CHAPTER IV.

EARLY GRECIAN ARCHITECTS.

In the year 548 B.C. the great temple to Apollo at Delphi, the work of the legendary architects Agamedes and Trophonius, was destroyed by fire. Of the four temples to the same deity that had been reared upon the same site, this was the first in which marble was employed as a building material. Naturally the question will present itself, how could a temple built of marble be destroyed by fire? The answer is, that while the main walls of the cell and the columns, entablatures, pediments and other exposed parts of the early Greek temples were built of marble, stone or sun-dried bricks, the roofs were generally of wood, and were heavily timbered, sometimes calling for great strength to support marble tiles. Much of the interior building material was also of wood, as well as the statuary with which the earlier temples were lavished and enriched. Thus if fire was started within the building, either by accident or, as not infrequently happened, by the hand of an incendiary, there was sufficient combustible material for it to feed upon and to heat the entire structure, reducing the otherwise enduring marble to crumbling lime.

The temple of Apollo having been thus destroyed, the much revered and highly respected Oracle was left without shelter and a place of business. This state of things of course could not long be allowed to continue, and the Amphictyons, a legislative body, having under its special care the Delphic temple, at once came to the front and ordered a new temple built at a cost of about $300,000. One-fourth of this sum was to be paid by the Delphians and the remaining three-fourths were to be contributed by the other cities of Greece and those nations which were in the habit of consulting the Oracle—a very proper distribution of the expense, considering how extensive and widespread was the renown and appreciation of the priestess. Amasis, King of Egypt, volunteered a thousand talents of alumina, thus showing what his feelings were in the matter, and the Alcmæonidæ, one of the oldest and most aristocratic families of Athens, undertook the contract, it is hinted, mainly for political reasons. This may be true, as they were much involved in local politics, especially with the banishment of Pisistratus, the tyrant, and they may have seen an opportunity in the rebuilding of this temple to make themselves very popular. They certainly went about it in the right way to achieve such a result, and did actually gain much influence by their generosity and the broadminded manner in which they disregarded the strict terms of the contract to do handsomer and better work than it called for. One particular illustration of their liberality has attracted the attention of the historian: it was the building of the temple in Parian marble, instead of Porine stone. While the Alcmæonidæ were prosecuting the work in this generous spirit, they did not neglect their fallen enemies, the Pisistratidæ, and threw out occasional innuendoes to the effect that the Pisistratidæ could tell more about the origin of the fire that destroyed the late temple than they evidently cared to, thereby intimating a crime as against their rivals that it might have been difficult to have proved. They even won the Oracle to their side by similar simple and ingenuous methods, with the result that ever afterward the Oracle did not hesitate to speak a kind word for the Alcmæonidæ and favor their native city, Athens.

The architect of this new temple was Spintharus, a Corinthian. As nothing further seems to be known of him, we have been somewhat particular to mention the importance of this work, to show that Spintharus was an artist who stood very high in his profession at the time. But as the temple was one of the longest in process of construction, taking about seventy-two years to complete, it is not likely that Spintharus lived to enjoy the full fruition of his work.

It may be of interest to add that no structure of its kind throughout all Greece was made the depository of richer or more extensive treasure than this temple to Apollo at Delphi, a fact not to be marvelled at if we do not lose sight of the Oracle. We have already seen how it excited the cupidity of the brothers Agamedes and Trophonius. What they appropriated to themselves from the rich vaults of its predecessor was, however, comparatively insignificant to the wholesale robberies that went on from time to time of the fifth temple designed by Spintharus. Herodotus says that the wealth of Delphi was better known to the Persian Xerxes than were the contents of his own palace, and that after forcing the pass of Thermopylæ he detached a portion of his army to capture Delphi. It failed to do so, only through the interposition of the Oracle or some other deity. Many years afterward the Phocians plundered the temple of what might be represented by $10,600,000 of our money. Still later the Gauls also made a rich haul, which the Romans afterward found in their city of Tolosa unexpended, probably because there was so much of it; and Nero is said to have taken from it five hundred bronze statues at one time.

