A house for the statue, an altar for the people
If you picture a Greek temple as a church, change one thing: the worshippers stayed outside. The building was a home for the image of the god, and the rituals of Greek religion happened in the open air of the sanctuary, usually at an altar in front of the temple. That is where animals were sacrificed and where the community gathered, with the temple as the backdrop.
The Parthenon is the obvious example. The Athenians dedicated it to Athena Parthenos, the patron of their city, and built it between 447 and 438 BCE. Inside stood her statue in gold and ivory, a chryselephantine figure (from the Greek chrysos, gold, and elephas, ivory). The main room is called the naos, the Greek word for temple, or cella, the Latin word for a small room; a porch in front, the pronaos, led into it. What made the house look like a temple was everything around that room: the steps, the ring of columns, the roof.
Where did the plan come from?
A long room entered from a porch on its short side was already the heart of the Mycenaean palace, the megaron, until the palaces were destroyed at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. Whether the temple descends directly from it is debated, because several centuries separate the two. The resemblance is plain, though: in the temple the god’s statue took the place of the king’s throne.
The first temples were modest, built of mud brick and wood, with timber columns. The Temple of Hera at Olympia (around 600 BCE) shows the change halfway through. It had a lower part in shell limestone, upper walls in mud brick and a wooden entablature, and its wooden columns were replaced with stone ones over time. On Samos the sanctuary of Hera goes back to the eighth century BCE, and there the Greeks built their first temple 100 feet long, about 30 metres, the length of two and a half city buses. In the seventh and sixth centuries the cities of the Asia Minor coast and the nearby islands competed with one another in huge stone temples.
From the steps to the roof
A stone temple sits on a stepped platform, the krepis (foundation), often of three steps, as at the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina. The top step is the stylobate, literally the step of the columns (from stylos, column, and bainein, to step). On it stand the columns, and on the columns rests the entablature, the horizontal band that carries the roof. At each short end the sloping roof leaves a triangle, the pediment, where sculptors could set a whole group of figures. A temple with columns all the way round is called peripteral, from peri, around, and pteron, wing.
Are those lines really straight? Not on the Parthenon. Its platform, its stylobate and its entablature all curve slightly upwards in the middle. Why the builders went to so much trouble is still argued over: the old explanation, that the curves correct an optical illusion, has been challenged, and no ancient text settles it.
Doric, Ionic and the late Corinthian
The columns follow one of the orders, a set of rules for proportions and ornament. The Doric order belongs to mainland Greece and to the western colonies; its columns are fluted and stand straight on the stylobate without a base, under a plain capital. The Ionic order belongs to the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the Ionian islands; its columns stand on a base and end in a capital with two spirals, the volutes. Both were established by the early sixth century BCE, a little like two accents of the same language.
The third order came much later. The Corinthian capital, wrapped in acanthus leaves, first appeared in the late Classical period and became common only in Hellenistic and Roman times. The earliest one we know stood inside the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, in the mountains of the Peloponnese, the only temple known to combine all three orders.
Did every temple face east?
Most did, without a fixed rule. In his survey of 113 temples William Dinsmoor found that about 73% faced within 60 degrees of due east, the arc of the rising sun. In Sicily the tendency is stronger: Alun Salt counted 40 temples out of 41 facing the eastern half of the horizon. On the mainland there are more exceptions, so “most faced east” is safe and “always” is wrong.
Temples from Olympia to southern Italy
The Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy, known together as Magna Graecia, built some of the best-preserved temples of all. At Paestum, south of Naples, three Doric temples still stand: the so-called Basilica, dedicated to Hera (about 560-520 BCE), the Temple of Athena (about 500 BCE) and the Temple of Neptune, finished around 460 BCE.
At Olympia the Temple of Zeus (about 470-456 BCE), designed by Libon of Elis, had columns 10.43 metres high, as tall as a three-storey house. Around 430 BCE Pheidias, who had made the Athena of the Parthenon, placed inside it a Zeus in gold and ivory. On the Acropolis of Athens the Erechtheion (421-406 BCE) rested the roof of its south porch on six young women carved in marble; five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum and one is in the British Museum. Also on the Acropolis, the small Temple of Athena Nike (about 425 BCE) is Ionic, with four single-block columns at each short end.
Where to see them
In Athens, the Acropolis (Parthenon, Erechtheion, Athena Nike) and the Temple of Hephaistos in the Agora; in the Peloponnese, Olympia and Bassae; the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina; in Italy, Paestum, with its three temples in one archaeological park. Opening hours change with the season, so check the official site of each before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003); “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “Greek Gods and Religious Practices”; “Mycenaean Civilization”.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Parthenon, Erechtheion, Temple of Athena Nike, Heraion and Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Aphaia, Temple of Apollo at Bassae.
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA): Parthenon, Erechtheion. Acropolis Museum: Erechtheion.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Acropolis, Athens (404); Archaeological Site of Olympia (517); Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae (392); Pythagoreion and Heraion of Samos (595); Cilento, Paestum and Velia (842).
- Parchi Archeologici di Paestum e Velia, “Archaeological area of Paestum”.
- R. Hannah, G. Magli and A. Orlando, Journal of Cultural Heritage 18 (2017), arXiv:1511.02497, with Dinsmoor’s figures; A. Salt, PLoS ONE 4(11) e7903 (2009).
- A. Goriely, preprint on the Parthenon curvature, arXiv:2510.16831 (2025).
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