Ixvi
arrival at Rome, in ordér to produce a greater degree of
elegance and lightness, but that what they obtained in these
qualities they lost in grandeur and symmetrical proportion'.
The Roman conquest spread the Corinthian style
throughout Greece, almost to the exclusion of the other
orders. Although the buildings of this period are often
more splendid and costly than those of preceding times, yet
the pure taste and correct designs of the better ages of the
art are generally wanting. From this remark, however,
must be exempted some of the works of Hadrian, especially
if the columns at Athens which are called by his name, and
which are in reality the ruins of the temple of Jupiter
Olympius, owe their origin to this Emperor. These display
the utmost beauty and propriety, with perhaps the greatest
degree of magnificence and grandeur, ever attained to by the
architectural exertions of the emperors of the Roman world?.
The remains of a dipteral temple with columns composed of
the purest marble, more than six feet and a half in diameter,
and sixty feet in height, cannot be described in any terms
commensurate with the sensations excited by the view of
the original?.
Plut. in vit. Publicol.
These columns are perhaps the remains of that temple which, according to
Vitruvius, was first projected by Pisistratus; the foundations of which were begun
by the architects Antistates, Callaeschros, Antimachides and Porinos. Afterwards
Cossutius, by birth a Roman, built the temple according to the design he made by
command of Antiochus Epiphanes. This we learn from the same author, who
fürther informs us that temple now built was of the Corinthian order, and of the
kind termed dipteral. This account is perfectly consistent with the mode of
arrangement preserved by the remaining columns, which proves it to have been a
temple of that description. Whenever, or by whomsoever, finished these columns
bear the indications of a pure age of Grecian art.
» Pausan. Att. 18. Vitruv. proëm. lib. vii. Stuart's Athens, vol, ii. c. 2.