But these robberies fade into insignificance when the insult heaped upon the Delphians and their Oracle by Constantine the Great is recalled. This Roman vandal not only removed the sacred Tripod and Brazen Column which supported it, but degenerated their use to the adornment of the hippodrome of the new city he built on the Bosphorus. The Brazen Column may still be seen in Constantinople, but the sacred Tripod has disappeared forever. There is a little story connected with a first disappearance of the Tripod that may be worth the telling. It was lost at sea, but afterward recovered by some fishermen. When Pythia was asked to decide to whom it should be given, her answer was that it should be bestowed upon the wisest man in Greece. Accordingly it was sent to Thales of Miletos. He, however, was too modest to retain it, and passed it over to Bias as a wiser man; Bias was also embarrassed by the selection, and presented it to another of the Grecian sages; he to still another, and so on, until it had made the circuit of pretty much every person in Greece with any claim at all to superior wisdom. Finally, however, it came back once more to Thales, who successfully ended its itinerary by dedicating it to the Delphic Apollo.

One of the earliest of the great temples to be erected in the Ionic order was that begun in the Ionian city of Ephesus in Asiatic Greece by Ctesiphon, a Cretan architect born in Cnossus, and his son, Metagenes. This temple was erected to the glory of the many-breasted and mummy-like appearing Artemis, a goddess peculiar to the Ephesians, whom the Greek colonists there doubtless inherited from the Asiatic races that preceded them in their Ionian settlement. There was nothing of the graceful, virgin-like characteristics of Apollo’s sister, the Arcadian Artemis, in this Ephesian goddess, but the Ionian Greeks were quite partial to her, attended her with eunuch priests, and built in her honor this temple, so grand and magnificent that it was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world.

Before alluding to some of the interesting facts that have been preserved concerning the early history of this great temple it may not be out of place to touch upon a custom which prevailed in Ephesus in respect to the employment of architects, which Vitruvius relates. He says: “In the magnificent and spacious Grecian city of Ephesus an ancient law was made by the ancestors of the inhabitants, hard in its nature, but nevertheless equitable. When an architect was entrusted with the execution of a public work, an estimate thereof being lodged in the hands of a magistrate, his property was held as security until the work was finished. If, when finished, the expense did not exceed the estimate, he was complimented with decrees and honors. So when the excess did not amount to more than a fourth part of the original estimate, it was defrayed by the public, and no punishment was inflicted. But when more than one-fourth the estimate was exceeded, he was required to pay the excess out of his own pocket.”

The honest Vitruvius almost sighs as he adds: “Would to God that such a law existed among the Roman people, not only in respect to their public, but also of their private buildings, for then the unskilful could not commit their depredations with impunity, and those who were most skilful in the intricacies of the art would follow the profession! Proprietors would not be led into an extravagant expenditure, so as to cause ruin; architects themselves, from the dread of punishment, would be more careful in their calculations, and the proprietor would complete his building for that sum or a little more, which he could afford to expend. Those who can conveniently expend a given sum on any work with the pleasing expectation of seeing it completed would cheerfully add one-fourth more; but when they find themselves burdened with the addition of half or even more than half of the expense originally contemplated, losing their spirits and sacrificing what has already been laid out, they incline to desist from its completion.”

There are, perhaps, some people even at the present time who can be found to echo these sentiments of Vitruvius, and exclaim: Would to God that such a law existed among the American people, especially in New York and Chicago!

Theodorus of Samos, it will be remembered, laid the foundation of the temple to Artemis of Ephesus in the year 600 B.C. To guard against the destruction of the temple by earthquakes, a marshy site was chosen, and Theodorus insured a firm foundation, by using charcoal, which was rammed down solidly, and then covered with fleeces of wool. Ctesiphon and his son did not, however, begin the superstructure until about forty years later.

