Behind the “chamber” is the “rear-chamber” in which are kept the valuable property of the god—­his riches,[88] and often the gold and silver of the city.  The temple is therefore storehouse, treasury, and museum.

Rows of columns surround the building on four sides, like a second wall protecting the god and his treasures.  There are three orders of columns which differ in base and capital, each bearing the name of the people that invented it or most frequently used it.  They are, in the order of age, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian.  The temple is named from the style of the columns supporting it.

Above the columns, around the edifice are sculptured surfaces of marble (the metopes) which alternate with plain blocks of marble (the triglyphs).  Metopes and triglyphs constitute the frieze.

The temple is surmounted with a triangular pediment adorned with statues.

Greek temples were polychrome, that is to say, were painted in several colors, yellow, blue, and red.  For a long time the moderns refused to believe this; it was thought that the Greeks possessed too sober taste to add color to an edifice.  But traces of painting have been discovered on several temples, which cannot leave the matter in doubt.  It has at last been concluded, on reflection, that these bright colors were to give a clearer setting to the lines.

=Characteristics of Greek Architecture.=—­A Greek temple appears at first a simple, bare edifice; it is only a long box of stone set upon a rock; the facade is a square surmounted by a triangle.  At first glance one sees only straight lines and cylinders.  But on nearer inspection “it is discovered[89] that not a single one of these lines is truly straight.”  The columns swell at the middle, vertical lines are slightly inclined to the centre, and horizontal lines bulge a little at the middle.  And all this is so fine that exact measurements are necessary to detect the artifice.  Greek architects discovered that, to produce a harmonious whole, it is necessary to avoid geometrical lines which would appear stiff, and take account of illusions in perspective.  “The aim of the architect,” says a Greek writer, “is to invent processes for deluding the sight.”

Greek artists wrought conscientiously for they worked for the gods.  And so their monuments are elaborated in all their parts, even in those that are least in view, and are constructed so solidly that they exist to this day if they have not been violently destroyed.  The Parthenon was still intact in the seventeenth century.  An explosion of gunpowder wrecked it.

The architecture of the Greeks was at once solid and elegant, simple and scientific.  Their temples have almost all disappeared; here and there are a very few,[90] wholly useless, in ruins, with roofs fallen in, often nothing left but rows of columns.  And yet, even in this state, they enrapture those who behold them.

=Sculpture.=—­Among the Egyptians and the Assyrians sculpture was hardly more than an accessory ornament of their edifices; the Greeks made it the principal art.  Their most renowned artists, Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, were sculptors.