Read Ancient Greece: A Complete History

Greek architecture is the most imitated building language in history, and the most misunderstood. For five hundred years Greek builders worked with a single structural idea — the stone lintel carried on columns — and refined it until a temple could be read like a sentence: platform, columns, entablature, pediment, each part proportioned to the whole. This book follows that idea from its beginnings, when there were no temples at all, through the Bronze Age palaces and citadels, the Archaic experiments in timber and stone, the Classical perfection of the Acropolis, the sanctuaries where all Greeks met, and the vast new cities of the Hellenistic kings — and then into its afterlives, where Rome dressed its concrete in Greek orders and the modern world rebuilt the temple as museum, bank and parliament. It is honest about evidence: the polychromy of the temples, the function of the Parthenon, the reconstructions at Knossos and the optics of its refinements are all debated, and the debates are flagged where they arise, because Greek buildings reward the reader who separates what the stone proves from what the imagination prefers.