The dimensions of the building were very extensive, and although the architecture was full of grandeur, grace and beauty were not sacrificed. The length was four hundred and twenty-five feet; the width two hundred and twenty feet. One hundred and twenty-seven Parian marble columns, each sixty feet in height, surrounded the cell in double rows, sixteen appearing in the front and rear façades, and forty each on the sides. Herodotus states that most of these columns were presented by the rich Crœsus, and some by other kings. The cell, according to some authorities, was devoid of a roof, but Mr. Wood, in his “Discoveries at Ephesus,” indicates otherwise. The whole edifice, both exteriorly and interiorly, presented great richness and elaboration of carving. The shafts of the columns in front of the building were carved in relief, in three broad bands, to nearly half their height, and those in the rear, in one band, to about one-quarter of their height. The frieze and pediments were also worked out by the chisel of the sculptor in designs of great and imposing beauty.

Many of the stones used in the building were very massive. An idea of how huge some of these blocks were may be gathered from the fact that the architrave alone contained pieces of marble thirty feet long, and that Ctesiphon and Metagenes were forced to invent special machinery and contrivances to convey the stones for the columns to the building from the quarry eight miles distant. Vitruvius explains these contrivances as follows: “He [Ctesiphon] made a frame of four pieces of timber, two of which were equal in length to the shafts of the columns, and were held together by the two transverse pieces. In each end of the shaft he inserted iron pivots, whose ends were dovetailed thereinto, and run with lead. The pivots worked in gudgeons fastened to the timber frame, whereto were attached oaken shafts. The pivots having a free revolution in the gudgeons, when the oxen were attached and drew the frame, the shafts rolled round, and might have been conveyed to any distance. The shafts having been thus transported, the entablatures were to be removed, when Metagenes, the son of Ctesiphon, applied the principle upon which the shafts had been conveyed to the removal of those also. He constructed wheels about twelve feet in diameter, and fixed the ends of the blocks of stone whereof the entablature was composed into them; pivots and gudgeons were then prepared to receive them in the manner just described, so that when the oxen drew the machine the pivots, turning in the gudgeons, caused the wheels to revolve, and thus the blocks, being enclosed like axles in the wheels, were brought to the work without delay. An example of this species of machine may be seen in the rolling stone used for smoothing the walks in palæstræ. But the method would not have been practicable for any considerable distance. From the quarries to the temple is a length of not more than eight thousand feet, and the interval is a plain without any declivity. Within our own time, when the base of the colossal statue of Apollo in the temple of that god was decayed through age, to prevent the fall and destruction of it, a contract for a base from the same quarry was made with Pæonius. It was twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and six feet high. Pæonius, driven to an expedient, did not use the same as Metagenes did, but constructed a machine for the purpose by a different application of the same principle. He made two wheels about fifteen feet in diameter, and fitted the ends of the stone into these wheels. To connect the two wheels he framed into them, round their circumference, small pieces of two inches square, not more than one foot apart, each extending from one wheel to the other, and thus enclosing the stone. Round these bars a rope was coiled, to which the traces of the oxen were made fast, and as it was drawn out the stone rolled by means of the wheels; but the machine, by its constant swerving from a direct, straightforward path, stood in need of constant rectification, so that Pæonius was at last without money for the completion of his contract.” The uninitiated who have speculated as to how the ancients succeeded in moving and transporting considerable distances such huge blocks of stone, without the assistance of our modern machinery and contrivances, are given in this quotation from Vitruvius some hint as to the ingenuity and inventive ability of the early architects and builders.

The temple, however, was slow in building, and Ctesiphon and Metagenes, after writing a book on their great architectural work, passed away in due course of time. Their places were filled by other architects, of whom there is no record, but Demetrius, a priest of Diana, together with Daphnis and Peonius, Ephesian architects, finally completed the work some two hundred and twenty years after it was begun by Ctesiphon and his son. In the course of that long interval, Scopas, an architectural sculptor of Paros, of whom there will be more to relate as we go on, contributed one column, which was regarded as so beautiful that it was accepted as a model for those that followed.

