the group of temples at Olympia. It is the most complete temple-group yet discovered, and was the scene of the religious ceremonies in connection with the Pan-Hellenic Games.

With the second half of the fifth century began the supremacy of Athens in the affairs of Hellas under the rule of Pericles, which enabled her as custodian of the Hellenic treasury to undertake the beautifying of the Acropolis. This culminated in the Parthenon, the noblest example of the Doric style and, as Mr. A. D. F. Hamlin writes, “the most faultless in design and execution of all buildings erected by man.”

Following, apparently, the tradition of worshipping in groves, the Dorians placed their temples in a temenos, or enclosure in which were other shrines, altars, and treasuries. Whether this temenos was on a hill-top, as in the case of the Acropolis in Athens and the site of the temple-group in Agrigentum, or in a valley on sloping ground as at Delphi, the irregularities of the ground were taken advantage of in the disposition of the buildings. Thus was created an ensemble in which art and nature united, while in the case of a level site, as at Olympia, Delos, and{120} Pæstum, the temples were grouped in picturesque irregularity.

Temple Plans.—The nucleus of the temple plan was the naos, containing the statue of the deity. Adjoining it were other chambers, connected with the ritual of worship; and this aggregate of naos and chambers, enclosed within walls, is known as the Cella.

It was approached from the front, which faced the east, by a covered, columned vestibule, open at the sides, called the pronaos. This was often repeated at the rear under the name of epinaos, or, as the Romans called it, posticum.

The pronaos was entered through a portico. When the latter was composed of columns, set between the prolonged sides of the cella, the type of plan was called in antis.

When the side-walls were not prolonged, but terminated in pilasters, known as antiæ, and the supporting members of the front façade were solely columns, the type was called prostylar or prostyle.

If, under the same conditions the portico was repeated at the rear, the type was called amphi-prostylar or amphi-prostyle.

If the whole were surrounded by a colonnade or peristyle the type was peripteral; while if a second row of columns were added on each side, as in the great Temple of the Olympian Zeus, erected in Athens during the Roman occupation, the type was dipteral. The external aisle, formed by the colonnade on each side was known as the pteroma.

Where there was no peristyle, but columns, known as false or engaged, were built into the wall of the cella, the type was pseudo-peripteral.{121}

There are also to be mentioned the octagonal plan, as seen in the Tower of the Winds in Athens; the circular peripteral plan of the Tholos at Epidauros and the examples of irregular planning presented by the Erechtheion and Propylæa.

The type was further distinguished by the number of columns—four, six, eight, or ten—composing the portico, as, respectively, tetrastyle, hexastyle, octostyle, and decastyle.

Thus the Parthenon is octostyle peripteral; Temple of Poseidon, Paestum, hexastyle peripetral; of Jupiter Olympios, Atucus, octostyle dipteral; of Apollo, Bassæ, in antis.

Temple Form.—The cella, or chamber for the god, was built originally of wood; later of sunburnt bricks on a lower course of stonework, the whole being coated with a thin layer of stucco, as is found to have been the practice also in later Doric temples in Sicily and Italy, where the material was soft stone. To protect it from the damp of the ground as well as to dignify it, the cella was raised on a platform, approached by steps.

On the top of the walls was laid a framework of timber sills, crossed by transverse beams, on which stood posts to hold the ridge-piece, from which the rafters sloped to the sills, so that the roof which was of wood, covered with sunburnt brick and later by tiles, formed eaves to protect the cella from the roof-rain.

The next step to add dignity to the entrance would be to prolong the gable end in front and support it by posts, so as to form a porch or portico. At first the weight of this might be chiefly carried by an extension of the side walls. Then a superior effect of lightness and dignity would be given to the portico by omitting the support of the sides and substituting posts; while, for further em{122}bellishment, a similar portico might be extended from the rear of the cella.

Then, in the search for dignity and also to give more protection from weather to the walls of the cella, the eaves of the roof would be further prolonged outward and made to rest on sills that were supported by a series of posts. In this way the cella was completely surrounded by a colonnade or peristyle.

As the use of stone or marble was adopted, the platform became the stylobate, which was approached by three steps, carried along the entire length of all the sides. The cella was built of marble or stucco-covered stone, and marble or stone took the place of the sills and beams of the roof, but the latter continued to be constructed of wood, supported by small columns resting on the capitals of larger ones. The outside sheathing of the roof was of terra-cotta or marble tiles. Unlike the roof of an Egyptian temple which was raised in the centre to admit clerestory windows, that of a Hellenic temple had an uninterrupted slope. Whence then was the light derived for the interior?

Lighting.—Since all roofs, being of wood, have perished, the explanations that have been attempted are purely conjectural. A remark by Vitruvius, the Roman architect and author of ten books on architecture, regarding the Temple of Zeus at Athens that it was hypæthral (open to the sky) has led to a suggestion that part of the roof may have been open, as in the case of the Pantheon in Rome. But, at the time he wrote, the cella was exposed because Sulla had carried off to Rome some of the supporting columns. Another Roman writer, Strabo, describes the decastyle Temple of Apollo near Miletus as hypæthral, but gives as the reason the enormous size of{123} the cella, in which precious groves of laurel bushes grew. So, it is purely a surmise that the portion of the roof may have been omitted and that the temples were hypæthral.

Another theory, founded upon the discovery in a temple at Bassæ of three marble tiles, or thin slabs, pierced with holes about 18 inches by 10, is that some five of these, let into each side of the roof, would have lighted the interior amply without admitting much rain. Again, the use of marble tiles has afforded a suggestion that, Parian marble being very translucent, the light might have penetrated through. James Fergusson, on the other hand, conjectured that a trench was let into each side of the roof; but this would have needed drains to carry off the water and no sign of a system of drainage has been found in any temple. Other authorities, however, maintain that it was only through the open doorway that light was admitted, which owing to the clear atmosphere of Greece and the reflection from the marble pavement, would be sufficient.

The Orders.—In Hellenic architecture there are two fully developed Orders—or combinations of Columns and Entablature—the Doric and the Ionic. To these are usually added a third, the Corinthian, which, however, though invented by the Hellenic artists, did not receive its full development as an independent order until employed by the Romans. The principal members of the classic column are the capital, shaft, and, except in the Doric order where the shaft was set directly on the stylobate, the base.

Doric Column.—It is possible that the Dorians took the character of their column originally from the example of Minoan architecture. For in a fresco at Cnos{124}sos appear the façades of three temples with columns, and the representation of the latter corresponds with the facts discovered in the actual remains of the palace. The columns are of wood, and have no base, since the shaft is let into a socket in the masonry. It is crowned by a torus, or circular cushion with a half-round edge, on which rests a square block, the abacus. The shaft differs in one respect, it narrows downward; whereas all Hellenic columns taper upward. The reason assigned for the Cretan practice is that the tree-trunk was inverted so that it might retain the sap.

All these features are reproduced in stone in the columns of the doorway of the Tomb of Atreus at Mycenæ, which has been already mentioned. The shafts of these columns are decorated with chevrons, whereas the Greeks in their best examples never decorated the shaft, nor, in fact, any other part of the structure that carried the chief strains.

Upon this crude type the Dorian architects continually improved until they had evolved an order of the most subtle refinement. In the earlier examples the diminution upward of the shaft is more pronounced than in the Parthenon, where the diameter at the bottom is 6 feet 3 inches and at the top 4 feet 9 inches, which gives a diminution of slightly over one quarter of the lower diameter. The shaft, except in one or two temples that were not completed, was always fluted. The flutes usually numbered twenty, and were elliptic in section, meeting in a sharp edge or arris, thus differing from the flat-edged fillet that separated the flutings of the Ionic and Corinthian. In order to correct the optical illusion, suggested in a diminishing shaft, that the contours are concave, they were made slightly convex, the swell of this{125} entasis, as the convex is called, being greatest at about one-third of the distance from the bottom.

As the shaft nears the capital, it is encircled by a narrow groove or annula. At the top of the shaft is a series of annulæ, some of which are cut in the shaft and others in the lower member of the capital, the echinus, so that the shaft appears to project in a necking, into which the capital is set. The echinus is a circular cushion with an eccentric curve; a curve, that is to say, that is not part of a circle. (Compare by contrast the semi-circular curve of the torus.) Upon the echinus sets firmly the abacus, a square block with a side measurement the same as the diameter of the echinus.

The height of the column varied in its proportion to the lower diameter. In the Temple of Poseidon, at Pæstum, the height is four times the diameter; in the later example of the Parthenon nearly five and a half times, while in the Temple of Jupiter Nemæus it is six and a half times.

The intercolumniation, or space between the columns, also varies. In the older temples it was about one diameter of the column, the space between the angle columns being always less; while in the case of the Parthenon the distance varies from one diameter to 1.24; this being an instance of deviation from geometrical regularity to be referred to later.

It remains to mention the antæ. These were flat, right-angled columns, projecting slightly from the wall of the pronaos at the corners, facing the end columns. While they correspond to the latter, they differ in three respects. The shaft did not taper and was set on a small base, while the capital was distinguished by different mouldings. For the mouldings suitable to a free-stand{126}ing column, supporting actual weight were felt to be unsuited for a member attached to a wall, whose functions were decorative.

Doric Entablature.—The principal members of the entablature are the architrave or supporting member, the frieze or decorative member, and the cornice or protecting member.

The architrave, as its name implies, “the chief beam” of the entablature, rests immediately upon the abacus; its edge corresponding neither with that of the abacus nor with the top edge of the shaft, but so adjusted to both as to ensure a feeling of complete stability. The architrave was usually plain[1] and crowned with a projecting fillet, called the tænia, which beneath the triglyphs, is supplemented by a lower fillet, known as the regula. On the under side of the latter were six studs, which recall perhaps the wooden pegs with which the ends of the beams in primitive construction were fastened.

The frieze is a vertical surface, composed alternately of triglyphs and metopes. The triglyphs, so called because they are divided into three vertical channels, represent the ends of the primitive longitudinal sills of the cella roof; and a recollection of the woodworker’s craft was still preserved in the chamfer or hollow of their outer edges. The function of the triglyphs was to support the cornice. Generally they were set above and between the columns, but at each end of the entablature one adjoins the corner, thereby increasing the effect of stability.

The space between the triglyphs, called the metope, was originally left open, except for a wooden shutter to{127} keep out birds. But in the most elaborate examples of later date the metope was decorated with sculpture in high relief. Those of the Parthenon contained groups, representing fights with Centaurs, Amazons, and Trojans.

Above the frieze was the cornice, which, as a protection from the drip of the roof, projected to a distance, about one-third of the diameter of a column. Its chief members were a vertical band, known as the corona, and an under-part, the soffit. The latter sloped down under the corona at about the same angle as the slope of the roof, and was decorated above each triglyph and metope with a mutule or square block, studded with eighteen guttae, or drops, a device that recalls the method of making fast the ends of the rafters with wooden pegs.

The cornice was carried up the two sloping edges of the roof, but here distinguished by an additional feature, the cymatium or gutter. The triangle or gable thus formed by the three cornices was called the pediment. It was embellished at the top and ends with small pedestals, acroteria, on which stood figures or conventional ornaments.

In a Doric temple the corona, on the sides of the building was without a cymatium, but studded instead with ante-fixae, ornaments of terra-cotta or marble, placed opposite the end of each tile-ridge of the roof. The latter, as we have already noted, was covered with tiles of marble or terra-cotta, and finished at the top with ridge-tiles.

The mere reading of these details is dry enough. They should be read with an eye on the examples illustrated but also with a mind constantly alert to think out the function and appropriateness of each feature. For the{128} principle of Hellenic construction was that every member should perform a special function. The architect’s logic would not permit him, as we say, to send a boy on a man’s errand or waste a man by employing him at boy’s work, still less to confuse the responsibility for the function between two or more members. Accordingly, the student who is reading intelligently will assure himself at each step as to what particular responsibility was laid upon each member and how appropriately it was fitted to its function.

Ionic Order.—From the grandiose simplicity of the Doric order we pass to the slenderer and more graceful and decorated order of the Ionic. It is almost like passing from a masculine to a feminine type: from a reflection of the severe discipline of the old Dorian, as perpetuated by the Spartans, to the more pleasure-loving and elegant life of the wealthy Ionians; from the grave influence of the Olympian Zeus, chief god of the Dorians, to the grace of the youthful Apollo and Artemis, beloved of the Ionians.

For the Ionic order, as the name implies, was developed by the Asiatic Hellenes whose migration from Armenia has been already noted. From them the Greeks of Europe borrowed it. Among the earliest known examples are a Temple of Apollo at Naucratis, in Egypt, and the archaic Temple of Artemis, at Ephesus, both belonging to about 560 B.C. The remains of the latter are in the British Museum. They include two capitals, inscribed with the name of Crœsus, who is known to have contributed to the temple.

As in the Doric order, the Ionic temple rested on a stylobate of three steps, but the column is also provided with a base. The latter was usually composed of two{129} tori, of semi-circular profile, separated by a concave moulding or scotia. Sometimes, as in the Erechtheion at Athens, the base stood upon a square, flat base-block, or plinth. Frequently the tori were embellished with horizontal flutings or the interlacing wave-lines, called guilloche.

