GREEK ARCHITECTURE: PERIOD OF HELLENIC INDEPENDENCE.
It is ideal sentiment only that can unite peoples in grand undertakings and give a higher direction to Architecture. This ideal sentiment was possessed in a supreme degree by the Hellenes. What the genesis of the peculiar development of Greek architecture was, what factors entered into it, what earlier and middle stages it passed through before it reached the climax of its glory, cannot be established satisfactorily, because both notices and monuments have only come clown to us from an age in which a previously rich architecture appears to have reached almost the highest point of its development.
Trans/lion from Pelasgic to ,Ilellenie we follow the history of Greece after the close of the mythic days of Pelasgian antiquity, we come upon the immigration of the Dorians at the commencement of the last thousand years before Christ. This people brought a new element into the social life of the region, which from this period began to change from Pelasgic to Hellenic, and this Hellenic culture spread far beyond the limits within which email] races worked, and became on the one hand the basis, and on the other the unattained ideal, of the collective culture of the later ages. However intimately the new Doric element blended with the older or Ionic, there was still a difference between them both in life and in architecture, and two independent yet parallel schools of forms arose—namelv, the Doric and the Ionic—which gave outward expression to the two elements.
The Dorians and Dorians at the time of their entrance into Greece may be regarded as a people nearly devoid of culture, familiar with nothing more than the primitive wooden buildings in the mountains. The Ionians inherited the ancient Pelasgian culture, and in their architec ture, as proved by their monuments in Asia Minor, likewise evolved most of their forms from timber structures, which are thus most probably the prhne source of Greek architecture. But the ideal sentiment of the Hel lenes planted Architecture upon a basis different from that in which they found it as left by the Asiatics and the Pelasgians. The monarchies of the Pelasgian Heroic Age had passed away: Hellenic architecture was not ordained the task of building palaces. Under the open heavens the free
citizens discussed their public affairs, while their private life was one of the greatest simplicity; thus neither of these called the higher Architec ture into requisition, and it became the expression of an ideal purpose almost free from material restrictions.
The Greek development of Grecian art was chiefly in the erection of temples. The religious conceptions of the Greeks were primarily artistic. Their poets taught them the knowledge of their gods without other intention than that through the fulness of poesy which resides in Grecian mythology they might lift their hearers out of every day life into an ideal realm. The earnestness and the strength of their morality were entirely independent of their religious conceptions, which latter had therefore little practical significance. The temple itself prob ably had none; to the Greeks it was not a dwelling of the gods nor a space in which great numbers of the people could assemble, nor was it an abode in which dwelt a multitude of priests performing there their offices: it was an ideal memorial of the Godhead, an artistic shrine for the image of the Deity, an adornmeut and a decoration of the city, a common ideal possession which, erected by the collective contributions of all, was a common tie and was to every individual a cause of pride, an incentive to patriotism, a sign that the god therein worshipped, and whose image the sanctuary enclosed, was. the protector both of the city and of himself.
In the temple of the Deity was to a certain extent embodied the ideal community of the state, to protect which was the duty of all the citizens, but which without some outward expression could not have bound their hearts so closely. In the temple Architecture was through an ideal pur pose guided to a higher development. The architecture of the temple was the proper art-speech of the people, and it was also the only one; so that when we see monumental architectural activity otherwise exhibited the forms are those of the temple applied to other purposes.