Together with its architectural glories, the interior was made a depository for many of the finest works of the great artists of antiquity, and Scopas is said to have introduced Caryatides here. This is doubted, but he certainly furnished a very grand statue of Hecate; and Praxiteles, with his almost equally gifted son, adorned the shrine.

Tradition relates that upon the very night that the great Alexander was born, the Ephesian temple was destroyed by fire, through the rapacious greed for notoriety of one Herostratus. This antique fire-bug, when put to the torture for his crime, confessed that his only object was to gain immortality for his name, an ambition which he succeeded in accomplishing through the stupidity of the states-general of Asiatic Greece. They decreed that the name of Herostratus should never be mentioned, and of course it always was, as all the contemporary historians felt impelled to record the fact that a man by the name of Herostratus was not to be mentioned, and to give the reasons therefor, and much more about Herostratus which, had there been no decree, might have been left unsaid. The result was and has been that a crank of antiquity has lived by name for twenty-five hundred years, and is quite likely to live for as many more.

When Alexander the Great reached maturity, doubtless feeling the depression consequent upon having his advent into the world which he was destined to dominate, associated with the destruction of so magnificent a temple to the Asiatic Diana, offered, it is said, to pay the cost of its restoration, provided—there is frequently a proviso coupled with these liberal offers—provided his name should be inscribed on the new edifice. While the Ephesians were made glad by the offer, they did not readily fall in with the proviso. The cleverness of their diplomatic reply, however, appealed to the susceptible side of Alexander’s human nature, and effected a compromise. They told the Macedonian that “it was not right for a god to make offerings to gods.”

The architect for the new temple was the great favorite of Alexander and his fellow-countryman, Dinocrates, who it is said rebuilt the edifice on even a more extravagant scale than was the first. Much of the marble and sculpturing of the old temple entered into the new, and the painters, statuaries and sculptors of the time again lavished upon it their best art. The walls were embellished from time to time by Parrhasius and Apelles; and Timarete, the first female artist of note of whom there is any record, contributed a picture of the honored Artemis. It is related that the folding doors or gates of this new temple were made of cypress that had been allowed to season for four generations, and that when the pieces of cypress wood were glued together the glue was allowed to remain for four years to harden. Mutianus, a Roman architect, states that when he found them, which was four hundred years afterward, they were as fresh and beautiful as when new.

Some remains of the splendor of this pagan temple are still doing architectural duty. The great dome of the beautiful Byzantine church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople, now a Turkish mosque, is supported by columns of green jasper, brought from the Ephesian temple by the Roman Emperor Justinian, and two of the pillars in the cathedral at Pisa are also from the same source.

There is some confusion as to the works of art and decorations associated respectively with the two temples just described which it would be vain to attempt to clear up, believing that it matters but little, inasmuch as it is not likely that Herostratus could have destroyed completely the first temple, and that the services of Dinocrates were engaged more in the line of making good the damage done than in erecting an entirely new edifice. The upper colonnades of Corinthian columns, however, which Mr. Wood shows as appearing in the interior of the temple, are clearly the work of Dinocrates.

Demetrius, the priest of Diana, and his associates, Peonius and Daphnis, the three architects who completed the first Artemesian temple, having flourished over two hundred years after the foundation of that structure was laid, are not, of course, to be classed among the earlier of the Grecian architects, and, properly, should not be treated under this heading; but as they are all grouped together in the erection of another great Asiatic-Greek temple, and are not further met with, it may be just as well to add what there is in respect to them at this time.

