The Art of the Hellenistic Age

Paris, Louvre.  I have never liked the nickname 'Rococo' for this kind of Hellenistic sculpture, which I appreciate for its virtuosity, but I can easily imagine it in the gardens of some great estate.

The Hellenistic Age (3rd to lst centuries B.C.), to Augustus.

We have noted in the previous sections that non-Greeks often availed themselves of Greek artists, when they desired their unique combination of naturalism, sense of form, and excellent workmanship; even before Mausolus of Caria hired Greeks, the Persians and Scythians as well as the Etruscans had obtained both Greek exports and the services, when they could, of the actual artists.  Although the way was thus paved for the Hellenization of the known world, what happened after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the kingdoms of his successors was quite different: the thorough Hellenizing of whole societies, from northern India (or, mostly, Afghanistan and Pakistan) to the Atlantic Ocean, because of which the centuries between Alexander and Augustus are called HELLENISTIC.  This spread of a common culture, with Greek language as a lingua franca, paved the way for the Roman Empire (one evidence of it is that the scriptures peculiar to Christianity are in Greek).  Among the societies that were Hellenized was Rome; the Latin literature of the second and first centuries before Christ testifies to this, and the protests of Republic-minded Roman authors themselves bear witness to the overwhelming effect on Rome of the Greek world as gradually Rome came to rule all of it.

Through the third and second centuries B.C., until Rome took each over, Greece itself was under the Kingdom of Macedon and regional leagues and kingdoms; Asia Minor was largely ruled by Pergamon, which had become independent in 263 B.C. and successfully drove back the Celtic Gauls (Galatians) at the end of the third century; Syria, Palestine, and the Middle East was ruled by the Seleucids (Iran, under the Parthians, broke free in 247), and Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies.  Rhodes and Delos flourished as free ports where Greek, Latin, and Semitic speakers traded side by side.  Until the Second Punic War, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily vied with the Ptolemies of Egypt in luxury.  After Rome sacked Carthage in 149, the Carthaginians were no longer a factor, but Rome ruled North Africa, an important bread basket; after 146, she ruled peninsular Greece, after the death of Attalos III in 133 also Pergamon's territories, then the whole Seleucid Middle East, coming thus into conflict with the Parthians.  Only Ptolemaic Egypt remained independent, until 30 B.C. just before Rome became an Empire under Augustus.  Understanding Hellenistic art, which Rome inherited, virtually, and in which she had indeed participated (to the extent that Romans of the Republic indulged in art--regarding art as an embellishment, rather than a necessity), is therefore essential to understanding Roman art.  Where the Roman Empire did not continue the art traditions of the Hellenistic kingdoms, it seems to have defined itself as over against the Hellenistic world. 

Macedonian Hellenistic art is very important but, after the Tomb of Philip (Alexander's father), not yet well published in English.  Doubtless, Alexandrian art (Alexandria being the capital of Hellenistic Egypt and one of the premier intellectual centers of the ancient world) was extremely important, but it is poorly preserved and not very well understood.  The importance of Pergamon cannot be overrated; not only are their own monuments the most impressive, but they endowed Athens and other cities as well; so did the Seleucids (the Jews emphatically did NOT admire their "improvements" to the Temple at Jerusalem, however).  Pompeii, south of Naples, which had been a Greek colony, was an important Latin-speaking Hellenistic city in the second and first centuries.  The temples and sculpture of the Etruscans and of Rome itself in this period are at once distinctive and part of the art of the Hellenistic world.  Their public spaces and civic buildings are most basically different from those of Greek cities.

Hellenistic art for private consumption is part of the evidence that in these centuries fewer persons were wealthy but those few wealthier, and the concentration of wealth had shifted to cities like Alexandria, Miletus, Pergamon, Rhodes and Delos, and, after c. 150 B.C., to Rome herself.  As the Hellenistic kings aggrandized their own dynasties, so the private patrons tended to indulge personal taste.  Genre art became popular, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hellenistic art, representing diverse age groups and classes and races for the sake of interest in them as categories; occasionally these verge on sentimentality or pornography, but many are masterpieces and art for art's sake, not in the service of religion or other ideology.  Miniature sculpture to be collected by connoisseurs flourished.  Realistic portraiture became very important.  In sum, the Hellenistic art world was more like that of the Renaissance or our own time than had ever before been the case.  They invented art history, as they began to look back to the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. as a great age; this too was inherited by Roman authors, such as Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius (reading them, in turn, the modern world reinvented art history).  In the first century B.C. this historical attitude gave birth to some remarkable attempts to revive classical, and even archaic, style.  Because of the eruption of Vesuvius, covering them with ash in A.D. 79, Pompeii and Herculaneum provide the best range of taste in pictures and statuary, but a few houses of first-century B.C. date were built over and so survived in Rome itself.  Paintings and mosaics from Pompeii that are copies of Classical or Hellenistic compositions are taught at this point in the course even if they come from houses built after Augustus, i.e., in the first century after Christ.  In fact, the styles of wall decoration in secular architecture were not very much affected by political changes, so houses decorated in what scholars call the first and second Pompeiian styles will be considered here, although the so-called Second Style remained popular well into the reign of Augustus.

