CHAPTER I

Twilight and Dawn
FROM THE 6TH TO THE IOTH CENTURY
TH E Greek temple (pL i) is the most perfect example ever
achieved of architecture finding its fulfilmentin bodily beauty.
Its interior mattered infinitely less than its exterior. The colon-
nade all round conceals where the entrance lies. The faithful did not
enter it and spend hours of communication with the Divine in it, as
they do in a church. Our Western conception of space would have
been just as unintelligible to a man of Pericles's age as our religion. It is
the plastic shape of the temple that tells, placed before us witha physical
presence more intense, more alive than that of any later building.
The isolation of the Parthenon or the temples of Paestum, clearly dis-
connected from the ground on which they stand, the columns with
their resilient curves, strong enough to carry without too much
visible effort the weight of the architraves, the sculptured friezes and
sculptured pediments—there is something consummately human in
all this, life in the brightest light of nature and mind: nothing harrow-
ing, nothing problematic and obscure, nothing blurred.
Roman architecture also thinks of the building primarily as of a
sculptural body, but not as one so superbly independent. There is a
more conscious grouping of buildings, and parts are less isolated
too. Hence the all-round, free-standing columns with their archir
trave lying on them are so often replaced by heavy square piers
carrying arches. Hence also walls are emphasised in their thickness,
for instance, by hollowing niches into them; and if columns are
asked for, they are half-columns, attached to, and that is part of, the
wall. Hence, finally, instead of flat ceilings—stressing a perfectly
clear horizontal as against a perfectly clear vertical—the Romans
used vast tunnel-vaults or cross-vaults to cover spaces. The arch and
the vault on a large scale are engineering achievements, greater than
any of the Greeks, and it is of them as they appear in the aqueducts,
baths, basilicas (that is public assembly halls), theatres and palaces,
and not of temples that we think, when we remember Roman archi-
tecture (pi, n).
However, with very few exceptions, these grandest creations of