The temple referred to was that dedicated to Apollo in the Ionian city of Miletus, not far distant from the scene of the joint labors of these architects at Ephesus. Its order was also Ionic, and although not as large as that to Artemis, it could have been very little, if any, inferior to it in columnar effect and general impressive beauty, if not grandeur. It was three hundred and two feet in length by one hundred and sixty-four feet in width, and, like the temple at Ephesus, was surrounded by double rows of columns, each column, however, being sixty-three feet in height. Indeed, Strabo, the celebrated Roman traveller and geographer, who visited the ruins of the temple during the first century before the Christian era, testifies that “it is the greatest of all temples,” and adds that it remained without a roof “in consequence of its bigness”; but this allusion to its roofless condition is probably due to the fact that the building was never wholly completed. Pausanias also gives it high praise, and speaks of it as one of the wonders of Ionia, and Vitruvius numbers it “as one of the four temples which had raised their architects to the summit of renown”[2]—a renown, it would seem, that has been very much begrudged them, as the literature of their time furnishes practically no data in regard to them personally, and what estimate can be formed of them is wholly based upon the importance of their works.

Peonius, we are told, was an Ephesian, but as to even the nativity of the other two architects we are in the dark, although Daphnis is supposed to have been a Miletian. There is also some little uncertainty as to the exact date when they exercised their profession, but it is probably safe to say that it was sometime within the first half of the fourth century before Christ.

Two columns of the great temple to Apollo have stood proudly against the attacks of time, and although scarred by their long battles, are yet evidencing the glories of a structure of which they were once but an insignificant part.

In the year 555 B.C. there lived four architects, to whose skill was entrusted the building of a temple that should be in all respects worthy to stand for the respect due the dignity, power and extreme longevity of the great Olympian Zeus—the king-god of the Greeks.

The foundation for this shrine was laid in the time of Pisistratus, a tyrant of Athens, who contributed several architectural works to that city, but whose several banishments greatly interrupted their building. This was particularly the case with the great temple to Zeus. However, it was sufficiently advanced for Pisistratus to dedicate it before he fell from power. It has been stated that it was due to the genuine dislike which the Athenians felt for Pisistratus and his sons, who succeeded him, that four hundred years were allowed to flow by before the temple was finished. This is hardly just to a ruler of great loyalty to his native city, and of unquestioned integrity in the discharge of his public duties. It is more probable that the delay was due to the animosity of the rival Athenian family of Alcmæonidæ, who, piqued by jealousy, fanned a flame of opposition to the works of Pisistratus that continued for several centuries.

Antistates, Antimachides, Calleschros and Porinus were the four architects engaged by Pisistratus, who, like their professional brothers employed on the temples of Diana, Apollo and Ceres, were, according to Vitruvius, entitled to immortality for the grandeur of their works, but about whom there is no other information to be given.

This temple to Jupiter was not built upon the Acropolis at Athens, like that to the patron goddess of the city, Minerva, but upon a raised peribolos within the city below, and on the site of an earlier temple to the same god, erected in the time of Deucalion, but which had perished from the ravages of ages.

It was like most of the early Doric temples, of peripteral construction, or surrounded by columns on all four sides. Aristotle, who saw it before it was finished, was so much impressed by its size that he compared it to the Pyramids; and one of his scholars remarked that “though unfinished, it called forth astonishment, and when finished would be unexcelled.”

Perseus, king of Macedonia, and Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria (176-164 B.C.) finally finished the cell and placed the Corinthian columns of the portico, employing for the purpose a Roman architect of great skill by the name of Cossutius. It was then, probably, that Livy made the remark “that among so many temples this is the only one worthy of a god.”

Sylla, however, when he laid siege to Athens, some forty years later, robbed the temple most unmercifully, carrying away with him many of the columns to Rome. But his work of destruction was more than compensated for by his successor, Hadrian, two hundred years still later, under the immediate direction of the celebrated Roman architect, Luigi Cannia. Hadrian, in his love of great architectural effects, was inspired to beautify the peribolos with a peristyle one hundred rods in length, and his architect contributed a new section to the temple itself, and added three grand vestibules.

The sacred enclosure, after Hadrian had finished it, which had a circumference of about twenty-three hundred feet, was ornamented by statues, contributed in great numbers by different cities. The length of the temple at this time, according to Stuart, was, upon the upper step, three hundred and fifty-four feet, and its breadth one hundred and seventy-one feet. The columns, which surrounded the cell, now all Corinthian, numbered one hundred and twenty-four, all of Pentelican marble, of which there are sixteen still standing. In the pronaos, or inner portico, Hadrian caused to be placed four statues of himself, two in Thracian and two in Egyptian marble, which were, perhaps, three more than a moderately modest man might have felt necessary.

