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 have drifted into some of the leading features of temples, and they
are indeed the buildings which have most influenced subsequent
centuries, but the features of the temple were originally those of the
stately house, as we can see clearly in the remains discovered at
Tiryns. The roofs and upper stories are all gone, but the arrangements
of the doorways are quite the same in principle as those of the historic
temples, except that in the Tirynthian doorways, there are many
evidences remaining of the actual use of wooden pilasters and pillars.
Pausanias in the second century still found one or two wooden pillars
surviving in the ancient temple of Hera at Olympia. As they got worn
out, they were replaced by stone, and Dr. Dörpfeld found that these
substitutions were not all uniform, but in accord with the altering
taste of the day. The capitals in particular varied from pillar to
pillar, to judge from those found among the débris of the temple,
which, by the way, contained the famous Hermes of Praxiteles.
The ultimate separation between the dwelling house and the temple was
that the house included a central court with rooms around it, which was
too large to roof over, and so the model was handed on to all southern
Europe. The Italian palaces, for example, are all dark and fortified
toward the street, and contain an inner court and a gallery running
round it on the building within, on which the rooms open. So permanent
are the right principles of architecture when once discovered by a race
of genius.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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