More remarkable even than this was the celebrated Temple of Diana at Ephesus, said by Pliny to have been 425 ft. long by 220 ft. wide. Recent excavations on the site, however, carried out by Mr. T. Wood, prove that these dimensions apply only to the platform on which it stood. The temple itself, measured from the outside of the angle pillars, was only 348 ft. by 164, making the area 57,072 ft., or about the average dimensions of our mediæval cathedrals. Besides these, there was a splendid decastyle temple, dedicated to Apollo Didymæus, at Miletus, 156 ft. wide by 295 ft. in length; an octastyle at Sardis, 261 ft. by 144 ft.; an exquisitely beautiful, though small hexastyle, at Priene, 122 ft. by 64 ft.; and another at Teos, and smaller examples elsewhere, besides many others which have no doubt perished. German explorations in Pergamon have brought to light the remains of the Augustæum, a building consisting of two detached wings with columns of the Ionic order resting on a lofty podium enriched with sculpture and connected one with the other by a magnificent flight of steps, the whole block measuring 125 ft. by 114 ft.[136] CORINTHIAN TEMPLES. The Corinthian order is as essentially borrowed from the bell-shaped capitals of Egypt as the Doric is from their oldest pillars. Like everything they touched, the Greeks soon rendered it their own by the freedom and elegance with which they treated it. The acanthus-leaf with which they adorned it is essentially Grecian, and we must suppose that it had been used by them as an ornament, either in their metal or wood work, long before they adopted it in stone as an architectural feature. As in everything else, however, the Greeks could not help betraying in this also the Asiatic origin of their art, and the Egyptian order with them was soon wedded to the Ionic, whose volutes became an essential though subdued part of this order. It is in fact a composite order, made up of the bell-shaped capitals of the Egyptians and the spiral of the Assyrians, and adopted by the Greeks at a time when national distinctions were rapidly disappearing, and when true and severer art was giving place to love of variety. At that time also mere ornament and carving were supplanting the purer class of forms and the higher aspirations of sculpture with which the Greeks ornamented their temples in their best days.