Doric, Ionic and Corinthian: the Greek temple orders and where Greece shows them

The short answer

The three Greek orders are systems for the column and the horizontal structure it carries, the entablature, and the quickest way to tell them apart is to look at the top of the column. A Doric capital is a plain cushion under a square slab; an Ionic capital has two scrolls, the volutes; a Corinthian capital is wrapped in two rows of acanthus leaves with small scrolls at the corners. Above the columns, a Doric frieze alternates grooved blocks (triglyphs) with panels (metopes), while an Ionic frieze has no triglyphs and may be carved as one continuous band.[2]

In Athens all three can be seen on monuments that official Greek heritage pages describe. The Acropolis Restoration Service calls the Parthenon "a Doric temple with Ionic elements" and the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike Ionic;[5][4][3] the Odysseus portal describes a Doric colonnade around the Temple of Hephaestus in the Agora;[10] and Hellenic Heritage says the Temple of Olympian Zeus, as completed by Hadrian, is in the Corinthian order.[12]

How to recognise each order

The descriptions below come from the encyclopaedic account in Wikipedia's "Classical order" article, which XTOUR uses only for the anatomy of the orders.[2]

• Doric. The capital is a convex, cushion-like block (the echinus) under a square slab (the abacus). In its Greek form the column has no base and stands directly on the temple platform. The shaft has 20 flutes, and the frieze above is divided into triglyphs and metopes, which may be plain or carved.[2]
• Ionic. The capital has two opposed scrolls, the volutes. The column stands on a moulded base and its shaft has 24 flutes. The beam immediately above the columns is usually stepped in three bands, and the frieze has no triglyphs; it may carry a continuous carved scene instead.[2]
• Corinthian. The shaft is slender and fluted like the Ionic, and the capital is the distinguishing part: two rows of acanthus leaves and four scrolls.[2]

Vitruvius, the Roman architect who wrote in the first century BC, treated the Corinthian as a variant built on the other two. He says the Corinthian column has Ionic proportions except for its taller capital, and that everything above it is borrowed from either the Doric or the Ionic, "thus, from the two orders, by the interposition of a capital, a third order arises".[1] XTOUR's reading is that this is a useful rule on site: a Corinthian building is recognised by its capitals, not by its frieze.

What the ancient and modern accounts say about origins

Vitruvius gave each order an origin story. He calls the Doric the order "of the greatest antiquity", traces it to a temple that Dorus, son of Hellen, built at Argos, and says the Ionian settlers in Asia called it Doric because they had first seen it in the cities of Doria; the Ionic, he says, takes its name from the Ionians, whose colonies in Asia were led by Ion. He says the Doric column was first given the proportion of a man, six times its lower diameter because a man's foot is a sixth of his height, and the Ionic that of a woman, eight times, with volutes like curls of hair and flutes like the folds of a garment. His story of the Corinthian capital is that Callimachus saw a basket left on the tomb of a young Corinthian girl, with acanthus growing up round it and curling at the corners of the tile laid on top, and made columns of this kind in the country around Corinth.[1]

These are Vitruvius's accounts, written centuries after the buildings, and the modern encyclopaedic account does not follow them on dates: Wikipedia says that the Doric is sometimes considered the earliest order "but there is no evidence to support this", and that the Doric and Ionic seem to have appeared around the same time, the Ionic in eastern Greece and the Doric on the mainland and in the west.[1][2]

The two also give different proportions. Vitruvius says later builders settled on seven diameters for the Doric column and eight and a half for the Ionic.[1] Wikipedia gives three different figures of its own: seven, eight and nine diameters in its section on measurement, 1:8, 1:9 and 1:10 in its table, and four to eight diameters for the Doric in its Doric section.[2] XTOUR does not give a single ratio for any order.

The Acropolis: Doric and Ionic on one hill

The Ministry's Odysseus portal says the monuments of the Acropolis "combine different orders and styles of Classical art in a most innovative manner".[8] The individual monument pages of the Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA) show how.

• The Parthenon is "a Doric temple with Ionic elements", built of white Pentelic marble to designs by Iktinos and Kallikrates.[3] The best-known of those elements is the frieze: the Acropolis Museum calls it "the temple's Ionic frieze" and mounts its blocks around a core matching the cella in the third-floor Parthenon Gallery, originals beside plaster casts of the pieces in the British Museum and elsewhere.[7]
• The Propylaia, the monumental entrance by Mnesicles, combines the Doric with the Ionic order, which the restoration service calls "a distinctive feature that adds originality to the building".[6]
• The Erechtheion is Ionic. Its south porch is carried by six female figures, the Caryatids, in place of columns.[4]
• The Temple of Athena Nike, by Kallikrates, is a small Ionic temple beside the Propylaia.[5]
• The "Old Temple" of Athena Polias survives only as foundations along the Erechtheion's south side; the Odysseus portal calls it the sixth-century Doric temple of Athena Polias.[9]

The official pages date two of these buildings differently. The restoration service says the Parthenon was built between 447 and 438 BC, while the Acropolis Museum says work began in 447 BC and was completed fifteen years later.[7][3] For the Temple of Athena Nike, the restoration service gives 427-424 BC and the Odysseus portal "c. 420 BC".[9][5] XTOUR does not choose between them.