The Ionic shaft was proportionately higher than the Doric, being from 8 to 10 diameters in height as compared with the 4⅓ to 7 of the Doric. Consequently, the entasis was less. The intercolumniation was sometimes as much as two diameters. The shaft was incised with twenty-four narrow flutings, separated by flat-edged fillets.

The capital usually commenced with a narrow convex moulding, called the astragal, which was often enriched with the alternate bead and spool ornament. Above this was the echinus, decorated with the egg-and-dart pattern. But the echinus is only partly visible, since it is encroached upon by the main feature of the capital, a fillet that passes across the face and at the sides winds inward upon itself, forming a volute, which projects beyond the echinus. Above this was a low abacus, enriched with ornament, on which set the architrave.

In some instances, as in the Erechtheion, the fillet forms a looping curve, the volute is enriched with intermediate fillets and the necking is decorated with the anthemion ornament.

The Ionic capital presented awkward features which the ingenuity of the architects never quite succeeded in disguising. In the first place the abacus projected beyond the face of the architrave which from the side view offered an unsightly appearance. Secondly arose the problem of treating the volutes of the corner col{130}umns, so that the effect might be symmetrical on both sides of the building. This was solved by converting the side end of the capital into another face, the adjacent volutes at the corner being brought out at an angle of forty-five degrees. This results in an awkward arrangement at the back where two half-volutes intersect each other at right angles.

The Ionic architrave consists of two or more fasciæ, or vertical faces, projecting one over the other. This recalls the original wooden construction and suggests that the Ionians used planks, while the Dorians used a single beam. It was crowned with small mouldings, frequently enriched with ornament.

Above this was the frieze, sometimes left plain, at other times enriched with sculptured reliefs. It was joined by a moulding to the cornice.

The latter, in the simpler form adopted by the Athenians, consisted of a plain corona, a fillet of bead-and-spool ornament, a row of egg-and-dart moulding, and the cymatium or gutter, which was often embellished with lion heads.

In Asiatic-Ionic examples, however, the cornice was more elaborate: a row of narrow blocks or dentils, crowned with a carved fillet, being inserted beneath the corona, while, further, the cymatium was embellished with a repeat of the anthemion decoration. This style is distinguished by the term Ornamented Ionic.

The origin of the dentil may probably be traced to the Lycian Tombs, where they are represented by the ends of the beams of the roof or gable. The volute appears as a decorative feature on the façade of the so-called Tomb of Midas in Phrygia. It also occurs as a decorative feature in Assyrian art and is found in the capitals of the{131} small columns of a pavilion represented in the reliefs at Khorsabad. The motive of the spiral is also found in Mycenæan jewelry. Professor William H. Goodyear in his “Grammar of the Lotus,” suggests that the volute may have originated in successive variations of the Egyptian lotus patterns.

The Doric and Ionic orders were sometimes combined in the same building, as in the Propylæa.

Corinthian Order.—The Corinthian order represents a still further advance in ornateness, which however by the Hellenic architects was confined to the capital of the column. For the base and shaft of the columns and the entablature followed the Ionic order. The embellishment of the capital may have been derived from the old custom of attaching metal ornaments or actual foliage to altars and pedestals; and it may be possible to trace the growth of the Corinthian style from the Ionic in the repeat of palmettes that occurs below the volutes in the capitals of the east portico of the Erechtheion. On the other hand, the general bell-form of the capital may have been derived from Egyptian lotus capitals.

The Corinthian order was used by the Athenians only in their smaller structures[2] and reached its most refined form in the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. Here the flutings of the shaft terminate at the top in leaves that curve outward. Above them is a band that may have been covered with a bronze collar, from which spring a row of small lotus leaves. Then come eight beautiful acanthus leaves, between each of which is an eight-petalled rosette, suggesting a lotus-flower. They{132} are surmounted at the corners by stalks of the acanthus, partly sheathed with leaves, that turn over with a spiral and form scrolls to support the abacus. The latter in the Corinthian order has concave sides.

The details vary so much in Hellenic examples of Corinthian capitals that, as we have already noted, the type had not yet been developed into an independent order. Its final development was worked out by the Romans, to whom its magnificence especially appealed.

Ornament.—The acanthus plant belongs to Southern Europe and the warmer parts of Asia and Africa. The common species found throughout the Mediterranean, has large, deeply cut, hairy leaves. As a decorative motive the Greeks first reproduced it in metal and then carved it in stone, using it with particularly fine effect on the upright form of tombstone known as stela. While they conventionalised the leaves, they preserved the character of vigorous and at the same time graceful growth. They gave a sharpness to the tips of the leaves that distinguishes their use of it from the Roman.

The anthemion ornament is often called the “honeysuckle pattern” from its resemblance to that flower. But it is supposed to be a conventionalisation of the flower of the acanthus, while related as a decorative motive with the forms of the Egyptian lotus and the Persian palmette.

The egg-and-dart border presents a repeat in which the form of an egg, set in a concave oval, alternates with a vertical bar that may or may not terminate below in a more or less pronounced arrow-tip. It permits the most subtle treatment of the planes of the egg, and of the contrast between the smooth surfaces and the sharpness of the other details.

The bead-and-spool repeat explains itself. It shows{133} a variation, according as the conventionalisation was derived from a spool that is wound or that is unwound.

The heart-leaf, also sometimes called the lily-leaf, is a remarkable instance of the closeness with which the Greek artist studied nature and of the imagination he displayed in simplifying the natural form into a convention, while at the same time preserving the principles of its construction.

Projections.—Unlike Egyptian architecture, the Hellenic is distinguished by the number and importance of its projections; which may be compared to the lines, angles, and curves which constitute the features of a human face and give it expression. They are the means by which the architect engraves upon his buildings expressive designs of light and shade. We have already spoken of the projections involved in the column and entablature, but may now specifically enumerate the various types of moulding that these involve; noting at the same time the particular ornament that was employed on each, if it were decorated. For such was the logic and refinement of the Hellenic taste that it adopted motives of ornament that corresponded to the planes of the surfaces of the moulding.

Thus, when the moulding took the form of the cyma recta—a curve outward growing into a curve inward—Hogarth’s “line of beauty”—the decorative feature applied to it was the anthemion, whose curves have a corresponding direction. On the other hand, for the reversed form of moulding, known as the cyma reversa where the inward precedes the outward curve, they used the heart-leaf. Again, the moulding known as ovolo, in which the contour of an egg is followed, is enriched with the egg-and-dart.{134}

The fillet, a small band used to separate the other mouldings, was usually left plain; as also were the simple hollow, called cavetto, and the deep hollow which separated the two tori in the base of columns. When the torus was embellished, the motives used on the semicircular surface were the interweave or plait, known as guilloche, or rows of leaves, tied with bands, so that the moulding resembled a wreath. Another small, separating moulding was the bead, which in contour approaches a circle, and, when decorated, received the bead-and-spool enrichment.

The distinction of the Hellenic use of all these mouldings and enrichments was the extreme delicacy of the cutting, which the hardness of the marble permitted and the clear sunshine helped to reveal; so that it has been said that “while the Hellenes built like Titans, they finished like jewellers.” But this did not involve a finicking precision, for it was but an instance of the feeling for proportion and choice relation of parts to one another that embraced the whole building.

Organic Relations.—The height of the building was thoughtfully proportioned to the length and width; the height of the shaft of the column was considered in relation to the diameter. Similar care was expended on the proportions of the several members of the capitals and entablature, and the intercolumniation bore relation to the lower diameter of the shafts. In every particular, great or little, the effort was to create a unified impression of organic harmony and rhythmical relations.

Now the term organic is primarily used of the living bodies of animals and plants, the parts of which are not only connected but perform certain functions in relation to the well-being of the whole. And it is an extension of{135} this idea that the Hellenes applied to the geometrical harmony on which their architecture was based. They considered the functions of each part—the amount of support it gave or strain it had to sustain and so forth; and having made provision for this as constructors, they were consistent to the principle also in their æsthetic consideration as artists. They modified the sculptural decoration according to the function of the parts; giving least to those whose function of support was most important and increasing the quantity and the boldness of the curving as the structural strain diminished.

Thus the shaft of the column was free of any carving except the fluting, which, however, served the purpose of channels to carry the rain water and helped to preserve the mass from decay. The capital in the Doric style was not enriched with ornament, and similarly plain, with very few exceptions, was the architrave. Meanwhile, sculptured figures in high relief were introduced into the metopes which originally had been openings, while the tympanum or flat surface of the pediment received groups of figures in the round. This increased boldness of relief, accompanied by foreshortening of the figures, was adopted to offset the diminishing effect that their greater distance from the spectator’s eye would otherwise have suggested. Moreover, in the sculptures, as in the carving of the mouldings, the varying quantities of light were considered. The mouldings on the outside of a temple in full sunlight were differently planned from those in the interior; and the shadow cast by the cornices was taken into account in graduating the relief of the sculptures in the metopes and pediments.

Nor was the actual work done by artists, but under their supervision by pupils and masons. From the rec{136}ords of payments made to the sculptors who worked on the Erechtheion it appears that they were ordinary masons, some of them not even citizens, who were paid for each figure the sum of 60 drachms, or 12 dollars!

Finally, the decoration of a Greek Temple comprised not only sculpture, but also painting. A large part of every Doric temple was covered with strong, bright colours, while certain prominent details were treated with elaborate patterns. The figures of the sculpture also were painted and relieved against a background of contrasted colour.

It has been discovered that the triglyphs were painted blue and the metopes red and that the mouldings were decorated with ornament in red, blue, green, and gold. The walls and the columns were probably stained yellow or buff, perhaps by the use of wax melted on the surface (encaustic).

Asymmetries or Refinements.—It might seem that, in the various particulars we have noted, Hellenic intellect and feeling had exhausted the possibilities of refinement. But there is yet another instance, which was first revealed by the detailed measurements of Hellenic temples made independently by two Englishmen, Francis Cranmer Penrose and John Pennethorne, and by a German architect, Joseph Hoffer. The results were published in 1838 and in 1851, and have been corroborated by other students. They are known as architectural “refinements” or “asymmetries.”

It had been assumed that, since the form of the temple type was apparently symmetrical, it also involved absolute symmetry of details; that geometrical regularity and mathematical accuracy were the necessary and natural conditions of the architectural design. By those investi{137}gators, however, it was discovered that though the principles of geometry and mathematics were the foundation of the planning and designing, regularity and accuracy were purposely avoided; and that so far from the details being symmetrical they exhibit intentional asymmetries.

One of these irregularities is the substitution of curved for straight lines. We have already mentioned the entasis or swell in the vertical contour of the column—a fact not observed by modern architects until 1810; but curvature is also found in the horizontal lines of the stylobate and the architrave, frieze, and cornice, and in the gable lines of the pediments. And since these were discovered other variations of equal importance and significance have been found.

“In the Parthenon, for instance,” (the quotation is from the writings of Professor William H. Goodyear) “surfaces or members which are set true to perpendicular are most exceptional. Perhaps the end walls are the only exception. All the columns lean inward about three inches in thirty feet toward the centre of the building. The side walls lean inward. The antæ, or flat pilasters at the angles of the ends of the walls, lean forward one unit in eighty-two units. The faces of the architrave and frieze lean backward, whereas the acroteria, the face of the cornice and the face of the fillet between architrave and frieze lean forward. Furthermore, the columns and capitals of the Parthenon are of unequal size, and the widths of the metopes and the intercolumnar spacings are also unequal.”

The discovery of these variations was pooh-poohed by architects who had been trained to believe that “correct” architecture depended upon geometrical regularity and mathematical accuracy. They dismissed them lightly as{138} “mason’s errors.” But this will not hold for three reasons. Firstly, these asymmetries only occur in the finest examples, where the design and the details are of superior refinement and the skill of the masons most unmistakable. Secondly, the number of variations increases pro rata with the superiority of the design, reaching their maximum in the Parthenon. And, thirdly, in cases which are unquestionably due to mason’s errors the amount of the variation is practically negligible. Is it likely, for example, that the masons who brought the two ends of the Parthenon within one quarter of an inch of being exactly equal in width, would have been so careless as to let the presumably horizontal lines curve up four inches on the sides of the buildings and two inches at its ends? Or, again, would they have committed so flagrant an error as giving the stylobate a convex curve upward, since it necessitated a corresponding curve to the base of each column, a most difficult and delicate operation of cutting? The perfect adjustment of these two curves, by the way, is one of many arguments against the theory that these variations were caused by settlements in the foundations or, in the case of the Parthenon, by the explosion which wrecked it in 1687, when it was being used by the Turks as a powder magazine.

The fact having been established that these variations were intentional, how are they to be explained? A generally accepted explanation of the curvatures in place of straight lines has been that they were intended to correct an optical effect of curvature in the opposite direction. Thus, if the contour of a column shaft were a straight line, it would appear to the eye to curve inward; similarly, the horizontal lines of the stylobate and entablature would appear to sag downward. Accordingly, the “re{139}finements” were designed as optical corrections of optical effects of irregularity; in other words, geometrical effect is supposed to have been sought by departures from geometric fact.

