The Ancient Engineers, page 11
East of the Greeks, four mighty kingdoms throve: the Lydian, Median, Chaldean, and Egyptian, all soon to be engulfed by the rising Persian Empire. Their influence, brought overland through Lydia and oversea by the Phoenicians, stimulated the Greeks to develop a civilization of their own. Authentic Greek history begins about —700. For the first century, however, this history tells us little save that this seafaring folk founded colonies on many shores of the Inner Seas, from Spain to the Crimea, and maintained a shadowy spiritual unity by athletic meets every four years.
The time from the early -500s to the late —400s is called the Golden Age of Greece, because then the Greeks made extraordinary advances in art, literature, science, philosophy, and democratic government. But the Greeks of the Golden Age did not snatch their ideas out of the thin air of Mount Olympos.
Their land is not rich. It is rugged beyond the conception of anybody who has not seen it; the landscape looks somewhat as the Grand Tetons would look if they were lowered until the sea foamed about their feet. The interior is so cut up by mountain ranges that communication with the gods must have seemed easier than communication with a town across the ridge.
The Greeks borrowed ideas from the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Phoenicians, much as these peoples in their time had borrowed ideas from each other. The remarkable thing about the Greeks of the Golden Age is that they made so much of their borrowings so quickly.
In Greece we see the first hint of the connection between engineering and pure science, which has become a commonplace of the modern world. Pure science in Greece, freed for the first time from priestly supervision, developed haltingly. The first surge in science took place in Miletos, on the western shores of Asia Minor. Here in the —500s flourished the astronomer and physicist Thales; his pupil the geographer Anaximandros; and the latter's pupil Anaximenes. The mathematician Pythagoras fled from nearby Samos to escape the tyranny of the local political boss. Later, other Ionian thinkers pondered and wrote on nature, geography, and history.
Hardened by incessant warfare among their tiny city-states, some of the Greeks of European Greece sent help to the Greek cities of Asia Minor when the latter revolted against Persian rule. After crushing this revolt, the Persian king Darius I looked sternly across the Aegean Sea at those he considered troublemakers. He had already, in —512, conquered Thrace and reduced Macedonia to a tributary state with the help of a Samian engineer, Mandrokles, who built a floating bridge across the Bosphorus.
So, in —490, Darius the Great sent an expedition by sea against the Athenians, whom he deemed the worst troublemakers of all. The Persians landed at Marathon, eighteen miles northeast of Athens across the tapering Attic peninsula. The Athenians marched to meet them with their hearts in their mouths. For the Persian force, though small, still outnumbered the Athenians; the Persians were practically unbeaten; and the promised help from Sparta had not yet come.
Here luck and technology came to the aid of the Athenians. The invincible Persians depended on foot archers and cavalry. The archers, shooting from behind a palisade of wicker shields, softened up the foe. Then the horsemen swarmed out and cut the enemy to pieces.
But, as a result of some logistical difficulty like that which sent Teddy
Roosevelt's Rough Riders to Cuba without their mounts, the Persians' horses had failed to reach the scene. So the world's most dashing cavalry were condemned to stumble about on foot as best they could.
Moreover, Greek bronzesmiths had already developed a new suit of armor for the Greek heavy infantryman or hoplites. A bronzen helm with a towering horsehair crest and projections to guard his nose, cheeks, and neck protected his head. A bronze cuirass, molded to fit his manly form, inclosed his torso. A kilt of leather straps studded with bronze buttons warded his loins, while bronzen greaves protected his legs. His shield was a circular structure of wood and leather, a yard across, with a facing of thin bronze. The Greek soldier's main offensive weapon was a short stabbing spear. He used his short broad chopping sword only when his spear was lost or broken.
The Persians had no such panoply. Later, in Xerxes' time, they began to fit heavy cavalry with shirts of iron scale mail. But it is unlikely that any of Darius' soldiers-were so equipped. Most of them, probably, went into battle simply in their uniform hats, coats, and trousers, with a spear and a buckler.