For what the two Acropolis visits involve, see Acropolis or Acropolis Museum and the Athens archaeological sites tickets guide.

Elsewhere in Athens

The Ancient Agora, which the Odysseus portal describes as a flat area bounded by the Acropolis and the Areopagus to the south and the Kolonos Agoraios hill to the west, holds both of the older orders.[11] The portal describes the Temple of Hephaestus on the Agoraios Kolonos hill as surrounded by a Doric colonnade of six columns on the short sides and thirteen on the long sides, probably built between 460 and 420 BC. Its sculpted frieze, the same page says, runs only across the front and back porches rather than round the whole inner building.[10] The portal's Agora description also names the remains of the Ionic Temple of Apollo Patroos of 325 BC on the west side, and the ruins of a Doric temple of Ares that it says was brought in pieces from Pallene and re-erected in the Agora in Roman times.[11]

The Corinthian order is clearest at the Olympieion. Hellenic Heritage says the Temple of Olympian Zeus was begun around 515 BC and completed by the emperor Hadrian in AD 131-132, in the Corinthian order and in Pentelic marble, with 104 columns in its peristyle, of which fifteen still stand and one more lies on the ground after falling in a storm in 1852.[12] XTOUR's reading is that the clearest Corinthian temple in Athens is therefore a Roman emperor's completion of a project begun around 515 BC. The Athens destination page collects the city's sites.

Doric temples outside Athens

• Sounion. Hellenic Heritage describes the Temple of Poseidon as a Doric temple of the mid-fifth century BC, built over an earlier temple destroyed by the Persians, at the highest point of the cape.[13] The site is in the municipality of Lavreotiki, not in Athens; see Sounion and the Temple of Poseidon.
• Aegina. Hellenic Heritage says the Temple of Aphaia, built around 500-490 BC, is Doric with a peristyle and that 24 of its 32 columns still stand.[14]
• Delphi. The Ephorate of Antiquities of Phocis describes both the Archaic temple of Apollo of 510 BC and the temple whose remains stand today as Doric peripteral temples with six columns on the front. Its own page dates the completion of the present temple two ways, to about 330 BC in its summary and to 334-333 BC in its description, with the pediments finished in 327 BC.[18] The sanctuary is covered in Visiting Delphi: the sanctuary and the museum, and the Delphi destination page covers the modern village.

Buildings that mix all three, and a disagreement about whether Bassae was the only one

Several buildings use more than one order, and Hellenic Heritage's own pages disagree about whether any temple other than Bassae used all three.

Hellenic Heritage's page on the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, designed by Ictinus, says that "although it is primarily Doric, it features Ionic semi-columns in its interior and a Corinthian column in the centre", and that "it is the first and only time that three different styles have been combined in a single temple".[15] The same site describes two other temples that combine all three. Its page on the fourth-century Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea says the architect Skopas "used elements from all three architectural styles, i.e. the Doric, the Corinthian and the Ionic".[16] Its page on Nemea calls the temple of Nemean Zeus, erected in 330 BC, "one of the first structures to combine the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders".[17] XTOUR states the three claims as the pages give them and does not resolve them.

Delphi adds a circular building. The ephorate's page on the Tholos in the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, built in 380-370 BC, describes 20 Doric columns outside and "10 or 13" Corinthian half-columns inside the cella, and reports that a recent reconstruction places Corinthian half-columns below and Ionic ones above in a double interior colonnade. What the building was for, the same page says, is still unidentified.[19] What the official pages say about current access to the Pronaia sanctuary is set out in Visiting Delphi: the sanctuary and the museum.

The dates of the first Corinthian columns are also contested between sources. Wikipedia names the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, of 335-334 BC, as the oldest known building built according to the Corinthian order, while the Delphi ephorate places Corinthian half-columns inside the Tholos decades earlier.[19][2] XTOUR's reading is that the two may be counting different things, a building whose outward order is Corinthian against Corinthian columns used inside a Doric building, but neither page says so.

Who looks after these sites

Hellenic Heritage names a regional ephorate of antiquities as the contact for most of these sites: the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens for the Olympieion, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and Islands for Aphaia, and the ephorates of Elis, Arcadia and Corinthia for Bassae, Tegea and Nemea.[17][16][14][12] Hellenic Heritage also says the temple at Bassae is covered by a protective shelter, and that it will be able to receive the first light of day again once the restoration work is complete and the problems with its foundations are resolved.[15] For anything about entry, use the operator's own page; the Greece country page lists XTOUR's Greek destinations.

What XTOUR does not tell you

XTOUR publishes no opening hours, prices, accessibility details or visit lengths for any of these sites, and does not say how to reach Bassae, Tegea, Nemea or Aegina or how they relate to any base. It does not give a definitive proportion for any order, does not settle whether Bassae was the only temple to combine all three, and does not date the Parthenon or the Temple of Athena Nike more precisely than its sources, which disagree.