A much more virile Ionic at enormous scale was developed in the great Hellenistic temples of the Asia Minor coast, such as those at Miletus and Priene. The archaic temple at Ephesus had set the style as early as the 6th century B.c., and its rebuilding, shortly after 35o B.C., by Dinocrates, while keeping certain of the more archaic features, such as the sculptured drums of the lower portions of the columns, was in the complete new Hellenistic Ionic style. The characteristics of this are: (r) a capital with volutes relatively smaller than in Athenian examples ; (2) a cornice whose most striking feature was the very large dentils of the bed-mould, so large and so widely spaced, in fact, that in appearance they became almost separate brackets.
The Roman Ionic was based more on the Asia Minor than on the Attic types. Its details, throughout, were heavier than the usual Greek type. This heaviness appears even in the temple of Fortuna Virilis, which is not only the earliest purely Roman Ionic order, but also probably the earliest building in Rome in a good state of preservation to-day. It is variously attributed to the beginning of the 2nd and the beginning of the ist century B.C. In general, the three chief differences between the Greek and Roman Ionic orders are : (I) the band connecting the volutes is perfectly horizontal, both at top and bottom, in Roman examples, and without the central dip of most Greek capitals ; (2) the rela tive height and importance of the bed-mould of the cornice is much greater in the usual Roman examples. This is true, even in the most delicate and the most Greek of the monumental Roman orders—that of the theatre of Marcellus; (3) the base of the Roman order has, almost always, a square plinth as its lowest member. An exceptional type of Roman Ionic order is that of the temple of Saturn, on the Roman forum, the ancient treasury of Rome, whose ugly heaviness is characteristic of its date, after the great fire of A.D. 283.
Whatever the date of the original invention of the Corinthian order, it did not come into general use until the middle of the 4th century B.C. The capital perhaps owes its bell shape to Greek travellers' memories of the campaniform capitals of Egypt. But the Greek expression of this form is characteristically gracious. (For the charming Greek myth of its creation, see Vitruvius, Bk. IV.) Certainly the simplest form of the capital, in which a bell, decorated with flat and delicately pointed leaves, close together, has its lower portion surrounded by eight boldly curv ing acanthus leaves, suggests a basket around the bottom of which an acanthus plant has grown, as the myth states. The most famous example of this simple type decorated the "Tower of the Winds," at Athens, originally built in the 1st century B.C.
to contain a water clock. The more complicated type, which is well represented by the exquisite capital of the tholos at Epidorus (middle 4th century B.C.), had two rows of leaves below and corner and central scrolls above. An even simpler form of the same type of capital, found alone in the ruins of the temple at Bassae, may be as early as the temple itself. The most popularly known example of the Greek Corinthian order, is that of the little choragic monument of Lysicrates, at Athens (335 B.c.).
The extremely lavish capital is, however, exceptional in many ways, and its silhouette unpleasantly broken. The existing col umns and capitals of the great temple of Zeus at Athens were originally considered to be duplicates of the capital that Sulla took to Rome, and which served as a model for early Roman Corinthian. It is now known that the present remains are of the time of Hadrian. The order is, therefore, Roman, and not Greek. The Greeks never developed a separate entablature for the Corinthian order, using, instead, one of purely Ionic type ; that of the tholos at Epidaurus owes its peculiar flat cornice to the fact that it was an interior order, rather than to any attempt to develop special entablature forms to crown the Corinthian capital.
Roman tradition found the origin of the Roman Corinthian order in a capital of the Athenian temple of Zeus, which Sulla brought with him to Rome. Long before that date, however, the Etruscans had been using forms Corinthianesque in type, and Pompeii also shows capitals which approach the Corinthian. In any case, the use of the Corinthian order on a monumental scale, as the Roman order par excellence, was well established by the time of Augustus, and the temple of Mars Ultor, dedicated in 2 B.C. as part of the forum of Augustus, and the portico of Oc tavia, of approximately the same date, both have completely developed magnificent Corinthian orders. It is noteworthy that in these the modillion (q.v.) had already reached a complete form. New light on the origin of this new feature which transformed the Ionic entablature into the Corinthian and which is the great Roman contribution to the development of the orders, is fur nished by fragments of the order of the basilica Aemilia (dedi cated 29 B.c.). These fragments are of the typically pure Augustan type, and therefore, probably due to this date and not to any of the succeeding rebuildings, and indicate a cornice with modillions which are deeper at the outer end than at the inner; that is, they slope down like the Doric mutules. Their outer ends are, however, scrolled.