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The Erechtheum
by Robin Osborne
The Parthenon may be more famous, but the Erechtheum has a good claim to be the most influential of all the buildings on the Athenian Acropolis: all over Europe you can find the details of the Erechtheum imitated in neo-classical buildings. Yet it is a most peculiar piece of temple architecture which breaks all the conventional rules: the Roman architect Vitruvius commented that 'it transfers to the sides what is normally at the front'.
We do not know who was the architect of the Erechtheum, but it is clear that he had a very difficult job. Once the Parthenon was completed in the 430s B.C., it dominated the Athenian Acropolis. But the Parthenon was not at the centre of the Acropolis but close to the south side. In the centre were the ruins of the old temple of Athena Polias, destroyed in the Persian invasion, which the Athenians seem to have been reluctant to clear away. The Erechtheum, built between around 421 and 405 B.C. had somehow to balance the Parthenon, while squeezing itself into the narrow space north of the old temple. In the archaic period several Greek cities had simply put up one Doric temple after another next to each other, but that was not an option here.
The architect of the Erechtheum solved his problem by building a completely different sort of building. He did not use the Doric order at all, with its tapering fluted columns, conical capitals, and triglyph and metope friezes. Instead he employed the Ionic order, with its sculpted column bases, slim and almost parallel-sided columns, and volute capitals. As its name suggests, the Ionic order was developed in Ionia, Greek Asia Minor. Before the Erechtheum few buildings on the mainland had used the Ionic order, and there was less expectation that Ionic buildings conformed to a rigidly symmetrical model.
The building described
The Erechtheum is symmetrical around no axis. The east front is the most standard. Six Ionic columns 6.5 metres high and 69 cm in diameter, standing on a base of three steps, form the façade. However, these columns neither continue down the flanks of the temple nor are they matched at the other end. For at the west front there are just four columns, 5.6 metres high, between antae (decorated wall ends), and these columns stand on top of a wall some 3 metres high, for the ground level has fallen away. What is even more remarkable is that this west façade is outflanked by further porches that project to the south and the north.
To the south, pointing to the Parthenon, is the famous Caryatid 'porch', in which six sculpted figures of maidens, carrying libation bowls, stand in place of columns. The maidens stand upon a high base, topped with large 'bead and reel' and 'egg and dart' mouldings, and although called a porch there is no possibility of entering by this route. They carry on their heads a highly decorated flat roof, well below the height of the main temple roof, with coffered ceiling and surrounded with a dentil frieze. The Caryatid porch only just overlaps the west façade, but the north porch overlaps by some 2 metres. This porch has six widely spaced columns, arranged like the Caryatids in a U with four across the front. The columns stand on a base of three steps and carry a roof, the top of which just reaches to the bottom of the roof of the main part of the building. These north porch columns are more than a metre taller than those of the east façade and are particularly elaborate. The bases comprise two convex mouldings separated by a concave moulding, and the top convex moulding is carved with a cable pattern. The capitals not only have a band of palmette decoration below the volutes, but cable decoration, originally inlaid with coloured glass, on the moulding between the volutes. More elaborate still was the decoration of the surround of the door leading from this porch into the temple, with successive bands of bead and reel, egg and dart, and Lesbian leaf mouldings and then a broad band of palmette decoration above the door.Tying the building together, at least after a fashion, was a frieze of dark blue-grey Eleusinian limestone on which marble figures were pinned. This ran round the north porch as well as around the main building, but not at the same level on both buildings.
The building explained
How can we explain the peculiar plan of this building? The site on which the building was constructed was certainly uneven and constricted. On the other side of the Acropolis, however, the Athenians had had no hesitation about flattening out the site in order to build the platform for the Parthenon. So why was the north side of the Acropolis not similarly levelled up? In this part of the Acropolis there were a number of natural features that had come to be associated with mythical events - the places where Poseidon had struck his trident to produce a source of salt water and Athena had made an olive spring from the rock; the tomb of Cecrops the first King of Athens. The Erechtheum had to provide a setting for all of these, not simply cover them up. The complicated internal division of the temple, into three or four separate rooms, seems similarly to have catered for the range of cults (Poseidon-Erechtheus, and the hero Boutes as well as Athena). But these cultic constraints are not the end of the story.
When we look at the plan of the temple, or at the temple itself seen from the west end of the Parthenon, it remains hard to understand how the more extreme peculiarities, or having the Caryatid and north porches overlapping the west end, could be regarded as acceptable. But we must realize that neither the plan nor the unsatisfactory views would ever have been seen. Visitors to the Acropolis could not just wander anywhere. A combination of walls in the way and the attraction of the Parthenon combined to ensure that there was just one way round the Acropolis, and that involved visiting the Parthenon first and only then coming to the Erechtheum. This meant that visitors approached the Erechtheum from the south east and were quite unaware of the different levels involved and the differences between the east and west. The north porch only became apparent to visitors who walked round the north of the Erechtheum itself, and even then it was the east end, not the isolated west end, that was seen.
This north porch should be seen not primarily as a practical way in to the western rooms of the temple, although it was that, but as the visual entrance, not just to the Erechtheum but to the Acropolis as a whole, for the man in the Agora, and in particular for the Athenians processing across the Agora as part of the great Panathenaic festival. The north porch was both a piece of façade architecture, to be seen from a distance, and a piece of decorative architecture seen from so close to that the exquisite details, not the relationship to the rest of the building, dominated the view.
The exquisite details are what have most influenced later architecture, though the Erechtheum has also been an excuse for adding porches in unexpected places. Details copied from the Erechtheum now adorn both civic and religious buildings throughout the British Isles. That is largely a result of the work of James 'Athenian' Stuart and Nicholas Revett. Their careful and detailed drawings in The Antiquities of Athens, published in four volumes between 1762 and 1816, first brought knowledge of this building to English architects, and Stuart went on to include details in buildings which he himself designed. The availability of Stuart and Revett's book, along with Stuart's example, led to all sorts of architects, provincial as well as famous, reproducing bits of the Erechtheum in their buildings. The chances are there is an Erechtheum lurking in a town near you!
Robin Osborne, when not editing Omnibus, is currently engaged in a research project not on Greek buildings but on Greek pots.Contact
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