Another gorgeous temple to the great Jupiter was begun about five years later than that at Athens by the architect Libon, an Eleian, in Olympia, which Lysias speaks of as “the fairest spot in Greece.” In Olympia the spiritual and physical natures of the Grecian people may be said to have combined in the perfection of development. Here the glories of the body, the capabilities of the finest muscular strength and athletic action, were exhibited in gymnasium and stadion, and here the religious spirit of the people arose to the fullest intensity, and as though doubly inspired by the action and strength of the perfect body, found expression in temple and sanctuary.

So great was the reward, so enthusiastic the reception accorded the champions in the athletic games of Olympia, that they call forth a protest from the sensitive Vitruvius, who seems to feel that the honors conferred upon them should have been reserved for the literary lights of the time. “The ancestors of the Greeks,” he complains, “held the celebrated wrestlers who were victors in the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean games in such esteem that, decorated with the palm and crown, they were not only publicly thanked, but were also, in their triumphant return to their respective homes, borne to their cities and countries in four-horse chariots, and were allowed pensions for life from the public revenue. When I consider these circumstances, I cannot help thinking it strange that similar honors, or even greater, are not decreed to those authors who are of lasting service to mankind. Such certainly ought to be the case; for the wrestler, by training, merely hardens his own body for the conflict; a writer, however, not only cultivates his own mind, but affords every one else the same opportunity, by laying down precepts for acquiring knowledge and exciting the talents of his reader.”

So attractive was this spot on the banks of the Alpheus in Ellis, in natural charm, as well as in the purposes for which it was visited, that it is here, as nowhere else in Greece, with the possible exception of the Acropolis at Athens, the Grecian architects lavished their best skill and best illustrated their appreciation of the fact, that the effect of fine buildings is greatly augmented by grouping them gracefully together in one place, producing, as it were, an architectural picture. “Many objects,” says Pausanias, “may a man see in Greece, and many things may he hear that are worthy of admiration, but above them all the doings at Eleusis and the sights at Olympia have somewhat in them of a soul divine.”

The worship of Zeus was an old worship in Olympia, so that when Libon was entrusted with authority to erect a new temple to that deity, out of the spoils taken in subjugating the Pisans and other neighboring cities which had revolted from the Eleans, he gave free reign to his art, and produced a Doric temple which rivalled that in Athens, though not as large.

Pausanias informs us that the Olympian temple was two hundred and thirty feet long, ninety-five feet wide and sixty-eight feet high; that it was surrounded by marble columns and covered with marble cut in the form of tiles. The front and rear pediments were adorned with sculpture, as well as the metopes of the frieze. The interior was of two orders of columns supporting lofty galleries, through which there was a passage to the throne of Jove “glittering with gold and gems.”

It was this temple of Libon’s that became, soon after its completion, the casket which held the _chef d’œuvre_ of Phidias, the colossal statue of Jupiter carved in ivory and gold, of which Quintilian observes that it added a new religious feeling to Greece. The story is well known how Phidias, being asked by his nephew Panænus, a painter, who assisted him in the decoration of the temple, how he could have conceived that air of divinity which he had expressed in the face of this noble statue, replied that he had copied it from Homer’s description of the god. Jupiter was presented naked to his waist, but draped from his girdle down. The significance of this was that the great Jove, knowing himself to be of heavenly origin, thought it best to conceal himself in part only from man. He was also given a beard for the reason that the Greeks, clinging to the Oriental notion, believed that beards carried with them an air of majesty; an idea, by the way, which was not shared in by the Romans, who spoke with derision of their bearded forefathers, and permitted the wearing of beards only to those who were in disgrace, and to poor philosophers, who probably, like our poor modern poets, found a visit to the barber’s an unnecessary and expensive luxury.

