Architecture, however, as the expression of genius and high civilization, was carried to perfection only by the Greeks, who excelled in so many things.  It was among the ancient Dorians, who descended from the mountains of northern Greece eighty years after the fall of Troy, that architectural art worthy of the name first appeared.  The Pelasgi erected Cyclopean structures fifteen hundred years before Christ, as seen in the massive walls of the Acropolis at Athens, constructed of huge blocks of hewn stone, and in the palaces of the princes of the heroic times.  The lintel of the doorway of the Mycenaean treasury is composed of a single stone twenty-seven feet long and sixteen broad.  But these edifices, which aimed at splendor and richness merely, were deficient in that simplicity and harmony which have given immortality to the temples of the Dorians.  In this style of architecture everything was suitable to its object, and was grand and noble.  The great thickness of the columns, the beautiful entablature, the ample proportion of the capital, the great horizontal lines of the architrave and cornice predominating over the vertical lines of the columns, the severity of geometrical forms produced for the most part by straight lines, gave an imposing simplicity to the Doric temple.

How far the Greek architects were indebted to the Egyptian we cannot tell, for though columns are found amid the ruins of the Egyptian temples, they are of different shape from any made by the Greeks.  In the structures of Thebes we find both the tumescent and the cylindrical columns, from which amalgamation might have been produced the Doric column.  The Greeks seized on beauty wherever they found it, and improved upon it.  The Doric column was not probably an entirely new creation, but shaped after models furnished by the most original of all the ancient nations, even the Egyptians.  The Doric temples were uniform in plan.  The columns were fluted, and were generally about six diameters in height; they diminished gradually upward from the base, with a slightly con vexed swelling; they were surmounted by capitals regularly proportioned according to their height.  The entablature which the column supported was also of a certain number of diameters in height.  So regular and perfect was the plan of the temple, that “if the dimensions of a single column and the proportion the entablature should bear to it were given to two individuals acquainted with the style, with directions to compose a temple, they would produce designs exactly similar in size, arrangement, and general proportions.”  The Doric order possessed a peculiar harmony, but taste and skill were nevertheless necessary in order to determine the number of diameters a column should have, and also the height of the entablature.