Even if coinage may not have played a major part in commercial expansion, there is no doubt that this was an age of growing prosperity. The more successful cities flaunted their wealth through their temples, now seen as the showcases of a proud polls. The earliest temples were simply structures within which to house a cult figure (wooden in the earliest examples) but as the sanctuaries became more elaborate the roof was extended outwards and then supported by columns. The earliest known peristasis, literally ‘that that stands around, is a wooden one in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus at the end of the eighth century. It was this temple that the king of Lydia rebuilt a hundred years later, with a length of 115 metres.
This inaugurated a period of great religious buildings in the eastern Greek Mediterranean. Between 575 and 560 an extensive sanctuary to the goddess Hera was laid out on the island of Samos. It was entered by a monumental gateway, and, within, beside the altar (altars were always kept outside temples so that sacrifices would be accessible to a large audience and the mess and smoke kept in the open air), was a vast temple. It was 100 metres long and 50 metres wide, with a double colonnade, twenty-one columns along each side, eight at the front, and ten at the back. As was now typical of Greek temples, it had a deep porch, and this led into the cella where the cult statue of the god or goddess would stand. At Didyma on the coast of Asia Minor there was another temple, dedicated to Apollo, that was so ambitious in its planned rebuilding in the sixth century it was never finished. A processional way with sphinxes led to the nearby city of Miletus. The temple to Hera was rebuilt in even grander form by Polycrates, another of the achievements for which Herodotus applauds him. This set off competition with the Peisistratids in Athens who were energetically building their own temples on the Acropolis (see earlier, p. 180).
Fig. 2 The Doric and Ionic orders. This figure illustrates the essential differences between the two original classical orders.
These eastern temples carried the scrolled columns of the so-called Ionic order. The development of orders of architecture, particularly through the provision of a model that can be copied, is a typical Archaic achievement. The Ionic order appears to be a Greek invention, though the foliage and decoration that goes with the order still suggests the influence of the east. On the Greek mainland and in the west the Doric order was supreme. In this order the columns are topped by square stone slabs and the whole design is simpler. In the west the richer cities, determined to show off their new-found wealth, built their Doric temples in groups, often along ridges. There were four great sixth-century temples at Selinus in western Sicily, for instance, and two at Posidonia (Paestum) that are still in fine condition.
What were the influences on the development of these huge temples? The Greeks initiated their own tradition of building in stone. The Corinthians were carving limestone by the end of the eighth century, and there are Corinthian temples with limestone walls by the early seventh. The inspiration to be more creative and ambitious with the material possibly came from Egypt. The opening of Egypt by king Psammetichus I (Psamtek) (664-610 Bc) encouraged the first major incursion of Greeks, both as traders and visitors, into his country. Inevitably they came into direct contact with its vast array of stone monuments. The pyramids of Giza, for instance, were only 120 kilometres from the Greek trading-post at Naucratis, and visitors would also have had the opportunity to see Psammetichus’ own massive building programme in action. It is interesting that the majority of Greeks who settled Naucratis were Ionians, and a taste for monumental art seems to be found largely in the Ionian cities. The temple of Artemis at Ephesus with its double row of columns may be an echo of the columned halls of Egypt, while the famous row of marble lions at Delos seems an almost direct copy of the traditional sacred processional routes of the Egyptian temples and in its turn probably influenced the processional way at Didyma.
The Ionians may not have been the only Greeks who borrowed from the Egyptians. Much of the ornament in the Doric order seems to develop directly from earlier Greek timber models (the triglyphs, for instance, are reproductions in stone of the ends of roof-beams), but a comparison can be made between the columns of the shrine of Anubis at the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri and the temples to Hera at Olympia (590 Bc) and to Apollo at Corinth (540 Bc). Some decorative mouldings on Doric temples, the cavetto, a hollowed moulding in the shape of a quarter-circle, also appear to be Egyptian in origin. The example may have spread to Greece via Corinthian traders.