In addition the Greeks, like the Assyrians before them, had developed close-order drill. Instead of rushing forward in a disorderly mob, with each captain leading his own little knot of fighters, the Greeks had learned to march in ranks and files to the tune of flutes and to dress their lines, so that a company presented a bristling, impenetrable hedge of spears and shields. They may even have marched in step.
When the Athenian line advanced, the Persian archers loosed their withering blast. The Athenians failed to wither; they plodded ahead, arrows bouncing from their bronze defenses. Then they charged. Once at close quarters, they had their unarmored foes at a grievous disadvantage.
In the center the Persians drove back the lobster-shelled Hellenes by weight of numbers and fierce fighting. But the Athenian wings closed in; the fight became a massacre; and the Persians fled to their ships, leaving over six thousand on the field.
To the Persians, this was a minor border skirmish. To the Greeks, on the other hand, it was an event of great moment, for it gave them the courage to face the much greater host that Xerxes led into Greece twelve years later.
In —480, Xerxes decided to end the squabble with these belligerent Westerners by extending his sway over European Greece. So he ordered a bridge built over the Hellespont. The bridge was built but destroyed by a storm. Xerxes had the engineers beheaded and appointed others, headed by the astronomer Harpales.1
Warned by their predecessors' fate, the new crew built a bigger bridge with larger safety factors. The engineers anchored 674 galleys in a double line. They connected each line by two cables of flax, weighing 50 pounds a foot, and four cables of papyrus. Long planks were laid at right angles to the cables, brush was piled on the planks, and earth on the brush. Over this bridge Xerxes' vast army—perhaps more than 150,000 soldiers, with several times that number of noncombatants—passed in safety, most of them to leave their bones in the stony soil of Hellas.2 After his navy was crushed at Salamis, Xerxes took one of his three army corps back to Asia Minor; another was smashed by the Greeks at Plataia; and, of the remainder, many died of starvation during the retreat.
Athens emerged from the struggle as the leading state of Greece. To wage the war against Persia, which dragged on for another thirty years, the Athenians and their allies formed the Delian League. Members sent money for ships and arms to the League's treasury at Delos.
Soon, however, the Athenians moved the treasury of the League to Athens and transformed the League into an Athenian empire. Thus began the Golden Age. Perikles, one of history's greatest statesmen, rose to power in Athens. In his charm, dauntless courage, many-sidedness, high-mindedness tempered by low political cunning, and sagacity flawed by extravagance and a weakness for the grandiose, he reminds one of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Now, Perikles was a ruthless imperialist, though that was not then considered wrong. Determined to make his beloved Athens the most beautiful city on earth, as well as the world capital of the arts and sciences, he spent the Delian treasury on a huge program of building. When the other members of the League protested, Perikles told them that so long as Athens protected them it was none of their business what was done with the money.
In —480, Xerxes' soldiers had burned the old temples on the Athenian Akropolis. During the —440s and —430s, Perikles retained the leading artists and architects of the time to cover the Akropolis with temples, shrines, and statues, the very ruins of which today provide one of the world's most splendid sights.
The Akropolis, a great ship-shaped flat-topped rock, towers over the city. Worshipers climbed the steep western slope along a zigzag path lined with statues. At the top, this path led through a monumental gateway, the Propylaia, remarkable for the use of wrought-iron bars to reinforce the marble ceiling beams. This is the first known use of metal structural members in building.
The aperture of the Propylaia framed the Parthenon,3 or temple of Athena, a hundred yards away and a little to the right. The Parthenon, built by the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates, covers an area 101 by 228 feet. In building it, the architects deliberately used clever optical illusions. Many of the lines that one would expect to be straight are not. The columns have a slight bulge and lean slightly inward. The steps surrounding the temple bulge slightly upward in the middle. The columns at the corners are a little thicker than the others lest, having only the sky behind them, they appear thinner. The architects artfully exaggerated the natural perspective to make the temple look even larger and grander than it really is.
