usion. Within the limits by which they confined themselves, the
Greeks worked with such power, learning, taste, and skill that we may
fairly claim for their highest achievement--the Parthenon--that it
advanced as near to absolute perfection as any work of art ever has
been or ever can be carried.

Greek architecture seems to have begun to emerge from the stage of
archaic simplicity about the beginning of the sixth century before the
Christian era (600 B.C. is the reputed date of the old Doric Temple at
Corinth). All the finest examples were erected between that date and
the death of Alexander the Great (333 B.C.), after which period it
declined and ultimately gave place to Roman.

The domestic and palatial buildings of the Greeks have decayed or been
destroyed, leaving but few vestiges. We know their architecture
exclusively from ruins of public buildings, and to a limited extent of
sepulchral monuments remaining in Greece and in Greek colonies. By far
the most numerous and excellent among these buildings are temples. The
Greek idea of a temple was different from that entertained by the
Egyptians. The building was to a much greater extent designed for
external effect than internal. A comparatively small sacred cell was
provided for the reception of the image of the divinity, usually with
one other cell behind it, which seems to have served as treasury or
sacristy; but there were no surrounding chambers, gloomy halls, or
enclosed courtyards, like those of the Egyptian temples, visible only
to persons admitted within a jealously guarded outer wall. The temple,
it is true, often stood within some sort of precinct, but it was
accessible to all. It stood open to the sun and air; it invited the
admiration of the passer-by; its most telling features and best
sculpture were on the exterior. Whether this may have been, to some
extent, the case with Persian buildings, we have few means of knowing,
but certainly the attention paid by the Greeks to the outside of their
temples offers a striking contrast to the practice of the Egyptians,
and to what we know of that of the Assyrians.

[Illustration: FIG. 50.--PLAN OF A SMALL GREEK TEMPLE IN ANTIS.]

The temple, however grand, was always of simple form, with a gable at
each end, and in this respect differed entirely from the series of
halls, courts, and chambers of which a great Egyptian temple
consisted. In the very smallest temple at least one of the gables was
made into a por