Another Egyptian influence may be seen in sculpture. In the seventh century small terracotta and bronze statues, with wigged hair, a triangular face, and a flat skull, became common in Greece. They face forward in a rigid pose with both feet together. The style is called Daedalic, after a legendary Greek sculptor, Daedalus, although it originated, with so much else, from the east. By the second half of the seventh century, Greek sculptors begin making life-size Daedalic figures in marble. A famous one is the statue of Nikandre from Naxos, possibly carved as early as 650, another the ‘Auxerre goddess’ of 630, found in France but probably of Cretan origin. ‘The origins of the Nikandre kore, writes Jeffrey Hurwit, ‘are complex: she owes her shape to a native [Greek] tradition of large scale sculpture in wood, her style to a popular Orientalizing fashion, and her proportions to Egypt. It was probably also the Greek experience in Egypt that gave her sculptor the inspiration and confidence to transpose a large-scale wooden image into marble.’
Marble was to become the preferred material for the sculpture of the period (at least until bronze casting was perfected later in the century) and it also became popular as a building material for temples and other prominent buildings. It can be assumed that the Greeks learnt how to fashion marble after seeing Egyptians working on their native hard stones, granite and diorite. The source of much of this marble was Naxos although the superb quality marble from the island of Paros soon became the most sought after. The most common sculptural form now became the kouros, a life-size (or even larger) nude male carved in marble, typically with the left leg in front of the right. These statues were planned out on stone blocks using a similar grid to the Egyptians, but the kouroi are normally nude (unlike the clothed Egyptian statues) and their poses are more relaxed and natural than those of their Egyptian counterparts, even though over 150 years, 650-500 Bc, their form remains much the same.
The kouroi stood on sacred sites, often as grave-markers, but also as offerings to the gods. Richard Neer, in his The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago, 2010), re-creates the sixth-century countryside around Anavysos on the Attic peninsula. Here a number of kouroi stood, marking graves and possibly the family landholding. These are aristocrats and proud of their achievements. One pedestal reads: ‘Stay and mourn the marker of dead Kroisos whom raging Ares destroyed once on a day in the front ranks.’ (Note the ‘front ranks’ so respected by Tyrtaeus.) Kroisos is a Lydian rather than a Greek name and so fits the dead warrior into that eastern aristocratic lifestyle described earlier (p. 160). This may have been the ‘home’ territory of the haughty clan of the Alcmaeonids. The kouroi are perfect in form and so the reality of a hacked about body retrieved from the battlefield has been transformed into an idealized human form by the act of heroism. Yet, as Neer goes on, fragments of fourteen large kouroi have also been found in the sanctuaries of Sounion on the tip of the peninsula and here they fill a different function, as votive offerings. Some kouroi show the attributes of the god Apollo, the symbol of order and reason—one cache of 120 kouroi has been uncovered at a sanctuary of Apollo in Boeotia.
The kouroi were found throughout mainland Greece (but rarely in the Pelopon-nese), on the Ionian islands, and even in Sicily. At the entrance to the sanctuary of Hera on Samos an enormous, three times life-size kouros stood, as if welcoming the victor to the sacred precinct. It was the personal offering of one Iches, son of Rhesis, made about 580. The link, here as elsewhere, is with aristocratic display. When an aristocratic elite is overthrown, the kouroi disappear. It could be said that the kouros is an immortalization of a hero at the height of his powers and probably the final flamboyant gesture of a threatened aristocratic elite. The kouroi offer the possibility of transcendence and it is telling that many centuries later the mauled bodies of Christian martyrs were also believed to have been transformed through their deaths into a state of physical and spiritual perfection.
