Three Doric Temples

The Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, begun in 449 BCE. This is generally said to be the best preserved Doric temple, and you can get a very good idea here of the basic structure. This was another product of Pericles' campaign to make Athens a beautiful imperial city, along with the complete rebuilding of the Acropolis.

It seems that construction was delayed by the Acropolis project and then by the war with Sparta, so that it was not completed until the Peace of Nicias in 421 to 415 BCE. It is located northwest of the Agora.

It was once believed that this temple was dedicated to the hero Theseus, because he is depicted on some surviving sculpture, and you still see the name Theseion on some tourist material. But modern opinion is that this is the temple described by Pausanius as holding images of Hephaestus and Athena.

The temple was converted to a church in the 7th century, dedicated to St. George, and remained one until 1834; in the early twentieth century all trace of Christianity was removed and the temple was restored to what was thought to be its ancient appearance.

This temple stands in Paestum, Italy, in a fabulous complex of ruins that includes three partially preserved temples. It used to be called the Temple of Poseidon, and then for a while the Temple of Apollo, but these days it is more commonly called the Second Temple of Hera. It was probably built in the mid fifth century BCE, perhaps 460 to 450.

Doric temples were modeled on earlier temples made of wood, and rather than making use of the greater strength of stone they revel in stolid structural simplicity: vertical columns and horizontal beams, with just enough slope in the roof to shed water. Their beauty is a testament to the power of limits: able to alter the basic shape in only the most limited ways, Greek architects sought instead to perfect it.

It is, of course, important to remember that these temples were not always the stark skeletons that carry us back in time to he world of Sophocles and Herodotus. If you want to know what the Parthenon looked like and don't care about its setting, you are better off going to see the reconstruction in Nashville, Tennessee, which has all the fussy details added back on and some of the color.

Some art historians think the colors were actually much more garish, something like this.

But for us now the Doric temple is a stone skeleton that evokes a lost age, like fossils that evoke the world of the dinosaurs. This is one of the best for time travelling, at Segesta in Sicily, built in the late fifth century BCE.

In a place like this our minds wander back to the dawn of the classical age, when the brash pride of Greek warriors birthed an extraordinary intellectual and artistic self confidence. These temples are the monuments of that extraordinary time.