This, however, would not explain the other variations that have been noted. Moreover, it is contradicted even in the case of curvatures by a discovery of Professor Giovannoni of Rome, that the façade of the Temple at Uri has a curvature in plan.[3] The columns, that is to say, are not set to a straight line but to a curve which is concave to the exterior; consequently the entablature is correspondingly curved, the effect of which to the eye as it looks up is the very one that it was explained the architects strove to avoid—a sag downward from the ends. In this case they deliberately designed the façade to produce the effect.

This explanation of optical corrections, then, as well as others, have been proved erroneous by Professor William H. Goodyear, who has made a life-long study of the subject and carried his investigations also into Gothic architecture, in which, as we shall see, he has discovered numerous instances of refinements and asymmetries. His explanation, supported by a wealth of conclusive evidence which is set forth in his “Greek Refinements,” is that the motive was æsthetic. The refinements were modulations designed to please the eye by avoiding the inartistic effects produced by formal monotony. They were planned to do away with the monotony and rigidity that result from geometrical regularity and mathematical accuracy and to introduce a suggestion of elasticity. They imparted to the structure something of the irregu{140}larity that characterises organic growth. It is because, with rare exceptions, they are not found in modern classical buildings, that the latter appear by comparison so stiff and formal.

These asymmetries, in fact, were intended to offset the liability of the beauty’s becoming “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection, no more.”

With few exceptions the Hellenic temple was oriented; its four sides facing exactly the four points of the compass, the principal entrance being on the east. It opened into the cella which was usually divided into what may be called a nave and side aisles by two rows of columns which carried smaller columns that supported the pitch of the roof. Where the cella was narrow, as in the Temple of Apollo Epicurios (“The Helper”) at Bassæ, near Phigaleia, the rows of columns were replaced by half-columns, attached to projections from side walls. The cella was occupied by the statue of the deity, which in the case of the Parthenon was the Athene Parthenos, the Maiden Athene, one of the most renowned works of Phidias. The draped figure of the goddess was represented standing, armed with helmet, spear and shield, supporting in one hand a Wingèd Victory. The statue was about forty feet high and of the kind known as “chryselephantine,” the draperies and accessories being of gold plates, the flesh parts ivory, with precious stones inserted in the eyes.

Behind this statue was the entrance to a small room, situated between the cella and the opisthodomos, an exceptional feature from which the name of the temple was derived. It was the Parthenon proper, or Virgi{141}n’s Chamber, which seems to have been used as a treasury. Its ceiling was supported by four Ionic columns.

The Ionic order in conjunction with the Doric was also employed in the Propylæa or monumental gateway of the Acropolis. This masterpiece of Mnesicles presents an irregularity of plan, exhibiting the Hellenic architect’s readiness to adapt his design to the peculiarities of the site. While Doric columns mark the exterior, Ionic were used in the interior to dignify the central passageway. A similar use of this order for interior embellishment was adopted by Ictinus, the chief architect of the Parthenon, in his otherwise Doric design of the Temple of Apollo Epicurios.

On the other hand, the Ionic order was employed on the exterior of the Erechtheion, another work of Mnesicles also irregular in plan. It occupies a sloping site on the Acropolis, where an older temple, burnt by the Persians, had stood. Spoils of the Persian conquest were preserved in it with other relics, held in special veneration. The nucleus of the design is a cella without colonnades (apteral), the sanctuary of Athena Polias (the City’s Guardian) and of Erechtheus (a mythic hero of the Athenians) and the Ocean-god, Poseidon. The exterior is distinguished by two Ionic porticoes, and by a third, a smaller one, in which the columns are replaced by caryatides, six draped female figures whose heads support the architrave. All these figures face south, the three to the west resting their weight on the right legs; the three eastern on the left—in each case the outer legs—thus giving to the outer contour of their bodies the effect of entasis.

Another Ionic example on the Acropolis is the Temple of Athene Nike (Victory), known as the Temple of Nike{142} Apteros; the term “Wingless,” however, not describing the statue of the goddess but, as used above, the style of the design—without colonnades.

Theatres.—Only second in importance to the Hellenic temples were the theatres. Both served as memorials of the ancient traditions of the race and as an incentive to higher citizenship. For the drama, which had its origin in religious observances, was a civic institution, maintained by the state and free to all citizens.

The origin of the Greek drama is to be found in the primitive worship of Dionysos, the god of productiveness, and to the last the Greek stage and auditorium perpetuated in their form some trace of their religious origin. The nucleus was an altar consecrated to Dionysos. In earliest times each family may have erected its own altar, presided over by the father of the family as priest. Later each community would have its official priest, and on the god’s feast-day all the villagers would move in procession to the common altar, headed by the priest and a choir of singers, trained by him. The altar reached, the priest would mount the pedestal, surrounded by the choir, while the body of worshippers disposed themselves around the spot. The priest would recite the greatness of the god and at intervals the choir of voices would chant the dithyrambic song, moving around the altar and accompanying the song with rhythmic movement of body and limbs.

From this root of a religious drama in time grew successive stems. The prowess of some hero would be adopted as a theme. At first the priest, or it may be some wandering poet, would narrate the story; later he would treat it in the first person, impersonating the hero,{143} sometimes engaging in dialogue with the chorus. Still later, other personages in the story would be separately impersonated, and so the scope of the dramatic representation developed.

Meanwhile the affair still maintained a semi-religious character; the place of presentation was still around the altar of Dionysos and the chorus was retained, taking its part in the action with explanation and comment, still delivered, however, in dithyrambic measure and with accompaniments of rhythmic gesture. The platform of the altar being limited in space, the dialogue was usually confined to two actors at a time, though a third was sometimes allowed. If there were other characters involved, these actors would often “double” the parts; disguising themselves by change of costume, especially by the use of masks. This demanded some kind of a screen behind which the actors could change their costumes and also wait until their presence was required. Skins hung upon poles would at first serve the purpose, or a skene or tent, from which we derive our word scene, might be used. Whichever it were, it would interfere with the view of the action from the back and so draw the audience to the “front.”

The most important remains of Hellenic theatres are the Theatre of Dionysos,[4] cut out of the side of the Acropolis, and the theatre at Epidauros, in Argolis, Greece. The plan of the theatre of Dionysos is that of a semi-circle, the ends of which are prolonged for a short distance in a direction at right angles to the front of the skene. Within the horseshoe was the circular orchestra,{144} still whole at Epidauros, in which the main action was carried on by actors and chorus. A different plan is given by the Roman architect, Vitruvius. It is to be noted, however, that Vitruvius lived in the reign of Augustus, by which time what was pure Hellenic had become modified by foreign influences into Hellenistic. He relates, for example, that in his time the height of the logeion or speaking platform—the stage of to-day—was from 10 to 12 feet. In earlier times, including probably the period of the Classic drama, the logeion was the platform around the altar, supplemented possibly by a platform two or three feet high extending across the front of the skene, from which, at certain points in the play, some, at least, of the actors spoke. This platform, being in front of the scene and enclosed at the sides by projections of the latter, was called the proskenion, from which is derived our word proscenium with its different meaning.

By the time that the Hellenic theatre had evolved into a permanent structure, the skene, originally a temporary screen, took the form of an architectural background, some ten feet high, with a central door for the entrances of the actors. But the idea of the original screen was perhaps retained in the row of columns which stood a little in front of the skene, and could be used, if needed, for the hanging of curtains or even of painted cloths. Meanwhile, the roof of the portico, which extended from the columns to the skene, could be utilised by the actors at certain stages of the drama.[5]

The interest of the discussion raised by Vitruvius’ de{145}scription consists in the question how far the actors mingled with or were separated from the chorus, which continued to occupy the orchestra or circle on the floor of the auditorium, corresponding to the place of the orchestra stalls in a modern theatre. The orchestra of a Greek theatre was originally the sole “stage,” but gradually, as the dramas involved more complexity of scenes, the actors would vary their position between the orchestra and the proscenium; and later, in Hellenistic times, as the religious origin of the drama was forgotten and the use of a chorus began to fall into abeyance, the use of the proscenium would increase.

Finally, when the Romans began to imitate the Greek drama, they dropped the chorus; the acting was confined to the proscenium, and the orchestra no longer needed for the play, became a part of the auditorium, reserved for distinguished spectators. The Roman theatre, in fact, like our own, represented the complete separation of the audience and the stage.

Odeion.—Supplementing the theatre was the Odeion or concert hall, which was constructed on the same general lines but distinguished by the addition of a roof for acoustic purposes. The oldest known is the Skias at Sparta, so called from its roof resembling the top of a parasol. The Odeion of Pericles, which served as a model for subsequent halls, was built on the southeastern slope of the Acropolis, its roof being made in imitation of the tent of Xerxes and constructed of the masts of Persian vessels, captured at the battle of Salamis. The most magnificent example, however, was erected A.D. 162 on the southwest slope, by a wealthy citizen, Herodes Atticus, in memory of his wife. Its ceiling is said to have{146} been composed of beams of cedar, carved with ornament, while decorations in the form of paintings and other works of art embellished the interior, which had accommodation for eight thousand persons.{147}

Such empire as Hellas achieved was succeeded by the Roman Empire. The earlier, as we have seen, was an empire loosely founded on kinship of race, ideals, and character, and on common interests of commerce. It was an empire of individualism; preserving the individuality of cities and their individual states, producing a few men of rare individuality and, as it spread throughout the Mediterranean, planting colonies which maintained their independence both against the Motherland of Hellas and the people in their immediate surroundings. It was, from the first, an empire of the spirit and, as such, survived its physical dissolution and has maintained its dominion over the human mind even to the present time.

On the contrary, the Roman Empire, in so far as it succeeded, was an empire of constructive organisation. It grew, cell by cell, each added cell becoming gradually impregnated with the life-principle of the earliest one, so that every part of the unwieldy body was an organic part of the whole. Thus, in time, each independent city and its adjoining community, alien races and huge slices of foreign territory, became gradually absorbed into the practical system of government that originated with the little settlement of Latins which first occupied the Palatine Hill and then extended its authority over the seven hills of Rome. Part after part became absorbed into the system of the Lex Romana and enjoyed the benefits of the Pax Romana. The Roman citizenship, judiciously{148} extended over the whole empire, carried with it substantial rights and equally substantial duties. The provinces of the empire contributed men of learning, generals, and statesmen to the central government. In time some of the provinces, notably those of Spain and Southern France, became more characteristically Roman than Rome herself. They had absorbed her system and her culture, and, far removed from the petty intrigues which convulsed the capital, reached a degree of civilisation that represented the finest product of the Roman ideal; an ideal that included individual uprightness, a sense of service and self-sacrifice for the common weal, and a high regard for order. It was a practical ideal, little concerned with abstractions, not devoted to excessive refinement, but centred on the effectual accomplishment of the individual and collective requirements of everyday life.

It is true that this ideal was never fully achieved. This is only to say that the ideal was truly human and therefore at the mercy of human chances and weaknesses. Moreover, that it was really an ideal; a principle of life, that is to say, which by reason of its bigness was only possible of partial achievement. And if the Romans failed in achieving theirs, they failed nobly, and with sufficient success to have left behind them a legacy of law and order and constructive principles of government that, like the cultural ideals of the Hellenes, survive to the present time.

And the Roman Empire played a part in the progress of the world, more immediately necessary than that of Hellas. The latter’s Empire of Spirit was in advance of its age. The world outside of the scattered outposts of Hellas was too rude, too backward in the very necessaries of life, to accept its message of beauty. Recognising{149} this, the Hellenes called all other races and nations barbarians and held aloof from them. The Romans, on the contrary, absorbed the aliens, instilled into them the rudiments of their own civilisation, while taking advantage of any good trait in the people themselves, so that they helped them to rise out of themselves to a higher plane of living. In a lawless world they became the great exponents of order, the upbuilders and engineers of a system of organised society, and so firmly did they lay the foundations and so strongly did they build that, although subsequent hordes of barbarians overthrew the dominion of the empire of Rome and laid waste many of the visible signs of her building, the destroyers were gradually absorbed into her system and became its continuers.

Therefore, when we consider the Romans specifically in relation to architecture, we look back to them as tireless and prodigious builders, constructors, and engineers, whose sense of beauty in architecture, as well as their aspirations in all branches of higher culture, were derived from the Hellenes. Their respect for the latter was such that so long as possible they tried to treat them as an independent power, with whom they could pursue the mutual advantages of commerce. Gradually, however, the tangle of politics made absorption necessary, and after a series of invasions Hellas herself became a province of the Roman Empire.