Rome during these early times, and before she had awakened to the cultivation of the arts at home, was prone to borrow from Greece the talent of which she was in need. It was about this time that we find the first record of such a call made by Rome upon her eastern neighbor for architects. The demand was answered by the two architectural sculptors Damophilus and Gorgasus, who were imported by the Dictator Posthumius to erect two temples in Rome, one to Castor and Pollux or, as some authorities assert, to Liber and Libera (Bacchus and Proserpine), which stood near the Forum and Temple of Vesta, and the other to Ceres, on the slope of the Aventine hill, near the Circus. These temples were vowed by Posthumius, in his battle with the Latins, 496 B.C., and were dedicated by Viscellinus some years later.

Before closing this chapter, in which the attempt is made to gather together some of the earlier architects of Greece, it may be as well to include within it a number of such artists who though not rising to the highest fame, or who were not connected with the most elegant buildings of their time, nevertheless had the good fortune to have their names preserved in history.

Pliny tells a rather amusing and interesting account of such an architect by the name of Bupalus, who probably flourished about the year 524 B.C. He is said to have come from a very old family of artists who exercised the art of the statuary from the beginning of the Olympiads; but as Pliny simply speaks of him as an architect and artist, but does not mention any building attributed to his skill, he becomes a subject for notice only in connection with the Iambic poet Hipponax, whom he used his art to torment. Pliny relates that Bupalus and his brother Athenis amused themselves by making caricatures of the satirical poet. Hipponax was undersized, thin and ugly, and probably, like the modern poet Pope, suffered his physical defects to give him a cynical view of life. The caricatures of the playful Bupalus and Athenis naturally affected unpleasantly his _amour propre_, and he employed the weapon at his command, his ironical pen, to strike back at his tormentors, with the result that he gave them a good pen lashing in a satirical poem, in which he also chastised his Ionian brethren for what he considered their effeminate luxury. In the same poem, also, he did not spare his own parents, and it is said that he even had the temerity to ridicule the gods.

There is, of course, always some one to start the story that a woman is at the source of all the infirmities that any particularly conspicuous man suffers from, and there are those who claim that Bupalus did not originate the trouble, but that it started through the fact that the architect had a very beautiful daughter of whom Hipponax was greatly enamored. Like the earlier Iambic poet Archilochus, who got into a similar scrape, the girl’s father refused to permit his daughter to marry a poor little withered poet, with the result that the poet’s life was ever after embittered. How very bitter Hipponax became, especially against the ladies, is illustrated by a remark which is attributed to him: “There are,” he said, “only two happy days in the life of a married man—that in which he receives his wife, and that in which he carries out her corpse.”

After his death Leonidas of Tarentum, in an elegant epigram, warned travellers not to pass too near his tomb, lest they rouse the sleeping wasp. The grave of Hipponax, by the way, instead of being covered with ivy and roses, like that of a mild poet, was planted with thorns and thistles.

Pausanias mentions several of these more obscure architects. Agnaptus was one, who built a porch in the Altis, or wall at Olympia, called afterward by the Eleans the “porch of Agnaptus,” and Antiphilus, Pothæus and Megacles were three other waifs on our sea of oblivion. They were responsible for the Treasury of the Carthaginians also at Olympia. Pyrrhus, with his two sons, Lacrates and Hermon, built the Olympian Treasury of the Epidamnians. There were ten of these Treasuries, by the way, raised by different states, which were not only architecturally very beautiful, but which contained statues and other offerings of great value.

Strabo mentions an architect and sculptor by the name of Hermocreon, who designed a gigantic and beautiful altar at Parium on the Propontis in Asia Minor; and Eurycles, a Spartan architect, who built the baths at Corinth, and “adorned them with beautiful marbles,” must not be overlooked, although he may have been of a much later date.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The other three temples which Vitruvius praised thus highly were those to Diana at Ephesus, Jupiter Olympus at Athens, and Ceres at Eleusis.