The female form of the kouros is the kore (plural korai). The korai are also found as grave-markers but more usually as offerings in sanctuaries. One feature the korai share with the kouroi is a slight smile, the famous ‘Archaic smile’, which gives the impression of detaching them from everyday life. Here, like the kouros, they have achieved transcendence. They hold offerings, a flower, bird, or apple perhaps, and the clothes are often elaborate. The statues were originally coloured, the different hues highlighting the drapery. Why korai are offered as votives is not clear. The clothes of some echo those known to robe goddesses; others, it has been suggested, are symbols of the controlled woman, her body frozen within her outer garments (see Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, 1997). The fine collection of korai dedicated on the Acropolis in Athens between 510 and 480, for instance, were dedicated by men, possibly as marking an aristocratic ideal of womanhood they wished to honour. Some are named. A poignant example is Phrasikleia, a girl who had died before she had married, and was thus truly a maiden, kore, of about 550 bc, comes from a cemetery at Myrrhinous in eastern Attica and there are named korai from the sanctuary of Hera at Samos as well. The korai disappear after 480.
In the second half of the sixth century another skill was perfected, the art of large-scale bronze casting by the ‘lost wax’ method. The earliest surviving bronze sculpture, a kouros from the Piraeus, dates from about 525 (or slightly later) and marks the moment when the technical problems involved in casting and assembling bronze statues had been solved. The technique seems to have originated in Samos, an important centre of trade, from models imported from Egypt and the Near East and, like many innovations in the open world of the Aegean, spread quickly. The method involved building up a model in clay and covering it with a thin layer of wax. A further coating of clay was provided which was joined to the inner core by pins that ran through the wax. The whole was then heated, solidifying the clay and causing the wax to run out. The gap between the two layers of clay could then be filled with molten bronze. It was an important revolution in that solid bronze statues often cracked when they cooled and were, in any case, too heavy to transport easily. Bronze is tensile enough for arms to be uplifted and poses created that are impossible in marble. Even when things do go wrong, the bronze can be melted down again and a new core made for the casting. Shattered or blemished marble is impossible to reuse.
Soon the Greeks were producing bronzes of the highest quality and the ancient sources suggest there were thousands at the major Panhellenic sites and important cities such as Athens. The tiny number that have escaped being melted down (and often only discovered because they were hidden (the Delphi charioteer) or lost at sea and recovered) make it impossible to give an adequate survey. The Delphi charioteer, the Zeus from Artemisium, and the Riace warriors, looted possibly from a monument to celebrate the Athenian victory at Marathon at Delphi, are among the few that survive from the fifth century but they are truly magnificent in their quality. Bronze is more reflective than marble and the patina, often achieved after months of polishing, adds to their impact.
Among the most engaging buildings of the Archaic age are the city treasuries given by cities, as offerings or evidence of their reverence, to the great sanctuaries of the Greek world. They were simple buildings, normally no more than a marble rectangle faced by two columns. The best known are at Delphi, the site of the Pythian oracle, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus (see further p. 242). Here fragments of sculpture or walls survive from treasuries given by Sicyon (in the northern Peloponnese), Athens, and the island of Siphnos. The myths of the Greek world were portrayed on the sculptured friezes which run as narratives around these treasuries. The finest, dating from about 530 Bc, are from the Treasury of the Siph-nians, wealthy from their gold and silver mines, who gave the Treasury as a thanksgiving for their good fortune. It is an exuberantly decorated building with marble from Siphnos itself but also from Naxos and Paros. The friezes are composed by two hands, one traditionally Ionian (the south and west friezes), the other influenced by local Attic styles and more innovative in style (north and east). On the east frieze there is a foreshortened chariot, an echo of the change in perspective being seen in Athenian pottery of the same date (see below). While the mythology of the friezes is often obscure, they appear to include a three-scene depiction of the judgement of Paris (Paris was asked to judge who was the most beautiful of the goddesses, Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite), a discussion by the gods of the fate of the defeated Trojans, and a battle between gods and giants (a Gigantomachy). The last was a favourite theme of the period, symbolizing the triumph of good over evil, Greek over barbarian.
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