War, in those days, as for centuries after, involved the barbarous practice of looting, and the Romans, with their shrewd instinct for acquiring what they most needed for their own development, bore back home in increasing quantity the treasures of architectural and sculptural art. Later, as the power of Hellas dwindled, Rome became the centre to which Hellenic artists and scholars flocked.{150}

The conquest of Hellas and gradual absorption of a part of her culture occupied the second century before the Christian era and the earlier years of the first. By this time, however, Rome herself had become a prey to the rivalries of political factions, beginning with the conspiracy of Sulla and ending with the civil war that followed upon the assassination of Julius Cæsar. The latter’s great-nephew, Octavianus, in conjunction with Marc Antony, conquered Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in Macedonia and Octavianus assumed authority over the West, while Antony established himself as ruler in the East. But his infatuation for Cleopatra raised the suspicion in Rome that he intended to marry her and make himself despot of an Oriental empire with Alexandria as its capital. War was declared against him as a national enemy and he was defeated at Actium, B.C. 31. The authority of Octavianus was now supreme. Republicanism, as a practical form of government, was dead. Conditions demanded one-man rule and Octavianus, in B.C. 27, resigned his office as Triumvir and received from the Senate the title of Augustus, which hitherto had been reserved for the gods.

During this period of struggle the Hellenic influence had been rapidly growing. The sons of the ruling class had Greek tutors; many studied in the schools of Athens and Rhodes, and Roman writers began to emulate the Greek authors. Cæsar published his Commentaries on the Gallic War and on the Civil War; Sallust wrote on the Conspiracy of Catiline and the Jugurthine War and Cornelius Nepos compiled biographies of eminent men. Cicero published under the name of “Philippics” the speeches which he made against Antony in the Senate, as well as “Letters” to various friends on the topics of{151} the times, while Lucretius composed in verse a treatise on the “Nature of the World” and Varro was the author of an encyclopædic work relating to the history, geography, agriculture, law, literature, philology, philosophy, and religion of the Romans. To Varro also had been assigned by Julius Cæsar the collection of a public Library of Greek and Roman writers.

The enthusiasm for literature was encouraged by Augustus and his minister, Mycæenas, who saw in it a means of allaying the bitterness of party strife. To this, the “Augustan” or “Golden Age,” as the writers called it in flattery of their patron, belong Horace, Livy, and Virgil.

In an effort also to lead the people back to the honourable simplicity of their forefathers, Augustus revived the ancient religious ceremonies and restored the temples. He became chief pontiff and, being regarded as the son of the deified Julius—in reality, his great-nephew—was treated almost as a divinity in Rome and deified by the provincials who built temples in his honour.

It was in the Augustan Age that Roman architecture virtually commenced and its developments are associated with Imperial rule. Of the period immediately preceding the new era Mommsen writes as follows: “There was in the world as Cæsar found it much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed, an old world; and even the richly gifted patriotism of Cæsar could not make it young again.”

Rome, the heart of the Empire, was corrupt. The ruling class coveted pensions from the public exchequer to be spent on luxurious living; while the mass of the populace clamoured for “panem et circenses”—feeding and{152} shows at the public charge. To satisfy their hunger both classes would have taxed the provinces. But among the chief duties of the emperors were the development of the resources of the provinces and the protection of the frontiers; and, while the best of the emperors performed these functions from high motives, even the worst found it politic to court the growing power of the provinces. Thus, the main vitality of the empire was in its extremities, and, although the emperors beautified Rome, they also encouraged public works of utility and beauty in the provinces. To this end a law was passed, permitting municipalities to receive bequests and gifts from private individuals. In the liberality with which wealthy provincials enriched their communities, Dr. Ferrero, the latest historian of Rome, has seen a parallel to the munificent public gifts of American millionaires.

Accordingly, this great era of Roman building left its impress not only upon Italy, but in Greece and northward as far as the Danube, in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, along the whole Northern coast of Africa, and in Spain, France, and Great Britain as far as the Firth of Forth. It was distinguished not only by the magnitude of the operations but also by their character.

Whereas in Egypt the architectural works had consisted of temples and tombs; and in Hellas these had been supplemented by theatres and odeia; while Assyria and Persia left their memorials in palaces, those of the Roman Empire embraced all of these types and many more. The Romans applied architecture to the practical needs of everyday life, and reinforced it with engineering. They overlaid the Empire with fine trunk-roads, many of which survive to-day; constructed sewers; spanned rivers with bridges; conveyed water in countless miles of aqueducts;{153} erected fora and market-places, triumphal arches, temples, palaces, villas, baths, basilicas, theatres, and hippodromes; providing alike for the necessities of life, the needs of government, and the amusements and luxuries of living.

To accomplish so prodigious an amount of building the Romans systematised the methods of construction in regard to both the labour and the material. The labour was mainly of an unskilled kind, including soldiers of the legions, slaves, and subjects liable through debt or other causes to statute labour. This employment of unskilled labour was made possible by the Roman habit of carrying the principle of repetition of motives to its utmost limit, and also by the methods of construction which they invented.

This was the extended use of concrete. During the Republic the Romans had followed the Greek method of building with large blocks of stone, unconnected with mortar. Their practical spirit, however, urged them to make a more economical use of materials and instead of composing the walls entirely of blocks of stone or marble, they used these or bricks as a facing, filling in the thickness of the wall with small fragments of stone mixed with lime or mortar.

They had been led to this practice by the existence of pozzolana, a volcanic product of clean, sandy earth, found in Rome and in greater quantities at Pozzuoli on the Bay of Naples, which, when mixed with lime, formed a concrete of exceptional hardness, strength, and durability. Material, approximating the properties of pozzolana and lime, was procurable in all parts of the Empire. Accordingly the use of this method of construction gave a similarity to Roman building everywhere.{154}

While the chief, and almost sole building material in Greece was marble, the geological formation of Italy supplied stone as well as marble and plentiful supplies of clay, which was converted into terra-cotta or bricks. The bricks were of two shapes: either square, from 1 to 2 feet in size and 2 inches thick or triangular in plan and of about 1½ inches in thickness. The latter were especially used for the facing of the walls, their pointed ends being driven into the concrete to form the smooth surfaces, while at the corners the points projected. In Rome itself the following materials were available: travertine, a hard limestone from Tivoli; tufa, a volcanic substance of which the hills of Rome are mainly composed; and peperino, a stone of volcanic origin from Mount Albano.

While Roman architecture was developed under the stimulus of Greek art and culture it probably owes its origin to the example of the Etruscans.

The origin of this race is uncertain, but its own traditions ascribe it to Lydia in Asia Minor, whence it may have passed during that general migration from Hellas into Italy about B.C. 1000. It was for long the dominant power in Italy, extending at various times over a territory that reached from the Tiber to the Apennines, and southward into Campania. This gave the Etruscans command of the Tyrrhenian Sea and made them commercial rivals of the Carthagenians. Their enmity toward the rising city of Rome would be natural and some authorities believe that the reign of the Tarquin kings was a period of Etruscan domination. Then the Romans expelled the tyrants, established a republic of their own, and by degrees wore down the power of the Etruscans, who had become enervated through increase of luxury.{155} Their civilisation long antedated that of the Romans. The earliest remains of art, found in Etruria, are now believed to have been imported from Hellas; but the tombs have revealed a quantity of later art objects which prove this people to have been skilful in the modelling and colouring of terra-cotta, in mural paintings, jewellery, and household adornments.

“The houses of the earliest period, to judge by the burial urns, known from their shape as ‘hut-urns,’ were small single room constructions of rectangular plan, similar to certain types of the capanne used by the shepherds to-day. Probably the walls were wattled and the roofs were certainly thatched, for the urns show plainly the long beams fastened together at the top and hanging from the ridge down each side.” (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Etruria.”) Tombs erected even later than the fifth century B.C. were cut in imitation of a most simple form of post and beam construction. The elements of the decoration, such as capitals, mouldings, rosettes, patterns, etc., were borrowed from Greece, Egypt, and elsewhere.

The architectural remains comprise tombs, city walls, gateways, bridges, and aqueducts, the walls of which are remarkable for their cyclopean masonry, while the general character of the construction resembles the early work of Tiryns and Mycenæ.

No example remains of Etruscan temples, but Vitruvius has described them. The plan was nearly square and the cella was divided into three chambers, since it was in groups of three that the Etruscans worshipped their deities. The columns represented in rude form the Doric order, set so far apart that it is concluded they were surmounted by beams of timber. A further dis{156}tinction of the Etruscan temple, adopted by the Romans, was the replacing of the stylobate by a podium. This was a continuous pedestal or low wall on which the columns were carried. It was approached in front by a flight of steps, enclosed between the prolongation of the side-walls of the podium. The most famous example was the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, dedicated B.C. 509, which contained three chambers, for the statues of Jupiter, Minerva, and Juno. It was destroyed by fire B.C. 83, and rebuilt by Sulla, who brought over for the purpose some of the Corinthian columns from the temple of Zeus Olympius in Athens. (See p. 122.)

Until recently the great sewer, or “Cloaca Maxima,” of Rome, constructed about B.C. 578, has been attributed to the Etruscans and considered a proof that they introduced the use of the arch to the Romans. But in 1903, when excavating the Forum, Commendatore Boni proved that the drain was originally uncovered and that the arch, which consists of three rings of voussoirs, each 2 feet 6 inches high, was added at the end of the Republic. “Thus the honour, not of discovering the arch, for it was known in the East, as we noted, but of popularising its use, does not belong to the Etrurians, though they did use it at a comparatively late time for city gates, as at Volterra.” (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Etruria.”)

Following Augustus, the emperors under whom Roman architecture chiefly flourished were: Nero (A.D. 54-69), Vespasian (69-79), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian (137-138), Septimus Severus (193-211), Caracalla (211-217), and Diocletian (284-305). By Constantine (306-337) were inaugurated two changes of policy, which affected the destinies of the world. For by granting toleration to all{157} religions he raised Christianity to equal footing with paganism and thus paved the way for the power of the Church; and in establishing his capital at Byzantium took the first step in the partition of the Empire into East and West. Aided by his vigorous efforts, architecture, which had declined, enjoyed a measure of revival, in which, as we shall see later, the Church began to play a conspicuous part.

With the commencement of the fifth century, A.D., began the irruption of Barbarians. Attila’s Huns swept like a scourge over Europe, while the German tribes conquered the provinces in turn and occupied them. In 455 Rome was sacked by the Vandals. In 476 Odoacer was proclaimed by his troops King of Italy, and thus the Western part of the Empire was finally separated from the Eastern. This is the date selected to mark the “Fall” of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile the steady decline of the power of the emperors had been long in process and was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the power of the Popes. Henceforth, during the “Dark Ages” of civil confusion, the influence and authority of the Church were the chief sources of social as well as religious organisation.

The Roman ideal of civilisation received its most characteristic architectural expression in the several fora, beginning with the oldest—the Forum Romanum. From ancient times it was the heart of the city; the centre of civil activity; the scene of some of the most stirring incidents in the growth of Rome; in later times the nucleus of the pomp and pride of the Empire. Here at some time was erected a cylindrical monument in three tiers, the Umbilicus or Navel of Rome, and hard by it stood the{158} Milliarium, a marble column, sheathed in bronze and inscribed with the names and distances of the chief cities on the great trunk-roads that radiated throughout the Empire from the thirty-seven gates of Rome.

Between these two monuments extended a platform, decorated with the bronze beaks of conquered vessels and hence called the Rostra, from which any citizen could speak who had aught to say concerning the commonweal. For it faced the Comitium or open space, which from earliest times had been the meeting place of the General Assembly of the people. It is true that the voice of the people was too often dominated by the Patrician class whose Curia or Senate House overlooked the Comitium; but the Comitium continued to represent, at least, the theory of Roman Government and to be the veritable nucleus of the Roman Forum.

Since the Forum embodied the ideals and the progress of Rome, its architectural aspects were continually changing throughout the more than one thousand years of Rome’s vicissitudes. But without attempting to follow these changes—many of which are shrouded in obscurity—let us try to picture the Forum in its general aspects and particularly as the embodiment of the Roman ideal.

The ancient citadel was the Capitoline Hill on which in early times had been erected the temple already mentioned to the three divinities of Male and Female Power and of Wisdom—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. It corresponded to the Acropolis of Athens and her Parthenon. But whereas the Parthenon was the nucleus of the Hellenic ideal, as embodied in architectural glory—the embodiment of an ideal, detached and lifted up above the common life—the formal grandeur of Rome descended from the Capitoline Hill and occupied the low ground{159} that separated it from the Palatine, so that it might identify itself with the practical, everyday ideals of the city.

And, first, for the purely practical. The southern side of the Forum was in early times bordered with the tabernæ or wooden booths of the butchers and other produce merchants, while on the north were the shops of the gold-and silversmiths, and money changers. The Forum, in fact, was the central market of Rome and came to be its financial centre, and, as a necessary result, the centre also of legal and judicial procedure. In later times, as the volume and intricacies of business increased, the tabernæ were replaced by basilicas, which included halls of justice and of exchange for merchants. Meanwhile, let us try to picture the Forum as the embodiment of Roman ideals.

It was bounded on both sides by the Via Sacra, or Sacred Way; the two forks uniting near the foot of the Palatine Hill, around which the Sacred Way continued to its junction with the Appian Way. Its stones were sacred because they had been trod by the countless hosts of Rome’s victorious armies, returning in triumphal procession to pay their homage to the deities of Male and Female Power and of Wisdom upon the Capitol.

As the soldiers swept out of the Appian Way, they would skirt the spot, where in later times arose the Colosseum, and the roadway was spanned by the Arch of Constantine, and a little farther on by the Arch of Titus. From this the road advanced in an easterly direction and then turned north.

