=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 Cnossos 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 _entasis_, as the convex is called, being greatest at about one-third of the distance from the bottom.