In the English text we are told that in "all the restorations hitherto published the height of the column has been assumed An image should appear at this position in the text.Fig. 186.—Priene, members of Entablature. to be nine diameters; but it having been ascertained from the exhaustive inquiry by Mr Penrose that the real height was not less than ten diameters, the temple in these plates assumes a more elegant form." Penrose's calculations resulted in giving a height of 42.30 and 42.95 feet to the column, without the plinths, while Rayet and Thomas estimated it at 11.75 metres.
Penrose had very inadequate data; the measurements on which he based were taken within the flutes, as the fillets were so broken, and Pullan gave the full bottom diameter as 4.230, which is about an inch in excess of the French and German estimates.Penrose's total height therefore works out to nearly 10¼ diameters, while Miletus, the later and otherwise tallest known column, is 945, or 9¾, and we saw that the Mausoleum, another work of the same architect, Pytheos, had a height of only eight diameters.
An image should appear at this position in the text.Fig. 187.—Priene, the Capitals.
The Germans proceeded by another method, taking the top courses of the antæ as restored in our Museum, and the bottom ones left on the site, and allowing for what seems to be missing they estimated the height as 11.40 metres, or less than 9 diameters. An American, Mr Dinsmoor, working by the same method, gives the proportion as exactly 8.814. An error of 1½ diameters or about 6.0 is rather serious in the minute engravings of the English volume.
If the column at Miletus, which seems to be the only one