Then from earliest times two objects would greet the victors’ eyes. Upon the right stood the arch of two-headed Janus, god of gates and doors. It was all but a{160} certainty that its two doors would be standing open; for, although this army was returning victorious, there were others almost continuously engaged on the frontiers of the empire. So the soldiers, glutted with fighting and hungry for the sight of their loved ones, would turn more eagerly to the left, where rose the circular temple of Vesta, guardian of the home and hearth. It was the symbol of the ideal of sane and simple home life, on which the greatness of Rome was founded, and as the Vestal Virgins thronged the steps of their convent or atrium, hard by the temple, the eagles would be lowered and every bronzed warrior would salute the maiden priestesses, who, in their absence, had kept perpetually alive the sacred fire.

Just beyond this spot in later times Cæsar Augustus erected a Triumphal Arch. Meanwhile, from Rome’s early days the victorious hosts would next defile past the Temple of Castor and Pollux, memorial of the victory gained at Lake Regillus with the help of these twin gods. Close by it came to be erected the Temple of Cæsar, in front of which the great Julius caused a rostrum to be placed, from the steps of which the oration over his dead body was spoken by Marc Antony.

At this spot the veterans would enter the Forum proper, welcomed by the cheers of the merchants; in old times, from the fronts of their booths and later from the porticoes of the Basilica Æmilia on the right and the Basilica Julia on the left. Then, both early and late in Rome’s history, would be reached the ancient Temple of Saturn, god of seed growing and the bounties of the soil, a god of meaning to the soldiers, for many a veteran had been left behind in distant lands, planted upon farms that were to consolidate the power and prosperity of{161} the Empire. Moreover, in some of the chambers of the Temple, which formed the official Treasury of Rome, a part of their spoils of war would be deposited.

The procession by this time is filing past the Comitium, filled with enthusiastic crowds, while orators welcome it from the rostra and the Senators are ranged in ranks upon the steps of the Curia. The roar of welcome is still in the ears of the host as it begins the ascent of the Capitol, passing under the Arch of Septimus Severus, if the date be after A.D. 203. Midway of the ascent, it passes the Temple of Concord, memorial of the termination of the internecine struggle between the Patricians and the Plebs; skirts the Tabularium, wherein the archives of the Empire were preserved, and finally reaches the summit of the Capitol.

Let us take one glance back before the picture fades. The scene is superb but not without confusion. The Romans paid no attention to orientation; consequently there is little uniformity in the placing of the several structures. They vary not only in size and design, but also in the direction which they face. In the contracted space the various edifices seem crowded. Indeed, the conjectured restoration of the Roman Forum and vicinity suggests rather a medley of magnificence.

But even in this respect the character of this heart of Rome, lying between the Capitoline and Palatine hills, symbolised the magnificent variety of elements that composed the Empire. One may find some parallel to Rome’s confusion of appearances in the variety and, for the most part, lack of an organic lay-out in the modern London, the present mother-city of an Empire, founded, like the Roman, upon commerce, and like it in having grown, cell by cell, transcending it, however, not only in size but in{162} grandeur. For the policy of the British Empire has gradually evolved beyond the Roman, substituting for the process of absorption the principle of free, self-governing dominions.

{163}

The Romans enlarged the scope of architecture in the direction of the art of the engineer. While Hellenic architecture had been an expression of the faculties of reasoning and of taste, co-operating in a singular harmony, Roman architecture was the product of reasoning stimulated by a practical sense and an extraordinary energy and audacity. In place of excessive refinement and sense of proportion, it is distinguished by variety, vastness of scale and exuberance of decorative detail. While every part of a Greek temple was constructional, having its distinct function in contributing to the stability as well as adornment of the whole structure, the Romans, as we have noted, had a uniform system of building in which they applied the structural details of the Greeks, very largely in the way of added embellishment.

Their aptitude for borrowing and adapting is apparent in their orders of columns and entablatures.

Roman Orders.—In the first place, they borrowed from the Etruscans the so-called Tuscan order. This had a rudimentary Doric form; the column being seven diameters in height; the shaft unfluted and tapering toward the capital, while the entablature was simpler, having no triglyphs, mutules, or guttæ.

In borrowing from the Hellenes, the Romans made little use of the Doric order. When it is used, as in the form of engaged columns in the Theatre of Marcellus, the{164} height of the columns was increased in proportion to their diameters; the shafts were either smooth or channelled with semicircular, instead of the subtler, elliptic flutings, separated by narrow fillets; a base was added and modifications were made in the details of the capital. The architrave did not overhang the face of the column and was reduced in height; the triglyphs were used in the frieze only over the centre of the columns, even at the angles, while the cornice was lighter, with dentils sometimes taking the place of mutules. The Doric, in fact, did not appeal to the Roman taste for rich decoration, and, in so far as it was used, was degraded in style.

The same is true of the Roman adaptation of the Ionic order. Simpler and more commonplace curves replace the extreme refinement of the volutes and the fillet of the latter was carried invariably across the top of the echinus or cushion, while the ornamentation of the entablature was more profuse. The best use of this order is found in the upper story of the Theatre of Marcellus; the worst, on the eight remaining columns of the Temple of Saturn in the Forum Romanum.

The Corinthian order, of which no type sufficiently definite to constitute an order had been evolved by the Greeks, was fully worked out by the Romans, with the assistance of Greek artists, and became the favourite expression of their taste for richness. The shaft was either smooth, as in the early example of the Pantheon (B.C. 27), or fluted as in the great temple of Castor and Pollux; the heights in these two cases being respectively 9¾ and 10 diameters. A special base was designed, consisting of tori, scotia, and fillets, resting on a square plinth.

The inverted bell of the capital was surrounded by an upper and lower row of acanthus leaves, which differ from{165} the Hellenic forms in being blunter at the tips. Above the rows of leaves projected the stalks, or “caulicolæ,” which terminated in spirals, both in the centre of each face and at the angles of the abacus. The four sides of the latter are concave and decorated in the centre with a rosette. In the more sumptuous examples further enrichment of ornament was added to the capital, while the capitals of the Temple of Castor and Pollux present a unique instance of the central spirals being interlaced.

The Corinthian architrave in Hellenic usage consisted, it will be remembered, of three bands, as in the Ionic order. The Romans frequently embellished the middle one with a version of the anthemion motive. They also added enrichments to the bed mould beneath the frieze. The latter was frequently carved with acanthus scrolls, grotesque figures, and ox-skulls, and garlands. The cornice was also enriched with carved ornament, of which the most characteristic were modillions or brackets, which appear to support the cornice.

The Composite order was an invention of the Romans and possibly suggested by the capitals of the Erechtheion in Athens, where the Ionic spirals appear above a necking carved with anthemion ornament. The capital of the Composite order consisted in the upper part of Ionic spirals, often richly decorated with foliage, and in the lower of two rows of acanthus leaves, as in the Corinthian order, which was followed also in the other details of the column and entablature.

The mouldings in Hellenic architecture are distinguished by the refinement of the contours, in Roman by the richness of carved ornament.

The anta, which appears in Greek temples at the corners of the cella walls was developed by the Romans into{166} the pilaster. This was a square pier, projecting about one-sixth of its width from the wall; used either to divide up and decorate the wall surfaces, or to serve as a “respond” to a column. It was frequently fluted and corresponded with the column in its details.

Arch-Vaulting.—The Romans did not invent the arch, but generalised its use and elaborated it into vaulting, thus introducing into architecture an element of construction capable of endless application and lending itself not only to utility but also to variety and magnificence. In doing so they were assisted by their discovery of the use of concrete. By means of supports and sheathings of rough timber, temporarily erected, they were able to cast their arches or vaultings in any form and practically of any size. The concrete “set” quickly and the arch or vaulting thus became a solid mass, which exerted but little thrust and covered the space with the rigidity of a lid or cup.

Such method of construction lessened the tendency of the arch or vaulting to exert a lateral strain or thrust which occurs when the arch is composed of voussoirs or, similarly, separate blocks of stone or brick are used in the vault. It tended to concentrate the strain on the vertical supports. Yet the Romans, though concentration of strains was a chief principle of their building, took no chances in the matter of stability and also distributed the strains. For example, the nave vaulting of a basilica would be reinforced by aisle vaulting, which was carried on walls that were either at right angles or parallel to the nave. But owing to the method of concrete construction and to the facility with which it could be employed, the Romans were able to erect vaults over buildings of complex plan and spaces of great size.{167}

The vaultings were of three kinds:

1. The semicylindrical vault, called also the wagon-headed vault or barrel vault.

2. The cross or groined vault.

3. The dome or semidome.

The semicylindrical vault was a continuous arch spanning an oblong space, a corridor, and sometimes a curved passageway.

The cross or groined vault was used over square spaces, its weight being carried at the four angles. It was formed by the intersection at right-angles of two semicylindrical vaults. When employed over long apartments or corridors, the ceiling was divided into a series of square compartments or bays, each covered by a cross-vault. Since the vaulting in each case was carried upon the corner supports, these became piers, and the wall spaces in between them, being thus relieved of the pressure of the vaulting, could be utilised for the openings of doors and windows. Moreover, a square space could be subdivided into bays, rendering it possible to vault a large area with no interruption to the floor-space except that of the piers.

The dome was used for covering circular spaces, and when the space is small the covering is called a cupola or little cup. Semidomes were employed over recesses.

The finest existing example of a Roman dome is that of the Pantheon, which, however, affords an exception to the usual method of construction. For here, instead of being composed of concrete, thus forming a solid shell, the dome, so far as it has been examined, is found to be built of bricks, laid in almost horizontal courses.

It is to be noted that the so-called “pendentive” dome, supported by arches over a space, square in plan, is not{168} found in strictly Roman buildings and was a development of the Byzantine architects.

The Romans also employed flat roofs and ceilings. In certain of the baths so much iron has been found amid the debris, that it is supposed the roofs were constructed with a framework of this material, fitted together with T joints. Otherwise the ceilings were made of crossed beams, dividing the space into coffers. The exterior of the roofs was covered with a sheathing of terra-cotta tiles or, as in the original roof of the Pantheon, of bronze gilded plates, which now are replaced by lead.

Vault and Wall Decoration.—Sheathing was also applied to the exterior and interior of the whole structure, forming, as it were, a garment of decoration. In the case of vaulting, the interior decoration was composed of stucco coffering; square, hexagonal, or octagonal panels, inclosed within raised framework that was arranged in a geometrical pattern. Sometimes the coffering was replaced by mosaics; which were of two kinds.

1. Opus tessellatum formed of tesseræ or cubes of marble or glass, arranged in patterned designs that often included figures.

2. Opus sectile, in which the tesseræ were cut into various shapes, to form the pattern, as in marquetrie. A rich kind, made of red and green porphyry, was distinguished as Opus Alexandrinum.

At other times the vaulting and walls were covered with hard plaster, wrought to a fine surface, which was polished and frequently embellished with mural painting.

The walls were also overlaid with slabs of coloured marble, in the selection and treatment of which the Romans took a notable pride.

Further, both the exterior and the interior walls were{169} relieved with carved decoration, which took the form of pilasters, arches, mouldings, and panels, encrusted with arabesques. These and the other embellishments could be so easily applied to the concrete shell, that Roman decoration had a tendency to become profuse and over-elaborated. Whereas in Hellenic architecture every decorative detail was an intrinsic part of the structure, Roman decoration was something added after the structure was completed. It was, in effect, like clothing, fitted to the form of the body, and varying in design and sumptuousness according to the taste and purse of the wearer. Since architecture generally was an expression of pomp, pride, and power, it was inevitable that the richness of decoration should frequently run to extravagance.

To the lay-student, at least, the actual forms of Roman architecture are of less interest than the uses to which they were put. For the Roman genius was displayed in practicalness; in the resourcefulness with which it extended the scope of architecture to serve the necessities and ideals of life. Hence the temple-form has ceased to occupy the chief attention; the truly monumental character of Roman architecture is distributed over a variety of achievements of magnificence and utility.

Temple Plans.—The plan of the Roman temple was circular, polygonal, or rectangular; the last being the most usual type. The best preserved example is the so-called “Maison Carrée” at Nîmes in Provence, which was erected during the reign of Hadrian (A.D. 117-138). Its form is of the favourite kind: pseudo-peripteral, that is to say, the columns which surround the sides and end are not detached from but built into the walls of the cella. The portico has a deep projection, supported by ten detached columns. As usual in a Roman temple the stylo{170}bate is replaced by a podium, in this case about twelve feet high, which projects in front, enclosing the entrance steps. The columns are of the Corinthian order, 32 feet in height, supporting an entablature which measures 8 feet to the lower angles of the pediment. The frieze is bored with holes, in which it is supposed the letters of an inscription were fixed, and the cornice is richly decorated.

Another very interesting example at Nîmes is the so-called Temple of Diana, which probably was a nymphæum, or structure for flowers, statuary, and fountains, attached to some thermæ. The plan shows a central chamber, flanked by two passages; the exterior walls being devoid of columns. Meanwhile, the interior walls of the central chamber have a series of detached columns, supporting an entablature from which spring the curves of the barrel-vaulted ceiling. The outward thrust of the latter is offset by the continuous vaulting of the side-passages. It is probable, as we shall see, that this arrangement furnished a type for many of the Romanesque churches of Southern France.

