Of all the nations of antiquity the Persians were the most simple and direct in the worship of the Creator. They were the puritans of the heathen world, and not only rejected all images of God and his agents, but also temples and altars, according to Herodotus, whose authority we prefer to any other, because he had an opportunity of conversing with them before they had adopted any foreign superstitions. As they worshipped the ethereal fire without any medium of personification or allegory, they thought it unworthy of the dignity of the god to be represented by any definite form, or circumscribed to any particular place. The universe was his temple, and the all-pervading element of fire his only symbol. The Greeks appear originally to have held similar opinions, for they were long without statues and Pausanias speaks of a temple at Siciyon, built by Adrastus—who lived in an age before the Trojan war—which consisted of columns only, without wall or roof, like the Celtic temples of our northern ancestors, or the Phyrœtheia of the Persians, which were circles of stones in the centre of which was kindled the sacred fire, the symbol of the god. Homer frequently speaks of places of worship consisting of an area and altar only, which were probably enclosures like those of the Persians, with an altar in the centre. The temples dedicated to the creator Bacchus, which the Greek architects called _hypœthral_, seem to have been anciently of this kind, whence probably came the title (“surround with columns”) attributed to that god in the Orphic litanies. The remains of one of these are still extant at Puzznoli, near Naples, which the inhabitants call the temple of Serapis; but the ornaments of grapes, vases, etc., found among the ruins, prove it to have been of Bacchus. Serapis was indeed the same deity worshipped under another form, being usually a personification of the sun. The architecture is of the Roman times; but the ground plan is probably that of a very ancient one, which this was made to replace—for it exactly resembles that of a Celtic temple in Zeeland, published in Stukeley’s _Itinerary_. The ranges of square buildings which enclose it are not properly parts of the temple, but apartments of the priests, places for victims and sacred utensils, and chapels dedicated to the subordinate deities, introduced by a more complicated and corrupt worship and probably unknown to the founder of the original edifice. The portico, which runs parallel with these buildings, encloses the _temenos_, or area of sacred ground, which in the _pyrœtheia_ of the Persians was circular, but is here quadrangular, as in the Celtic temple in Zeeland, and the Indian pagoda before described. In the centre was the holy of holies, the seat of the god, consisting of a circle of columns raised upon a basement, without roof or walls, in the middle of which was probably the sacred fire or some other symbol of the deity.