A. Art before c. 150 BCE (to the death of Attalos III)

[A 252]  We already have studied art objects that Greeks made for Persians and mentioned their working to Scythian and Thracian specifications as well.  To the north of the Greek heartland, and largely a part of Greece today, Macedonia was already quasi-Greek in the fifth century; that is, its townspeople were Greek-speaking and Greek-educated.  Although the original language of Macedon was not Greek (still less was it Slavic), Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander were much more nearly Greek than educated Etruscans or Romans of the same period, the fourth century B.C., although from the Athenian point of view, especially that of Demosthenes, Macedon's being a kingdom rather than a democracy, at the same time as it was the rising power, overshadowed the Hellenic education (with Aristotle himself as tutor) that Philip was providing his young heir, Alexander.  Macedonian tombs, to be sure, were wealthily furnished and built to resemble houses, suggesting ideas of an afterlife more like those of the Etruscans (and Egyptians) than those reflected in the Athenian grave stelai that we have studied.  The gilded silver quiver, a masterpiece of Greek craftsmanship, with scenes from the Trojan Cycle, is the kind of combined quiver and bowcase that the Macedonians carried.  The style and technique are Greek; the object is not, and the wealth that commanded it (and also drew Lysippos and the famous painter Apelles, not to mention Aristotle, to Macedon) far exceeded that of any central Greek city: Macedon had its own gold mines.  The Derveni Krater also comes from a Macedonian tomb, but it is purely Greek in shape (a typical Late Classical volute krater: compare the Archaic Vix Krater) and style, an object that would have pleased an Athenian or Corinthian--if he had been able to afford it.  It is bronze, with fire gilding; the gold mixed with mercury is fused to the bronze in a kiln, where the mercury vaporizes.  The scenes, extremely beautiful, are Dionysian; the figures seated on the shoulder of the krater are separately cast bronze figures, each a masterpiece in its own right.  Both of these works are Late Classical, but they serve to introduce us to the art world as it was altered by the career of Alexander the Great.  Those unfamiliar with his story can find it in any encyclopædia; see also the Syllabus; it is impossible to complete this course in one semester if one tries to teach all of ancient history, even summarily, as well.

[A 257] [A 258] [A 480]  Besides the three kingdoms founded by Alexander's generals after his death in 323 B.C., a fourth, Pergamon, was founded in 265 B.C. in northwest Asia Minor; for Hellenistic architecture and sculpture, it proved extremely important, since its rulers were highly desirous of making a cultural contribution, of making Pergamon a place to vie with Athens, in particular.  But Pergamon had to meet serious challenges.  Just as Rome had had to contend with invading Celtic tribesmen (Gauls) in the fourth century B.C., so had Pergamon in the third (an eastern branch that had come into Asia Minor, the ancestors of the Galatians to whom Paul wrote an epistle).  Attalos I of Pergamon drove them back and saved his kingdom in 235 B.C.; a monument was erected in the city commemorating that victory.  The Dying Gaul in the Capitoline Museum in Rome is a marble copy of a bronze Gaul, probably of one of the Gauls on that monument, made in the Early Hellenistic last third of the third century B.C. for Pergamon--wherever the sculptor was born and trained.  It is a fine example of the kind of closely observed, sharply executed anatomical detail that we see in Early Hellenistic sculpture inspired by Lysippos's rather than Praxiteles' or Skopas's example.  It is much else besides: a splendid composition of the human body engaging the space around it and meant to be appreciated from all sides, a magnificent study of a foreign facial and body type, continuing the genuine interest in other nations' physiognomies that we already saw in the "Mausolos" from Halikarnassos, and a fine illustration of the torque (neck ring), trumpet, and shield of a Gaulish warrior, confirmed by archaeological finds all over Celtic Europe.  It has been pointed out that there are two periods in Greek art that really are intensely, soberly realistic: Early Classical and Early Hellenistic, and the Gaul is maximally realistic.  Not that there is not also Art in the pose and in the rendering of the hair, but the bone structure and body proportions, the hair growth, the rough feet all have been most closely observed.  To many Americans (of northern European ancestry) the Gaul looks exceptionally normal; many an American pickup-truck cowboy, if he fought naked as the Gauls did, would look just like him in the face (note the shapes of nose, brow, jaw, mustache), in the long torso with flattish pectorals and little indentation at the waist, in the shape of the arm and leg muscles.  But his untanned skin, small, shaded eyes (probably pale gray or blue), straight hair (singed and stiffened to look fiercer), and long torso (more like Larry Byrd than like the Doryphoros or the Apoxyomenos) were extremely exotic to a Greek; novel, too; they had known Africans for all their history, but not northerners.  Pergamon did not want to be captured by Gauls any more than Rome did, but they had to admire their bravery, and there is no condescension in this portrayal.  What glory would there be in beating a contemptible foe?  The style of the Dying Gaul and other copies that go with it is sometimes called the First Pergamene School (of sculpture)