Of the circular temples the best known examples are the Temple of Mater Matuta in Rome, the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, and the Pantheon. Nothing but a few fragments remain of the Temple of Vesta in the Forum Romanum. The first named, situated in the Forum Boarium, is peripteral, consisting of a cylindrical cella, 28 feet in diameter surrounded by a circular colonnade of 20 Corinthian columns, 34 feet 7 inches high; the whole standing on a podium raised 6 feet from the ground. In the case of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli the Corinthian columns, 18 in number, are 11 feet lower. “The reason for this difference,” writes Professor Banister-Fletcher,{171} “is instructive. The Temple of Mater Matuta, placed in a low, flat situation, has columns of slender proportion in order to give it the required height; whereas the Tivoli example, placed on the edge of a rocky prominence and thus provided with a lofty basement, has columns of sturdier proportions.” A further difference is found in the foliage decoration of the capitals of the two temples; those of the Temple of Mater Matuta having pointed leaves of the Hellenic type of acanthus, while in the Temple of Tivoli the Roman type is adhered to.

The most famous circular example, as well as the most impressive of Roman temples to the modern mind, is the Pantheon. Investigation has proved that the circular part or Rotunda occupies the site of an earlier nymphæum, on the south side of which, in the reign of Augustus, B.C. 27, Agrippa erected a temple, consecrated to the Divinities of the Julian house under the name of Pantheum (“all-holy”). Hence the inscription on the frieze of the present portico: “M. Agrippa L. F. Cos. tertium fecit.” This temple, which, from Pliny’s account seems to have had a dome, was destroyed in the great fire in A.D. 80.

The present edifice was built by Hadrian, A.D. 120-124. The Rotunda occupies, as we have said, the site of an ancient nymphæum, the floor of which, however, was raised 8 feet. Agrippa’s portico was removed from the south to the north side and set up with a front of 8 columns instead of 10. There are 16 in all. The portico is supported by 16 Corinthian columns, each a granite monolith 42½ feet high, with marble Corinthian capitals. The tympanum was originally filled with bronze reliefs, representing a gigantomachia, or battle of the gods and giants.{172}

The walls of the rotunda, which are of solid tufa concrete, faced with thin bricks, are nearly twenty feet thick. This mass was partly to support the dome and partly to admit of eight recesses, opening from the interior. One forms the entrance, while three of the others are semicircular in plan and the remaining four rectangular. The exterior walls, carried far above the spring of the dome, was veneered with porphyry and marble and enriched with Corinthian pilasters and sculptured ornament, a considerable part of which still exists.

Meanwhile, it is the interior of the building that presents the chief impressiveness. Here the walls, which originally were faced with precious Oriental marbles, extend to a height of only two stories, crowned by the vast dome, which in the interior has a height equal to its diameter—one hundred forty-two and one-half feet. It is embellished with coffers, which in order to assist the perspective effect are foreshortened, diminishing in width as they ascend. Thus the gaze is carried up with a sweep to the central aperture at the summit, an open circle twenty-seven feet in diameter, the sole source of light to the interior. “One great eye opening upon Heaven—by far the noblest conception for lighting a building to be found in Europe.” It is as if the soaring imagination of the architect could brook no limit to its vision and must incorporate with his vault the firmament itself. In this magnificent audacity men have seen a symbolic reference to the ancient worship of Jupiter, the god of gods, beneath the open vault of heaven. Meanwhile, the architect may have derived the idea from the old nymphæum with its court open to the sky. And of the two, some will prefer to believe the latter, seeing in it a beautiful illustration of how the artist can and sometimes will use the re{173}quirements of practical conditions as an inspiration to the creativeness of his own imagination.

From structures circular in plan, we may pass to those in which the plan had the form of an ellipse, or comprised as its chief feature portions of a circle. In the first class belong the amphitheatres and to the latter the various circuses and theatres.

The prototype of all these was the Hellenic Theatre, in the construction of which the architect took advantage of a sloping site.

The Romans, on the other hand, with their general use of arch and vaulting, were independent of natural assistance and usually built their circuses and amphitheatres and theatres in the open.

Circus.—The Roman circus was an adaptation of the Hellenic Stadium, which, however, was used chiefly for athletic games, while the Circus was employed for horse and chariot races. The oldest was the Circus Maximus, situated between the Palatine and Aventine; but the one of which most remains have been preserved is the Circus Maxentius, near the tomb of Cæcilia Metella on the Appian Way. Its plan presents a long rectangle terminating at one end in a semicircle. Surrounding this were tiers of marble seats, supported by raking vaults and an external wall of concrete. At the square end were situated the Carceres or stables and down the centre of the rectangle ran a spina or barricade, with a meta or post at each end to mark the turning points. “To graze the meta” was a Roman saying for the taking of great chances. The course was seven times round and on the top of the spina were oval objects, one of which was removed on the completion of each lap of the race.{174}

Amphitheatre.—The most magnificent of the amphitheatres was the Flavian, known since the eighth century as the Colosseum, probably from the colossal statue of Nero which once adorned it. Its plan is elliptical, the main axis being about 615 feet and the shorter about 510 feet; while the arena, which is oval, is 281 feet long by 177 feet wide. The number of spectators that it could accommodate has usually been stated as 87,000; but the calculation is now said to have been based on a misapprehension of the records and has been corrected to 45,000 seats and standing room for 5000.

The exterior comprises four stories. The three lower are composed of arches supported by intermediate piers which are ornamented with columns, respectively, of the Tuscan, Ionic, and Corinthian orders. The fourth story, which, when the amphitheatre was completed in A.D. 82, appears to have been of wood, presents a wall adorned with Corinthian pilasters. Between these, projecting from the cornice, were corbels, pierced to hold the poles that sustained the velarium or awning. The imposing character of the exterior is due not only to the structure’s immense size, but to the difference in unity secured by the application of the three orders, and to the magnificently sweeping lines of the entablatures.

The interior shows the arena surrounded by a smooth wall, above which the seats rise in concentric tiers to the height of two stories. Here they are bounded by a wall, through which are entrances to the seats while it also acted as a parapet to the upper gallery. The fourth story formed a continuous peristyle. The whole area for spectators was called the cavea.

The place of honour was the circle nearest to the arena, called the podium, in which sat the Emperor, senators,{175} principal magistrates, Vestal Virgins, and the provider or “Editor” of the show. In the amphitheatre at Nîmes seats in the podium were also assigned to the various guilds, whose names are still inscribed upon the seats with the number of places reserved for each.

The principle of construction adopted in the Colosseum, as may be seen from the plan, is that of wedge-shaped piers, radiating from the arena to the exterior. These were connected by vaults which ran downward toward the centre and also in concentric rings, forming passageways to all parts of the cavea. The system is one of concrete vaulting resting on piers of the same material, the latter being reinforced by tufa where the pressure was greater and in the parts of greatest strain by blocks of travertine, four feet thick, sheathed with brick work. “The supports have been calculated at one-sixth of the whole area of the building.”

Theatre.—The form of the Roman theatre grew directly out of that of the Hellenic, but was modified to suit the change which had come over the character of drama. The religious origin of the Hellenic drama had been completely left behind. There was no longer any pretence of a chorus; accordingly the circular space of the orchestra, which had been used by it, was now filled with seats, reserved for persons of distinction. It became, in fact, that part of the auditorium which we still distinguish as the orchestra seats.

Already, in later Hellenic drama, the action of the principal players, which originally had been confined to the orchestra, had extended more and more to the slightly raised platform in front of the proskenion. It was therefore but another step to limit the action to the platform, which, now that the orchestra was filled with spec{176}tators, was raised higher from the floor, and, to accommodate the players, was made broader. The separation of the actors from the audience was complete.

The proscenium now became a background, built up to represent a façade of several stories, embellished with pilasters and engaged arches and with niches holding statues. The remains of such a permanent “scene” are found in the Theatre of Orange, in Southern France, where what we now call the stage is 203 feet wide and 45 feet deep, framed in at the ends by return walls at right angles to the proscenium. Near the top of the walls are two tiers of corbel stones, pierced to receive flag-staffs that supported the velarium.

Baths.—Public baths, thermæ, were as necessary a feature of Roman cities as the amphitheatre. Rich citizens, like Mæcenas and Agrippa, set the fashion of building them, and it was followed by emperors seeking to ingratiate themselves with the populace. For the charge for admission was only a quarter of an as—about one quarter of a cent or half a farthing; and even this was waived by certain emperors.

The principal Thermæ in Rome were those of Agrippa, Nero, Titus, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, Diocletian, and Constantine. Many of them assumed immense proportions; the ground plan of the Baths of Caracalla, for example, occupying a square quarter of a mile. Besides the actual bathing conveniences, which included hot water baths, vapor baths, cooling chambers and plunges, there were rooms for ball-playing, gymnasiums, colonnades, libraries, theatres, and open courts with shade trees.

From two of the sides of the Baths of Caracalla projected long exhedras, or semi-circular recesses, furnished with benches, which are supposed to have been the meet{177}ing places for the discussion of philosophy and poetry. In fact, the great thermæ were the clubs of the period; the resort of all classes, offering cleanliness to the poor, luxury to the rich, and healthful exercise and opportunity of cultured intercourse between those who desired it. And the highest skill was represented in making the walls of the various chambers and reservoirs impervious to moisture, in conducting and heating the water, and in providing flues for hot air.

Basilica.—Equally characteristic of Roman life were the Basilicas. These structures seem to have been intended at first to relieve the congestion of business in the various fora and to afford quiet as well as protection from the weather, for the transaction of business. The earliest in Rome was erected B.C. 184 by Porcius Cato; hence called the Basilica Porcia. Then followed the Basilica Fulvia, Basilica Æmilia, and Basilica Julia, the last being the largest of the five which existed during the reign of Augustus. In A.D. 112, Trajan built the great Basilica Ulpia in connection with his forum, and some two hundred years later was erected the vaulted Basilica of Maxentius or Constantine on the Via Sacra. In all there came to be some twenty basilicas in Rome alone.

One great interest of the basilica halls consists in the fact that from them were derived the plan and form of the early Christian churches. It has been conjectured that the plan of a basilica was derived from that of a Greek temple, the cella walls being replaced by ranges of columns, opening into the peristyle where in turn the columns were replaced by side walls. The colonnades thus became aisles to the central nave; the vestibule being retained at one end and later to be called a narthex, while at the opposite end an apse projected. Here in the Ro{178}man basilica were the seats of the quæstor and his assessors, occupied in early Christian basilica churches by the bishop and presbyters.

The interiors of the Roman basilicas present two types of treatment. In the Basilica of Constantine, for example, the nave columns were attached to great piers which supported groined vaults, the thrust of which was sustained by walls at right angles to the piers. These walls divided each aisle into three bays, corresponding to the three bays of the nave, and over each aisle-bay was a barrel-vault, which, being at right angles to the nave, served as extra support to the nave-vaults. Light was admitted through windows in the side walls of the aisles and also through windows in the upper part of the nave, above the aisle vaults.

On the other hand, in the interior of the Basilica Ulpia a range of columns, supporting an entablature, took the place of the piers on each side of the nave. On the entablature rested another range of columns, surmounted by another entablature, above which walls, pierced with windows, were carried up to carry the flat, coffered ceiling. Both tiers of nave columns opened into the aisle, which correspondingly had two stories, the upper crowned with a flat ceiling.

Arches, Columns of Victory.—The magnificence of Rome and other cities was further displayed in the Triumphal Arches and Columns of Victory erected in honour of emperors and conquerors. The arch was of two types: the single arch and the three-arched. A famous example of the former is the Arch of Titus, which commemorated the capture of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. Examples of the three-arched type are those of Septimus Severus, and of Constantine in Rome, and the Arch at Orange. The{179} façades were adorned with columns of the Corinthian or Composite orders, partially or wholly detached, supporting a broken entablature—one, in which the uniformity of projection is interrupted by a projection over each capital. Above it is a top-story, known as the attic. The soffit of the arch was richly coffered and the wall spaces embellished with low-reliefs, representing incidents of triumph, while the attic bore upon its face an inscription and was surmounted by statues or a four-horse triumphal chariot (quadriga).

The most famous of all the pillars of victory is Trajan’s Column, erected in connection with his Basilica. It is a column of the Roman Doric order, mounted upon a lofty pedestal, the height over all being 147 feet. The shaft, 12 feet in diameter at the base, encloses a spiral staircase of marble, while its exterior is decorated with a spiral band, 800 feet long and 3½ feet wide, carved with reliefs, representing incidents in Trajan’s victorious campaigns against the Dacians. It stood originally in a court of the Basilica Ulpia, from the several galleries of which the sculpture could be viewed. The statue of Trajan which originally adorned the summit of the pillar has been replaced by a bronze statue of St. Peter.

A special pillar of imperial times was the Rostral Column, erected in commemoration of a naval victory and decorated with the bronze beaks or prows taken from the enemy’s ships.

