We have even fewer materials for the history of the Ionic order in Greece than we have for that of the Doric. The recent discoveries in Assyria have proved beyond a doubt that the Ionic was even more essentially an introduction from Asia[134] than the Doric was from Egypt: the only question is, when it was brought into Greece. My own impression is, that it existed there in one form or another from the earliest ages, but owing to its slenderer proportions, and the greater quantity of wood used in its construction, the examples may have perished, so that nothing is now known to exist which can lay claim to even so great an antiquity as the Persian War. The oldest example, probably, was the temple on the Ilissus, now destroyed, dating from about 484 B.C.; next to this is the little gem of a temple dedicated to Niké Apteros, or the Wingless Victory, built about fifteen years later, in front of the Propylæa at Athens. The last and most perfect of all the examples of this order is the Erechtheium, on the Acropolis; its date is apparently about 420 B.C., the great epoch of Athenian art. Nowhere did the exquisite taste and skill of the Athenians show themselves to greater advantage than here; for though every detail of the order may be traced back to Nineveh or Persepolis, all are so purified, so imbued with purely Grecian taste and feeling, that they have become essential parts of a far more beautiful order than ever existed in the land in which they had their origin. The largest, and perhaps the finest, of Grecian Ionic temples was that built about a century afterwards at Tegea, in Arcadia—a regular peripteral temple of considerable dimensions, but the existence of which is now known only from the description of Pausanias.[135] As in the case, however, of the Doric order, it is not in Greece itself that we find either the greatest number of Ionic temples or those most remarkable for size, but in the colonies in Asia Minor, and more especially in Ionia, whence the order most properly takes its name. That an Ionic order existed in Asia Minor before the Persian War is quite certain, but all examples perished in that memorable struggle; and when it subsequently reappeared, the order had lost much of its purely Asiatic character, and assumed certain forms and tendencies borrowed from the simpler and purer Doric style. If any temple in the Asiatic Greek colonies escaped destruction in the Persian wars, it was that of Juno at Samos. It is said to have been built by Polycrates, and appears to have been of the Doric order. The ruins now found there are of the Ionic order, 346 ft. by 190 ft., and must have succeeded the first mentioned. The apparent archaisms in the form of the bases, &c., which have misled antiquarians, are merely Eastern forms retained in spite of Grecian influence.