Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 289
Reconstruction of a crane, used here for lifting column drums (after a
description by the Roman engineer Vitruvius). Courtesy akg-images,
London.
so that it could witness the sacrifice being performed on the altar.
At first, only the stepped platform on which the temple stood was
made of stone, but later stone replaced wood for both the columns
and the superstructure. The first temple to be made entirely of stone
was that of Artemis on the island of Corcyra (Corfu). The best preserved
temple is the Second Temple of Hera at Poseidonia, which
was built of limestone around the middle of the fifth century b.c.e.
The crowning achievement of Greek architecture is the Parthenon,
which uses a numerical ratio of nine-to-four in all its proportions.
Such are its stylistic refinements, which are intended to counteract
the effects of optical illusion, that not a single line in the entire
building is perfectly straight.
Greek temples are categorized according to three orders of architecture.
The principal orders are the Doric and Ionic, which both
evolved in the fifth century b.c.e. A third, known as the Corinthian,