Palaces.—Augustus set the example of building himself a palace, choosing the Palatine Hill, to which successive emperors, particularly Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Septimus Severus, made additions of increasing splendour. Nothing remains but ruins, which,{180} however, show that the principal apartments were as follows: the Tablinum or throne-room; Basilica, or hall of justice; Peristylium or rectangular garden-court, enclosed with colonnades; Triclinium, or Banquet Hall; Lararium or domestic temple for the household gods and the Nymphæum.

A remarkable example is the Palace of Diocletian at Spalato, Dalmatia, built A.D. 300. The plan, rectangular in shape and covering an area of 4½ acres, about the same, in fact, as that of the Escoriál in Spain, seems to have been laid out on the lines of a Roman camp. A square tower occupies each of the corners, while three of the sides were pierced with entrances, flanked by octagonal towers, which were distinguished as the “golden,” the “iron,” and the “bronze” gateways. From these extended colonnaded roads which met in the centre, thus dividing the area into two northern sections, probably used by the principal officers of the household and the guests, and a large southern portion reserved for the imperial palace, and two temples. One of these was dedicated to Æsculapius; the other, circular in plan, to Jupiter.

The architecture was of a somewhat debased character, but offers certain interesting features of transition to the later style of the Romanesque. Thus, in the northern gateway an entablature is not employed, and the arches rest directly on the capitals of the columns.

Domestic Buildings.—The domestic architecture comprised three forms: the domus, or city residence of the well-to-do; the insula, or city tenement house, and the rich man’s country house or villa.

The last term comprises the house and its accompaniments of beautifully laid-out grounds and gardens. On a colossal scale of magnificence was the Villa of Hadrian{181} erected at Tivoli, where the whole area amounted to seven square miles. It included, besides the usual palace apartments, a gymnasium, thermæ and theatre, disposed amid terraced gardens, peristyles, ornamental water-basins, and fountains.

Some idea in miniature of the luxurious villa of the Romans is to be gained from the various villas excavated in the summer resort of Pompeii, such as the House of Pansa and the House of Vetius. It comprised a rectangle bounded on three sides by narrow streets and on the fourth by the garden. The lower story contained shops, opening on to the streets, as in the case of many modern hotels. The principal entrance to the house itself was a portico through which the visitor passed into an oecus or reception room. On the right of this were the quarters of the kitchen and on the left was the triclinium or dining-room for use in cold weather. The reception-room led into a peristyle court open to the sky, with covered colonnades that afforded protection from the sun, while the rain was caught in an impluvium or central cistern. On one side of the court extended a row of cubicula or sleeping apartments, another row of which lined one side of the atrium. This also was an open court, furnished with an impluvium, and protected from the weather on its sides by the extended eaves of the adjacent roofs. The atrium was the public reception place in which the owner of the house interviewed his clients and transacted business. Accordingly it had a separate entrance from the street.

The walls of the principal apartments were decorated with paintings, many of which involved architectural features; the floors were laid with mosaics and the timber ceilings were probably painted and gilded, their roofs{182} being constructed of terra-cotta. The blocks of dwellings, called insulæ, seem to have anticipated our modern apartment and tenement houses, for they were carried up through many stories and housed numerous families. It is probable that they involved few conveniences, as we understand them to-day; the important necessity of water, for instance, being met by public fountains, which supplied drinking water, and by the public baths that made provision for cleanliness and health.

Bridges, Aqueducts.—Among the great public works achieved by the Romans were roads, aqueducts, and bridges; and, although these were, strictly speaking, engineering masterpieces, the use of the arch in the last two brings them within the scope of architectural grandeur. The visible signs, and indeed the symbol of Roman civilisation, were the roads which pushed their way forward to the limits of the Empire, as far as possible with a directness that swerved aside from no obstacle, and with a solidity of foundation that in many parts of the world survives to-day. And a corresponding solidity allied with the dignity of simplicity of design characterised the bridges. The best preserved in Italy is the five-arched Bridge of Rimini, while impressive examples are found in the favoured province of Spain; at Cordova, for instance, and Toledo.

The Romans were lavish users of water, for purposes of luxury as well as necessity. They understood the simple hydraulic law that water will rise in pipes to its own original level and applied the system in their buildings. But since pipes of lead and bronze were costly and none too durable, they dispensed as far as possible with their use, conveying the water in lofty aqueducts, with a fall, as Vitruvius recommended, of 6 inches in 100 feet, so{183} that the water was delivered from a height at the spot it was needed. The channel, constructed of concrete, lined with cement, was conducted upon a series of concrete arches, faced with brick; the arches being of immense height and sometimes in several tiers. The Anio Novus, constructed A.D. 38, was sixty-two miles in length and entered Rome on arches carried over the Aqua Claudia, which was erected at the same time and is still one of the water supplies of Rome. The finest existing example, however, is the so-called Pont-du-Gard, near Nîmes, which forms part of an aqueduct twenty-five miles long. For a distance of about 900 feet it is composed of three tiers of arches, crossing the valley 180 feet above the River Gard.

In conclusion, the genius of the Roman architect consisted in his faculty of organisation, which enabled him to take the principles of Hellenic architecture and apply them to a great variety of requirements. What his architecture lost in refinement, it more than gained in flexibility and resourcefulness, while creating for itself a distinction of structural grandeur. It refertilised the Hellenic which had threatened to become a barren style and produced a style that not only was richly competent to serve the needs of its own time, but has proved capable of being further developed to new needs. It involved principles that had their influence on Romanesque and consequently on Gothic architecture, became the source from which Renaissance architecture was evolved, and, even in our own day, are still capable of new and active service.

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As the power of Rome waned and the Empire became disintegrated, the force of Christianity increased and spread and the organisation of the Church became consolidated. The immediate followers of Christ looked for their Lord’s reappearance as a Jewish Messiah. Paul, however, taught that there was no distinction in the sight of Christ between Jew and Gentile and treated Christianity as a philosophic system of ethics, applicable to all races and conditions of rich and poor. His view prevailed and Christianity became a great proselytising force.

Its idea of a universal brotherhood appealed especially to the multitude, while men and women of the highest classes were attracted by its ideals of better and purer living. For the period was one of social unrest and of havoc of old faiths and standards of conduct. Profligacy was sapping the vitals of the state and of society, and the need of new moral ideals was insistent. “No one thing about Christianity commended it to all, and to no one thing did it owe its victory, but to the fact that it met a greater variety of needs and met them more satisfactorily than any other movement of the Age.”

Its growth was further facilitated by the proselytising zeal of its adherents. Christianity spread not only throughout the Roman Empire in Europe, but also fastened upon Asia Minor and North Africa, taking firm root especially in Egypt, the intellectual centre of the Empire,{188} and extending even to the Germanic tribes which were to become the conquerors of Rome.

Its power, moreover, was strengthened by its organisation. In the beginning each congregation had been independent. It had its officers, deacons, who cared for its poor; elders or presbyters, who, as the council of the church, looked after its interests; and its overseer, episcopus, or bishop, the chief of the presbyters. In course of time, as the church of a given city sent out branches to neighbouring towns and rural districts, the bishop of the parent community came to have authority over a group of congregations. In time the bishops of a province learned to look for guidance to the highest religious officer of the provincial capital, who acquired the high importance of a “Metropolitan.” And above him in dignity were the “Patriarchs” of such cities as Antioch and Alexandria, while the Bishop of Rome was acquiring the greatest influence. “In brief, the government of the Church was becoming a monarchy.” (Botsford.)

Constantine, recognising the advantage of allying himself with such an organisation, issued in 313 the Edict of Milan, which placed all religions on an equal footing. Furthermore, to set at rest the dissensions which were threatening to disrupt the organisation of the Church, he summoned a council of the representatives of all the great branches of the Church to meet in Nicæa, to decide upon a creed which should be acceptable to all.

For with the growth of the Church, Christianity had become encumbered with doctrines that hardened into dogmas, and by this time a controversy was raging over the rival dogmas upheld by two officers of the Church in Egypt, Athanasius and Arius. Both held that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but Arius maintained that He{189} had proceeded from the Father and was therefore second to the latter, while Athanasius proclaimed the absolute equality of the Father and the Son. The Council of Nicæa pronounced the latter doctrine to be orthodox and branded the Arian as heresy. The Nicene Creed, in which the orthodox was embodied, was accepted in the West, but in the East, the Arian dogma continued to be held.

Apart, however, from its bearing on this question, the Council of Nicæa was an event of profound importance. This first Œcumenical Council, or Council representative of the whole Christian world, not only was an object lesson of the widespread power of the Church, but also exalted the clergy to a high position of spiritual authority amid the temporal distractions of the time.

Constantine, upon his deathbed, accepted the Christian faith. Some fifty years later Theodosius made Christianity the sole religion of the state and the pagan temples were closed.

By degrees the spiritual power of the Church was reinforced by the temporal. The beginning of this change is sometimes dated from the act of the Frankish king, Pepin, to whom the Pope appealed to stem the attack of the Lombards, then pushing south from their possessions in Northern Italy and threatening Rome. Pepin drove them back and handed over a considerable slice of territory to the Pope, to swell the so-called “Patrimony of St. Peter.” The latter, from this time on, became a source of increasing wealth, which enabled the Popes to maintain armies and play the part of princes in the world of politics.

Meanwhile, the temporal power of the Western Church, centred in the Papacy, had been helped by Constantin{190}e’s removal of the capital of the Empire to Constantinople. Two circumstances contributed to the change. By this time the Senate had lost even the semblance of authority, and the real source of government was in the consent of the armies. Secondly, the frontiers chiefly threatened were the eastern ones. Constantine accordingly selected as the site of a Nova Roma, the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. It, too, had its seven hills, occupying a promontory between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, a spot defended, as well as beautified, by nature and already an important gateway of commerce, both by sea and land, between Europe and the East. Constantine planned the new city of Constantinople on extensive lines and set an example of magnificent building that was continued by his successors; so that Constantinople continued for a thousand years to be the Eastern bulwark of European civilisation, until it was conquered by the Moslems in 1453.

Among the results of this change of the capital was, firstly, that the Empire gradually separated into East and West; secondly, that Constantinople became the centre of culture, and, as darkness settled down upon the West, the almost sole refuge of learning and the arts. In the beginning Roman architects directed the character of the new city, but even then the artisans who executed the work were either Byzantines or Greeks, attracted to the new city from various parts of Hellas and Asia Minor. In consequence architecture and the other arts gradually became impressed with a new character, which, for convenience’ sake, is styled Byzantine. It represents, in the case of architecture, a mixture of Roman, Greek, and Oriental; and involved, as we shall see, the treatment of old principles in a new spirit of invention.{191}

The change was encouraged by the contact of Byzantium with Eastern and African civilisation. For as the Western Empire declined in power, the Eastern grew; extending its sway in Asia, where it came into conflict with the Parthians and Persians, and along the northern littoral of Africa. The Metropolitan Bishop of Byzantium became to the Eastern Churches what the Metropolitan Bishop of Rome was to the Western; and exercised a spiritual headship over the Coptic Church in Alexandria, the Syrian Church in Antioch, the Nestorian Church in Ctesiphon, and the Armenian in Asia. Over this widely spread area religious art flourished, coloured in each locality by racial influences, all of which influences in a measure reacted upon the capital city of Byzantium.

Meanwhile, in the West, the Church was labouring to reorganise a settled condition of society by assisting the consolidation of authority. A case in point is the welding of the Frankish tribes into some semblance of a nation. By 486 they had found a great leader in Clovis, who led them across the Rhine, conquered the Romans at Soissons, and proceeded to extend his sway over Gaul. To consolidate his power he married Clotilda, a princess of the Burgundian Goths, and accepted her faith of Christianity. It chanced that she professed the orthodox belief, unlike the majority of the Burgundians and the other German tribes at this time in Gaul, who were Arians. Consequently the Roman Church threw the weight of its influence on the side of Clovis and helped him to found a monarchy in France that endured under the title of Merovingian, so called from Merovech, the grandfather of Clovis.

In time the vigour of the Merovingian kings declined, until the actual power was wielded by the steward of the{192} royal household, the Mayor of the Palace. Gradually this office became hereditary in a dynasty of rulers known as Carolingian or Charles Dynasty. The first great Charles was Mayor Charles, surnamed Martel or the Hammer; the last, Charlemagne, or Charles the Great. The former derived his name from the crushing blows he inflicted upon his enemies, particularly the Saracens, the followers of Mohammed, who by this time (732) had replaced the Vandals along the north coast of Africa, conquered the Visigoths in Spain, and were threatening France. Charles met them at Poictiers or Tours, and in a complete victory saved Christianity to Europe.

Charles remained simply Mayor; but the title of King was assumed by his son, Pepin, who was first elected by the Franks and then anointed by the Church, thus ascending the throne with the consent of the Pope. We have already noted how he repaid the debt. He was succeeded by his son Charlemagne, whose dream was to found an empire upon the ruins of the Roman. It was fulfilled to the point that he extended Frankish sway over Germany, as far as the Elbe, and into Italy. In the last named country he conquered the Lombards and signalised the completeness of the conquest by assuming the iron crown of Lombardy. On Christmas Day, A.D. 800, as he was kneeling at prayer in the Church of St. Peter in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned him Emperor of the Romans.

