Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/210

This page needs to be proofread.
194
THESEUM, ERECHTHEUM, AND OTHER WORKS.

again into barbarism, that it is difficult to understand why this temple had any reputation.

The temple of Dionysos at Taos and the temple at Magnesia on the Meander were according to Vitruvius the work of one architect, Hermogenes, who, he says, wrote a description of the Ionic pseudodipteral temple of Diana at Magnesia and of the monopteral[1] temple of Bacchus at Teos. The pseudo-dipteros, he explains, has a single row of columns at the distance of two intercolumniations and a diameter from the cella. The temple at Teos was eustylos; that is, its intercolumniations were of 2¼ diameter. "Its proportions were discovered by Hermogenes, who was also the inventor of the octastylos or pseudodipteral[2] formation; he omitted the intermediate columns in number 38, and thus great space was obtained around the cella." It is difficult to say what all this means, a monopteros as wide as a dipteros is found in one of the early Doric temples of Paestum, indeed it is selected to illustrate the word pseudodipteral in the American "Dictionary of Architecture." The Ionic temple of Messa on Lesbos, described by Koldeway, and dated by him about 400, is also of this formation, which, as shown below, is about two centuries earlier than the temples of Magnesia and Teos. The temple at Magnesia was excavated by the French about 1842, and large parts of the sculptured frieze and the carved cymatium of the cornice are in the Louvre. It was a large Ionic structure about 190 by 100 feet, the columns were 40 feet high. The site has been recently re-examined by a German expedition, and part of the order has been set up in the Pergamon Museum at Berlin. Foundations of an earlier building of the dipteral formation were found. In the rebuilding the intermediate row of columns was omitted. This seems to be the true basis of the confused account in Vitruvius. The entire frieze was occupied with an Amazon battle—very poor, coarse, and ineffective. The figures are only so much space-filling instead of important stories. Although the "architrave order" of Ephesus, Priene, and the rest has here been given up, it is

  1. Notice this use of the word. In his general description of temple types he seems to limit it to circular buildings without a cella, but it must mean properly what it means here, a temple with one row of columns.
  2. Omit "or," and read "octastyle-pseudodipteral"?