The Temple

For the Greeks and Romans the temple was not a place of congregation but the house of a god. The worshippers gathered outside, at an altar in front of the entrance; the building itself sheltered the cult statue in a dim inner room, the cella, and displayed the god’s dignity to the city. Because it was the most important building type and the most carefully proportioned, the temple became the model for all classical architecture: the portico, the pediment and the colonnade migrated from temples onto churches, palaces, villas, banks and parliaments.

The parts of a temple

At its core is the cella, a rectangular room with a door at the front. The side walls usually continue forward past the front wall to form a porch, the pronaos, ending in thickened wall-ends called antae; two columns set between them stand in antis. Many temples have a matching porch at the back, the opisthodomos, which held treasure or offerings. The whole may then be surrounded by a peristyle of columns. The building stands on a stepped platform, the crepidoma, whose top step is the stylobate; the Romans instead raised their temples on a high podium reached by a flight of steps at the front.

Vitruvius’s classes of temple

Vitruvius classifies temples by the arrangement of their columns. The simplest is in antis. A prostyle temple has a row of columns across the front; an amphiprostyle has one at each end. A peripteral temple is surrounded by a single row; a dipteral by a double row; a pseudodipteral by a single row set as far out as the outer row of a dipteral, leaving a wide walkway. The Romans invented the pseudoperipteral temple, with a deep free-standing porch in front and half-columns engaged in the cella walls along the sides and back. Front colonnades are named by their number of columns: tetrastyle (4), hexastyle (6), octastyle (8), decastyle (10).

℟Twice as many intercolumniations on the flanks

In a peripteral temple the flanks have twice as many intercolumniations as the front: six columns in front means eleven along each side, counting the corner columns twice.

side columns = 2n − 1 (Vitruvius) · 2n + 1 (Greek practice)

The number of columns on the flanks follows from the number on the front. Vitruvius wants the sides to have twice as many intercolumniations as the front, so a hexastyle temple has eleven columns along each side (counting the corners twice), and the temple is twice as long as it is wide. The classical Greeks usually added one more: six by thirteen at the Temple of Hephaestus, eight by seventeen at the Parthenon.

The cella

Vitruvius gives the cella and its porch a length of twice the temple’s width, the cella itself being a quarter longer than it is wide. Its walls line up with the columns of the peristyle, so that the plan is controlled by a single grid. In large Greek temples the cella was divided by two rows of internal columns, often in two storeys, which carried the roof and framed the colossal statue: Pheidias’s gold-and-ivory Athena in the Parthenon stood nearly twelve metres high.

The pediment

The temple’s low-pitched roof ends at front and back in a triangular gable, the pediment. It is framed by the horizontal cornice below and the raking cornices that follow the slope of the roof, and its triangular field, the tympanum, was often filled with sculpture, the most famous being the birth of Athena and the contest of Athena and Poseidon on the Parthenon. Ornaments called acroteria stood at the apex and the corners.

℟The height of the pediment

Divide the whole front of the cornice into nine parts; give one of them to the height of the tympanum, measured at its centre.

tympanum height = cornice width ⁄ 9 (≈ 12½°)

Vitruvius makes the tympanum one-ninth as high as the cornice is long, a slope of about twelve and a half degrees, the pitch of a Greek roof covered with heavy marble tiles. Later architects building in wetter climates often steepened it. The pediment outlived the temple roof: Renaissance and Baroque architects put pediments over doors and windows, broke them open, curved them into segments and stacked them, turning the end of a roof into one of the most flexible ornaments in the classical vocabulary.

Round temples

Vitruvius also describes two kinds of circular temple: the monopteros, a ring of columns carrying a roof but with no cella, and the round peripteral temple, or tholos, in which a ring of columns surrounds a circular cella. The Temple of Vesta at Tivoli and the round temple by the Tiber in Rome are Roman examples; the Tholos at Delphi a Greek one. The type had an extraordinary afterlife: Bramante’s Tempietto of 1502, the first great building of the High Renaissance, is a Doric tholos, and domed round temples crown buildings from St Paul’s in London to the Capitol in Washington.

Greek and Roman

The two traditions put their temples to different uses in the city, and it shows. A Greek temple stood free in its sacred precinct, approached at an angle and meant to be walked round; its colonnade looks the same from every side. A Roman temple usually stood at the end of a forum, on a podium, facing down its axis; its front is emphatic and its back often blank. The Roman temple (frontal, axial, raised on a base and approached by a monumental stair) is the ancestor of the portico on a Palladian villa and of the neoclassical public building.

℟The temple front on the house

Give the front of a country house a portico with a pediment, as the ancients did, for it shows the entrance, gives grandeur, and makes a place to display the owner’s arms.