It was the aim of Charlemagne to establish his government on Roman lines, to which end he reintroduced Roman laws and methods of civilisation and ordained that Latin should be the official language. The city selected as his capital was Aachen—Aix-la-Chapelle.

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When the “Peace of the Church” had been proclaimed by Constantine and Christians were able to worship openly, the age of church-building commenced, the Emperor himself setting a lead. After the edict of Theodosius, making Christianity the State religion, many of the pagan temples were adapted to the purposes of the Christian ritual, or their columns and decorative features were appropriated for the building of new churches. The former practice accounts for the preservation of the Parthenon, Erechtheion, and the Temple of Theseus at Athens. An instance of the method of conversion is to be traced in the Cathedral of Syracuse, Sicily, which occupies the site of an ancient temple. Walls were built between the Doric columns of the peristyle, while the walls of the cella were pierced so as to communicate with the peristyle, which thus served as aisles. Another instance is that of a temple in Aphrodisias, in Caria, Asia Minor, where the walls of the cella were entirely removed, and walls were built outside the peristyle to form aisles, while to increase the length of the nave the front and rear portico columns were set in line with the others.

Basilican Plan.—These changes coincided with the general adoption of the basilica plan in the case of new buildings. For the early Christian churches show very little regard for the appearance of the exterior. Attention was concentrated on the interior, in fitting it for ritual wor{194}ship and in beautifying it, and to both these objects the basilica plan most readily contributed.

The earliest example in Rome of a church so planned is that of St. John Lateran, which, however, has been completely remodelled by subsequent additions. The next in point of time was the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, erected near the spot in which the saint was martyred in the circus of Nero. It was torn down in 1506 to make room for the present cathedral commenced by Julius II; but the appearance of its principal façade is known from Raphael’s mural painting “Incendio del Borgo,” in the stanze of the Vatican, and there is a record of its plan. The latter shows that the basilica building was approached by an atrium, surrounded by either colonnades or arcades, enclosing a rectangular space, open to the sky and having a fountain in the centre. With the water the worshippers sprinkled themselves, a symbol of purification still preserved in the “holy-water” vessel, placed inside the entrance of Roman Catholic churches.

The end arcade, abutting on the church proper, was used by penitents and called the narthex. The body of the church was divided, as in the basilica halls, into central nave and side aisles—the latter sometimes double. Across the end of the nave extended the bema or sanctuary, corresponding to the space raised and enclosed for litigants and lawyers in the basilica. Its ends projected beyond the line of the main building, forming rudimentary transepts, which may have been used as sacristies for the robing of the clergy and the preservation of the sacred vessels and other ritual objects. The central part of the bema was elevated and occupied by the altar which was surmounted by a baldachino or canopy, supported on four{195} columns. Behind the altar was the apse, lined with seats; those of the Roman assessors being now occupied by the presbyters, while the centre one of the quæster or praetor became the bishop’s throne. For the transference of the latter to the side of the choir was of later date.

The officiating priest stood behind the altar, facing the congregation and the east. For as yet the main façade was not the western, a fact of interest when we recall that while the Hellenic architects built facing the four points of the compass and made the chief entrance on the east, the Romans were indifferent to the matter of orientation.

In certain instances as that of S. Clemente, in Rome, the accommodation for the choir projected from the bema into the nave. It was enclosed with low screen walls called Cancelli (whence was derived the word chancel); the side walls projecting to afford space for two reading desks, or ambones; respectively, the Gospel ambo and the Epistle ambo.

Treatment of Columns.—There were two ways of treating the columns. In the earlier type of churches, the aisles were spanned by arches, while those of the nave supported an entablature. But this necessitated a narrow intercolumniation, considerably obstructing the view. Accordingly, the practice ensued of placing the columns further apart and surmounting them with arches. The first example of this use of arcades in a nave is believed to occur in the northern gallery of the Palace of Diocletian in Spalato, Dalmatia. Both methods continued to be employed and were sometimes combined in the same building. Over the entablature or arches, as the case might be, was a high stretch of wall, rising above the level{196} of the aisle roof, pierced with a row of clerestory windows. The nave and aisles terminated in arches, that of the former, the principal entrance to the sanctuary, being called the Arch of Triumph. The roofs were of timber; that of the nave rising to a ridge and finishing at each end in a gable, while a slope from below the clerestory covered the side aisles. The construction work of the roofs was usually hidden in the interior by flat ceilings, beamed and coffered.

The decoration of the interior included the use of antique columns, which were sometimes adapted to their new place by cutting down or removing the bases. The walls above the nave arcading or entablature were adorned with mosaics, which also embellished the space above the Arch of Triumph and the semi-dome of the apse. The floors were covered with geometric patterns of marble sliced from columns and other antique fragments.

The principal examples of basilican churches, still existing in Rome, are St. Paul-without-the-walls, S. Clemente and S. Maria Maggiore. The first named is of modern construction, completed in 1854, but preserves the plan and dimensions of the older church which was destroyed by fire in 1823. It had been begun in 380 by Theodosius, on a plan closely following that of the old St. Peter’s, except that the transepts of the bema project less and the atrium was abandoned, leaving only the narthex. Its construction and embellishment were continued by other emperors and by many popes, the munificence of the latter being commemorated in a series of portrait medallions of the popes which extends in a band above the arcade-arches on each side of the nave. The wall space above them is veneered with rare marbles,{197} enclosing panels filled with paintings representing incidents in the life of St. Paul. Amid the somewhat extreme sumptuousness of the interior a feeling of the older character of a basilican church is preserved in the mosaics of the fifth century which adorn the arch of triumph, and in those of the apse which date from the early part of the thirteenth century.

S. Maria Maggiore presents an original basilican plan of nave and single aisles, from each of which during the Renaissance was built out a square side chapel, surmounted by domes, giving the plan the form of a cross. But the interior of the nave dates from the time of Sixtus III in the fourth century and shows on each side a series of Ionic columns, supporting an entablature. Above this, as also over the arch of triumph, are mosaics of the fifth century.

The Church of S. Clemente is notable for the retention of the atrium and also for the termination of the aisles in apses, a feature which suggests Byzantine influence.

Circular and Polygonal Plans.—In addition to the basilican buildings of this period were some which involved a circular or polygonal plan, suggested probably by the circular temples and tombs of the Romans. They were applied in the early Christian era both to tombs, which in some cases were afterward converted into churches, and to baptistries. The latter were independent buildings, so called from their use at first solely for the sacrament of baptism. In later times, however, it became the custom to place the font inside the church; yet as late as the eleventh century was erected the famous Baptistry of Florence, in which even to this day every child born within the city is baptised.

The examples in Rome of circular or polygonal build{198}ings are the Baptistry which forms part of the group of buildings of S. John Lateran, the Tomb of S. Constanza, the daughter of Constantine, which was converted into a church in 1256, and the church of S. Stefano Rotondo.

The general character of the Roman tomb was a circular mass, superimposed on a square podium. The cylindrical mass was sometimes decorated with pilasters, supporting an entablature, and occasionally was surrounded by a peristyle, while its roof was apt to be conical.

In early Christian architecture this principle of construction was developed. The peristyle was enclosed by outer walls, and the lower part of the walls of the cylindrical mass was replaced by columns. Thus, in the Baptistry of S. John, which has been called the Baptistry of Constantine, the conical roof is supported by a circle of eight columns, in two stories.

The Tomb of S. Constanza has a dome which is supported on twelve pairs of granite columns, while the wall of the circular aisle is inset with sixteen recesses, alternately apsidal and rectangular in shape, one of the latter being opened through to form the entrance. The sarcophagus of the saint which formerly occupied one of the niches, is now in the Vatican Museum. Its sides are carved with genii gathering grapes—a motive which is also represented in the mosaics that adorn the vaulting of the church’s circular aisle.

S. Stefano Rotondo, though much reduced from its original size, is said to be still the largest circular church in existence. The wall of the cylinder, surmounted by a wooden conical roof, is supported on a circular entablature, carried by antique columns. It was surrounded, when built by Simplicius in the fifth century, by double circular aisles, covered by a sloping roof. The latter was{199} supported by columns and arches, while the external wall was decorated with pilasters. Traces of these are still apparent; otherwise the outer aisle has disappeared and the present exterior represents the walling up of the spaces between the columns. This was done by Nicholas V in the fifteenth century, by which time the edifice, once richly decorated with marble veneers and mosaics, had fallen into decay. Its lateral walls are now covered with horribly naturalistic scenes of martyrdom, executed at the end of the seventeenth century.

Syrian Examples.—Syria has disclosed to explorers—of whom the late Marquis of Vogüé and Dr. H. C. Butler of the American Archæological Expedition have been the foremost—a number of interesting monuments, both civic and religious, erected between the third and eighth centuries. While details of moulding and ornament appear to have been copied from those of Roman remains, the methods of construction were worked out by the builders themselves. They seem to have retained the Phœnician preference for using the largest stones that could be quarried, transported, and put in place. Thus, arches were frequently carved out of a single stone, and when voussoirs were used, they were either few in number or, if numerous, of great height and depth. Large slabs of stone were also employed for roofing, especially in houses. In imitating antique details the architects appear to have had little if any feeling for their constructional origin or meaning; the capital and half the shaft of a column, for example, being carved out of one piece of stone, while the remainder of the shaft and the base were cut out of another. On the other hand, they developed for themselves certain fine features of construction, as for instance, in{200} the arcading of their basilican churches, in which the columns were sometimes replaced by large rectangular piers, carrying arches of great width. An example of this impressive method is found in the interior of the Church of Kalb-Lauzeh. This corresponds with the larger Church of Turmanin, the western façade of which shows a very independent spirit of design. It has a broad arched entrance, flanked by two square towers, connected over the doorway by an open gallery, constructed with columns.

A corresponding inventiveness marked their use of the basilican plan. A fine example is the large Church of S. Simeon Stylites at Kalat-Seman. The nucleus of the plan is an octagonal court, open to the sky, in the centre of which stood the pillar on which the saint spent thirty years of his life. This court forms the intersection or crossing of four rectangular wings, arranged in shape of a cross, each one of which has a basilican form, the nave and aisles of the eastern one terminating in apses.

Another very interesting plan occurs in the Cathedral at Borah. It presents a circle inscribed in a square, in the angles of which are apsidal recesses projecting from the circle. Moreover, from the east side of the square project three short rectangles, terminating in apses, which suggest the prolongation of the nave and aisles that have been interrupted by the circle. Nothing but the foundations of this church remain. Meanwhile, the Church of S. George at Esrah shows a similar plan and is surmounted by a high elliptical dome. It is conjectured that these two churches were the prototypes of S. Sergius, Constantinople, and S. Vitale at Ravenna, which will be discussed later, and of many corresponding churches of Byzantine architecture.{201}

Ravenna.—In the development of early Christian architecture a very interesting part was played by Ravenna. For this city, situated on the Adriatic (though the sea has since receded to a distance of six miles), was the chief port by which the trade of Constantinople or Byzantium entered Italy. Accordingly some of the tombs and churches present a fusion of Byzantine and Syrian influences with Roman. The change from the basilican type is especially marked in the character of the plan and by the adoption of domes.

Thus the Baptistry of Ravenna is an octagonal structure, surmounted by a dome of hollow tiles. The Tomb of Galla Placidia is cruciform in plan with a lantern raised over the crossing or intersection of the arms of the cross. The lantern is pierced with four windows and surmounted by a dome, supported on pendentives—a method of construction, peculiarly Byzantine, which will be considered presently.

When Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostro-Goths and ruler of Northern Italy, selected Ravenna as his capital, he built the Church of S. Apollinare Nuovo, importing twenty-four marble columns from Constantinople and employing Byzantine artists and artisans. The plan is basilican, though the atrium and apse have been removed by subsequent alterations, but the interior is richly embellished with Byzantine mosaics. The latter also adorn the larger basilican Church of S. Apollinare-in-Classe, so called from its being situated near the port. Its columns also are distinguished by the peculiarly Byzantine feature of the impost block, to be described later.

After the death of Theodoric in 536 the Emperor Justinian, having through his general, Belisarius, routed the Goths from the country, made Ravenna the political capi{202}tal of Italy, under the authority of an exarch. Then was built, probably as Court Church, the famous example of Byzantine influence, the Church of S. Vitale. We will return to this after a consideration of what is involved in the Byzantine style.

Byzantine.—The term Byzantine is applied to the style of architecture gradually developed in Byzantium after Constantine, in A.D. 324, transferred the capital of the Roman Empire to that city. Its distinctive features are the use of brick and stone in place of concrete; the use of imposts in connection with columns and arches; the character of the carved ornament applied to surfaces and, most important of all, a system of covering rectangular spaces with domes. It reached its highest point of development under the Emperor Justinian, between the years 527 and 565.

The style was the result of evolution; a product of the combination of principles of construction derived from Roman, Early Christian and Syrian architecture, and from the traditional methods of the Iran builders of Assyria; affected in matters of decoration by the luxurious taste of the Orient.