On Sunday, September 2, 1934, the New York Times announced the discovery of a stack of wooden panels painted with vibrant colors (Figures 44 and 45). Anastassios Orlandos had found these small panel paintings deep inside a cavern lined with stalactites, at Ano Pitsa, near Corinth, in the Peloponnese. The headline read “Plaques Found at Pitsa: Blue, Yellow and Green Shown on Painted Wood.”1 Its emphasis on the colors painted onto the wooden panels positioned the discovery within ongoing debates about the presence or absence of colors in ancient Mediterranean art and language. Orlandos’s discovery of material colors on partly intact paintings merited column inches in a newspaper across the Atlantic for several reasons. First, antiquarian debates as well as academic research about colors in ancient Mediterranean art had continued unabated into the early decades of the twentieth century.2 Second, despite the celebration of ancient Greek painting by ancient authors writing in Greek and Latin, comparatively little material painting survives in the archaeological record. In 1934, that corpus was even smaller than it is today.3 Third, Euro-American nation-states had long claimed and constructed an intellectual, structural, and material genealogy back to ancient Greece, and this faraway discovery of ancient Greek colors – blues, yellows, and greens – undermined the dominant impression of monochrome edifices.4

Approaching the bronze statue of a naked male figure from the left, a beholder encounters the uncanny sight of an eye looking out from a socket cast into its head (Figure 104). Anatomical parts of the eye have been pieced together from polychrome materials: white bone for the white, a pink vitreous paste for the tear duct at the inner corner, a ring of black surrounding a thicker brown ring for the iris, and at the center a void where a pupil would once have been inlaid.1 Only the tear duct alters the symmetry of these concentric circles, decreasing in diameter to the pupil point – white, black, brown, black again – like a target. A sheet of bronze enfolds the back of the eye to hold its parts together; at the front, this bronze sheeting has been sliced into lashes that curl away from the eye and frame it.2 The eye does not move or contract as a beholder approaches; however, brilliance, hues, and variegation form and animate it.

A massive mosaic of black, white, orange, and tan uncut pebbles covered the floor of a banquet room in a private house at Pella (Figure 141).1 The pebbles depict Theseus, the mythical founder-king of Athens, abducting the child Helen of Sparta, years before her marriage to the Mycenaean king Menelaus and subsequent trafficking by Aphrodite and Paris to Troy. Phorbas drives Theseus’s getaway chariot, pulled by four white horses, each with contrasting golden-orange manes and tails. Although this portion of the mosaic has sustained heavy damage and partial erasure, we can still see that the chariot driver looks over his shoulder at Theseus, who drags Helen towards the chariot.2 Helen’s companion, Deianeira, reaches for the girl, as Theseus pulls her out of reach. The scene captures a critical moment in Theseus’s abduction in which Deianeira fails to recover Helen.

The opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games took place not at Olympia, the ancient site in the Peloponnese region of mainland Greece that gave its name to the modern games, but, like the first modern games of 1896, in Athens, the capital of the modern nation-state of Greece. This slippage between places maps an ancient artistic connection forged by two colossal polychrome statues, the Athena Parthenos in Athens and the seated Zeus at Olympia, both designed and produced by Pheidias and artists of his workshop. Neither statue exists today; because of their vibrant splendor, politicians spent, people reused, and time degraded the gold, ivory, wood, jewels, stones, and added pigments that formed them. Elements of both statues, however, persist in reproductions, descriptions, and reconstructions. Pausanias, for example, provides a vivid description of their appearance in the second century ce. In conjunction with other literary references and archaeological and epigraphic evidence, we can today form an idea of how these statues might once have been pieced together and beheld.

The path to the Panhellenic sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi takes a visitor up a steep and winding path from the lush expanse of the plain to the multifaceted sanctuary complex that was considered the navel (omphalos) of the ancient Mediterranean world (Figure 67). Climbing the path towards the sanctuary in the late sixth century bce, a pilgrim would have encountered a small, vibrantly polychrome, temple-like building (Figures 68 and 69).1 Officials from the island of Siphnos commissioned this treasure-house, built about 525 bce, which is thought to be among the first of such buildings erected along the switchback path. Over the next 200 years, dozens more cities would build treasure-houses lining a path to the oracular sanctuary and the Temple of Apollo (Figure 70).2

The Greek temple in dressed stone, with elaborate columnar orders and sculptural decoration, appears rather suddenly in the archaeological record, at the end of the seventh century.3 If one defines Greek architecture by the standards of the Archaic and Classical periods, one may argue, retrospectively, that architecture “did not exist” earlier in the Greek world. For the ages between the fall of the Bronze Age (BA) civilizations and the beginning of the seventh century, Greek temples in most regions were made mainly of earth, wood, and fieldstones, primitive in comparison to Archaic and Classical monuments. Yet if we look instead contextually at these temples and put aside the standards of future architecture, we can appropriately assess the architectural development of the temple.4 Adopting this approach, this book explores the early stages of the most emblematic architectural icon of the ancient Greek world. Ultimately, it will become clear that pre-Archaic temple architecture warrants a dedicated architectural history.

Judging from the present record, temples remained exceptional during most of the Early Iron Age (EIA). From the late ninth through the eighth centuries, this picture gradually began to change, with new sanctuaries and temples established in several regions.9999999 While even in the eighth century temples were far from common and many sanctuaries lacked monumental architecture, from this period onward we find sanctuaries and temples in rural settings as well as settlements.

Beginning in the late eighth century, temples had flourished across the Greek world, many with an ambition that made them monumental by our definition. Yet in design and construction, temples did not differ greatly from houses or other utilitarian structures. In the first half of the seventh century, technological innovation in temple construction transformed Greek architecture. Newly introduced roof tiles and stone ashlars set the temple apart from the rest of the built environment, harbingers of what the temple would become during the Archaic and Classical periods.