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Hellenistic builders did not invent a new architecture. They worked with the vocabulary of Classical Greek architecture: columns and beams, stone masonry, the Doric and Ionic orders, temples, stoas, theatres and gymnasia. What changed was who paid and how much. In a world ruled by kings, architecture became a way of displaying a dynasty’s power across a whole city.
The orders changed too. The Corinthian capital, with its bell-shaped core of acanthus leaves, spirals and palmettes and a small volute at each corner, first appeared in the late Classical period but became common only in Hellenistic and Roman times. It looks the same from every side.
Pergamon: a city on a hill
The clearest example is Pergamon, in western Asia Minor. Founded in the third century BCE as the capital of the Attalid kings, it was built on top of a steep hill, and the slope itself became part of the plan. Its buildings included an extremely steep theatre, a long stoa, a gymnasium on three terraces and the Great Altar, arranged on the steep slopes of the hill. The Attalids also founded one of the largest libraries of the ancient world there. After 133 BCE Pergamon passed to the Romans, who kept and extended it.
The Great Altar, built around 170-160 BCE under Eumenes II and now reconstructed in Berlin, was an architectural stage: a monumental staircase rising between two wings, wrapped in a frieze of gods and Giants more than a hundred metres long.
Buildings for public life
Temples still mattered, but kings also paid for buildings that people used every day. In Athens, King Attalos II of Pergamon, who reigned from 159 to 138 BCE, gave the city a long two-storey stoa, a covered colonnade, in the Agora. The Stoa of Attalos was rebuilt by the American School of Classical Studies and dedicated in 1956, and today it houses the Agora museum: one of the few places where you can walk inside a full-size Hellenistic building.
Temples on a new scale
Temples grew to colossal size. The Roman architect Vitruvius names four temples of marble that were famous above all others, among them the Ionic temple of Apollo near Miletus, built by Paionios and Daphnis, and the temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. The Athenian temple had been begun under the tyrant Peisistratos and abandoned; some two hundred years later, King Antiochos paid to resume it, and a Roman citizen named Cossutius designed its cella and its double ring of columns in the Corinthian order, on a very large scale.
Monuments as wonders
The age liked buildings that astonished. Its forerunner was the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, the tomb of the Carian ruler Mausolos, built in the mid-fourth century: a colonnade of thirty-six columns topped by a stepped pyramid and a four-horse chariot, carved by Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos and Leochares. Like the lighthouse of Alexandria, it was counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
Where to see it
The ruins of Pergamon are at Bergama in Turkey, and the reconstructed Great Altar is in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. In Athens you can walk through the rebuilt Stoa of Attalos in the Agora and stand among the Corinthian columns of the Olympieion. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Pergamon and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape” (1457).
- American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Agora Excavations, “History and Timeline”; history of the reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos.
- Vitruvius, On Architecture 7, preface 15-17 (LacusCurtius); Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.30-31 (Perseus Digital Library).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Architecture in Ancient Greece” and “Art of the Hellenistic Age”; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, “Der Große Altar von Pergamon”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Seven Wonders of the World”.
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