Similar refinements were used in later temples. Impressive as the surviving Greek temples are, however, the emotions to which they give rise are probably due less to the artistic skill of Iktinos and his colleagues than to the associations that they conjure up. To an educated modern man, a Greek temple is not just a mass of masonry, of good workmanship if somewhat primitive design. Instead it is Zeus and Aphrodite, Jason and Achilles, nymphs and centaurs, Marathon and Salamis, Homer and Pheidias, Perikles and Plato, and all the other glowing images that the concept "ancient Greece" evokes, as if it were one of Keats's
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.4
For the Parthenon's statues, Perikles hired Pheidias, the leading sculptor of the age. Pheidias had already made a thirty-foot bronze colossus of Athena Polias,5 which stood about a hundred feet beyond the Propylaia, to the left of the Parthenon.
For the main hall of the Parthenon, Pheidias created a huge gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess. He also executed, for the pediments at the ends of the roof, two groups of statues representing scenes from the myths of Athena. And he supplied the many matchless reliefs for the frieze around the main wall and for the metopes around the entablature (the structure just above the columns and below the roof).
Later, in Elis, Pheidias made a gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus for the temple at Olympia. This statue was listed among the ancient Wonders of the World.
There are various tales of Pheidias' fate. According to Plutarch, whose account seems the most plausible, Pheidias returned to Athens but was there attacked by Perikles' political enemies. These accused him of stealing some of the gold for the statue of Athena and of impiously carving his own face on one of the warriors in the reliefs. The sculptor was accordingly put in prison, where a sickness carried him off.
For almost a thousand years, the Parthenon shed its glory on Athens. Then, like many other temples, it was converted into a Christian church. This involved removing statues, cutting doorways through the walls, and bricking up the spaces between the columns to make new walls. The gold-and-ivory Athena disappeared, so today we can only guess at its appearance from what we know of the conventions of Greek religious art.
Later, under the Turks, the Parthenon became a mosque; but it was still in fair repair in 1687. At that time the Turks, at war with the Republic of Venice, stored gunpowder in the temple. A German gunner with a besieging Venetian army dropped a mortar shell through the roof, igniting the stored powder and blowing out the whole central part of the temple.
After the city fell, the art-loving Venetian general, Francesco Moro-sini, tried to remove the chariot of Athena from the West Pediment. But the workmen, unused to such a task, dropped the sculpture and smashed it.
When the Earl of Elgin was British ambassador to Turkey in 1801, he found that the Athenians of that less artistic age were feeding the remaining sculptures into limekilns. Getting permission from the Turkish government, which cared nothing about such things, Elgin removed most of the remaining sculptures and shipped them to England. When the ship transporting the marbles ran on a rock off Kythera and sank, Elgin hired divers to bring up the sculptures and finally got them to their destination. There he sold them to the British Museum for £36,000— little more than half of what he had spent in collecting them.
Thirty years later, when Greece became independent, the Greeks demanded the sculptures back, but to this day the Elgin Marbles continue to dwell in London.
In +XX the Greeks, with the help of American donations, began to put the ruins of the Parthenon back together. Reassembly and restoration have continued slowly on the Akropolis ever since. Framed in the doorway of the Propylaia, the Parthenon, even in ruins, is still a breathtaking sight.
However, the traveler who wants to see Greek temples more or less intact does better to study the temple of Hephaistos (the so-called
"Theseum") in Athens, or the temples at Paestum in southern Italy, and at Segeste and Agrigento in Sicily. But, while these temples are structurally better preserved than the Parthenon, those in Italy and Sicily lack its finish. For the western Greeks, not having the excellent marbles of Aegean quarries, coated their temples with stucco. This has now worn off, leaving a rough and pitted surface.
