What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Philosophy
What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?
Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Civilization; Greece -- Civilization; Greece -- Intellectual life
We can derive from this simple form the whole classical architecture of
Europe. In the first place, the gaps between the logs were filled with
clay, and so even the great stones at Tiryns are treated. Thus the wall
was made staunch against rain and wind. But then someone discovered that
by making clay into bricks and drying them slowly in the sun, they would
have a building material much more serviceable than wooden logs or
stones. And so the filling up stuff became the main stuff of the wall;
yet how persistent the idea of using wood can be inferred from the fact
that early brick walls have wooden beams built into them longitudinally
by way of giving firmness, but also affording a danger of complete ruin,
if the building was attacked by fire. The door posts and the lintels
were of wood; for the mud brick wall ending beside the door would
rapidly suffer if not protected by a facing of wood, and later on, terra
cotta casing was used to replace the wood. Ultimately, stone door frames
and pillars replaced the older wooden work. But everywhere the traces
of the primitive wood work survives. The oldest pillars were tree stems
set on a stone base. At the top where the weight laid on them tended to
flatten them out, they were probably bound with a metal band. This you
see perpetuated by the Doric pillar, standing on its base without
plinth, and at the top we have a band running round, and over it a
splaying capital with a slab or abacus over it, to protect the inwards
of the wood from being soaked with rain.
There is no more persistent ornament in a Doric Temple than that course
over the actual wall which consists of what are called metopes and
triglyphs. The metopes are not foreheads (μέτωπα) as even some persons
who know Greek might imagine, but interstices (μετόπαι), in fact open
spaces or holes between the triglyphs. Originally, when the roofs were
of opaque tiles, these openings were necessary to let in light. But the
triglyphs, what were they? Vitruvius notes them as beam ends, for he
calls the metopes _intertignia_; and why were they always marked with
three grooves, as their name implies? Apparently because two horizontal
beams, intended to make a ceiling, had a third pinned between them which
rose to the gable, where it met another, and so formed the skeleton of
the sloping roof. When marble tiles, which were semi-transparent, or
when a higher false roof was set on, the metopes were no longer
necessary to let in light, and the Greeks made the now closed interstice
an ornamented surface, showing groups, either painted, or carved in
relief, to vary the severe lines of the building.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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