The Doric Peripteral Temple

A Greek temple was built to hold a god's cult statue, not to hold a congregation. Worship and sacrifice happened outdoors, at an altar set before the building's entrance, so the temple itself functioned as a treasury and a house for the divine image rather than as an assembly space, and its architecture reflects that purpose. The peripteral plan wraps a continuous colonnade around a rectangular core, the cella or naos, that contains the statue and any dedicated offerings, with a shallow porch, the pronaos, before the cella's door and often a matching false porch, the opisthodomos, at the rear for symmetry and additional storage.

In the Doric order, the oldest and, for temples, the most widespread of the Greek architectural orders, the surrounding columns rise directly from the stepped platform without individual bases, their shafts tapering and fluted, capped by a plain rounded capital and topped by a frieze alternating triglyphs, blocks carved with three vertical grooves, and metopes, panels often filled with relief sculpture depicting myth. The Parthenon in Athens, built for Athena Parthenos in the mid fifth century BCE, is the best known example of the type, though the form itself was already centuries old by the time it was built and continued in use, with regional variation, across the Greek world and its colonies from Sicily to Asia Minor.

Vitruvius, writing centuries after the Doric temple's Archaic development, records a tradition that its stone forms preserved details, like the triglyph and the shape of certain moldings, originally carpentry solutions from an earlier generation of timber and mudbrick temples, translated into limestone and marble once Greek builders began working in permanent materials during the seventh century BCE. Whether or not every specific detail Vitruvius names reflects real lost wooden originals, the general pattern, monumental stone construction gradually replacing earlier perishable temple buildings across the Archaic period, is well supported by archaeology at sites including Olympia and the Argive Heraion.

The type spread with Greek colonization, so that some of the largest and best preserved Doric peripteral temples stand not in mainland Greece but in Sicily and southern Italy, at Paestum, Selinunte and Agrigento, built by colonists who carried the form with them. Because the same basic plan, a colonnaded rectangle housing a god's image, kept being rebuilt and refined for close to a thousand years, surviving examples span an enormous range of scale and date, from small local shrines to the largest of all completed Doric temples, the Olympieion planned for Zeus at Akragas in Sicily, and give modern visitors one of the clearest continuous architectural threads running through the whole of ancient Greek religious life.