Of the other Greek temples, some, like those at Selinunte in Sicily, have been shaken down by earthquakes. Some, like the temple of Zeus at Olympia, were pulled down on orders of the Roman emperor Theo-dosius II to suppress competitors of the new state cult of Christianity (+V). And many were demolished by Byzantines, Crusaders, or Turks who wanted the stone for building and fortification.
To recapture the full beauty of the Parthenon when new, you can find faithful small models in museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There is even a life-sized replica of this temple, in concrete, in Nashville, Tennessee, the interior of which is used as an art museum. The Nashville Parthenon, alas, is defective in two regards. First, the concrete is not very good and is already crumbling. Second, whereas on the side walls of the original Parthenon no two reliefs were alike, the builders of the Nashville replica saved money at the cost of authenticity by making the friezes on the two sides duplicates.
Greek temples followed a design that spread all over the Mediterranean world, lasted for centuries, was revived in Renaissance Europe, and is still used in modified form in some modern art museums, banks, churches, and memorials.
The earliest Greek temples were small boxlike buildings of brick or stone, housing a rough-hewn image of a god. Over the temple rose a low-gabled roof of wood, except that in a few temples the center was left open to the sky.
The Greek temple was strictly a god-house; only the priests were allowed inside. To shelter worshipers from the rain, the side walls and roof extended forward to form a small porch. A pair of posts cut from tree trunks held up the roof over this porch. The Greeks never invented a true roof truss, wherein a series of beams are joined together to form a rigid structure made up of triangles. Instead, they relied upon an elaborate system of posts and lintels.
As time went on, the Greeks built more splendid temples. Marble columns took the place of wooden posts. Stone replaced brick in the walls. Stone architraves—the long horizontal members resting on top of the columns and holding up the roof—took the place of wooden lintels.
Statuary filled the pediments—the triangles formed by the gables at the ends of the building. Roof tiles were substituted for wooden shingles. The roof, now upheld by rows of columns running clear around the building, extended out in all directions.
Temples grew larger and larger. The Didymeion near Miletos covered an area 160 by 360 feet and was surrounded by a double row of 60-foot columns. Of about the same size was the Artemision of Ephesos, better known from the Bible (Acts xix) as the temple of Diana of the Ephe-sians.
This temple began as a small shrine (—VIII) and grew by successive rebuildings. For the rebuilding of —600, the architect Chersiphron devised an ingenious scheme for moving column drums to the site. Fearing that if he loaded them on carts, the carts would get stuck, he fitted a wooden frame around each column drum with a pivot on each end. Then he had each drum pulled by a team of oxen, rolling along on its side like a lawn roller.
A still larger version of the Artemision endured from —540 to —356, when a youth named Herostratos, craving eternal notoriety, set fire to it. The final version, with one hundred 60-foot columns, remained intact until the Goths destroyed it in +262.
In such major structures, Greek architects avoided the use of mortar. Instead, they trimmed their stones to an extremely accurate fit and bonded the marble blocks together with I-shaped iron cramps. After chiseling slots in the adjacent parts of the blocks, they inserted the cramps and poured molten lead into the space between the iron and the stone to make all secure. Ancient buildings from classical times are often pockmarked where greedy men of later ages chiseled out these cramps to sell the metal.
Like the Egyptians, the Greeks persisted in using the architectural forms that they were accustomed to from the days of wood. All the details of the entablature, with its cornices, friezes, and so forth, were copies in stone of wooden structural elements. Greek builders even imitated the pegs that held the ancestral wooden structure together by adding little stone knobs called "drops."6
In spite of the emotional effect that Greek temples have on the modern beholder, from the strictly engineering point of view Greek temple design remained comparatively static and unprogressive. The architects not only failed to invent the roof truss, but they did not, until late Roman times, try out the arch, long known in the East.
The earlier Greek architects developed two styles of temple, distinguished mainly by the shape of the capitals at the tops of the columns.