[A 280]  In the "Barberini Faun" (Sleeping Satyr) in Munich, we have an extraordinarily fine copy of a sculpture of the same period as the Dying Gaul.  Even the copy reminds us of the great Baroque sculptor, Bernini.  Of course, this is no victory monument but a sculpture made for a wealthy and discerning private patron, one who wanted great sculpture, not merely interesting subject matter and virtuosity.  It is an excellent example for grasping an important principle.  The handling of all the forms, even when we study the shoulders from the back or side, is awe-inspiring; Michelangelo would have admired it; this is truly great sculpture (until quite recently, many art historians thought that it must be an original simply because it seemed too good for a copy; it was a very good copyist, too).  At the same time, even if you read it as a philosophical statement about animal passion, or whatever you please, it is a frankly pornographic statue--the only piece of real porn in this course.  It is true that the older photographs show it with an incorrect hanging left arm and with its right leg restored at not quite the correct angle, even more spread-eagled than it actually was, but with the leg placed correctly, it remains an image of male cheesecake in terms of sexual enervation.  Sometimes some people say that a work with a pornographic subject is too vile to be art.  Others in defending art that others object to may talk almost as if a work must be art just because it is sexy (though they don't really mean that).  In fact, most porn is trash and non-art (just go to the video shop and rent some, and you'll see); in fact, many devotional images (oleolithographs and plaster statues and Sacred Heart nightlights) are non-art and some are trash, too.  On the other hand, some of the greatest art is religious images and some of it, also, is, if not quite pornographic, certainly unsuitable for a living room wall--for most people's living room walls, anyway.  Decency and artistic value are independent of each other.  In this period, it is not impossible that this statue was dedicated in a sanctuary, but it is much more probable that it was made for the garden court of a private house or one of those merchants' and bankers' private clubhouses, lavishly adorned, that were built in mercantile centers.  The Barberini Faun is about the same date as the Dying Gaul, but it is a different kind of style, with powerful exaggerations of the muscles and a more pictorial handling of surfaces.   It is a different kind of sculpture for a different purpose, and in the Hellenistic Age we shall see a bewildering use of different stylistic approaches for different subjects, varying also according to region and, of course, date.  In fact, for this reason and because our written sources fail us, being most interested in writing about Classic art, we often cannot date Hellenistic works nearly so closely as we can Archaic and Classical; sometimes we have documentation, however.

[A 254] [A 284] [MA 69] [A 298]  Genre (< genus, Latin) is the French word for a kind of thing, generic rather than specific, such as bimbo or street person or old fisherman or bag lady or any other type that can be characterized generically.  Art historians use the word for artistic subject matter that deals with human types; these ordinarily are infants and children, the elderly poor, and occupational categories.  Genre art is made for patrons in a position to be sentimental about such subjects; statues of fishermen or drunken market women are made for patrons who find them quaint and charming.  Its existence is always evidence of considerable private money being spent on art, enough that the class of collectors is large enough to include persons more interested in anecdotal subject matter than in artistry as such.  Genre art is one of the hallmarks of the Hellenistic Age.  Consider that in the fifth century privately purchased art, apart from painted vases, was largely votive or funerary, set up in public sanctuaries or cemeteries.  Much of the genre art now (as it will be in Rome later) was for private delectation.  Boethos of Chalcedon's Boy and Goose was famous and popular in antiquity; we have many copies of it.  The original was bronze; a bronze cast of it adorns a park, not far from the Railway Station, in Basel, Switzerland, which is so successful that it suggests that the statue originally was used in the same way: as a fountain figure.  The narrow pipe comes up through the bird's tail, and, as the child squeezes his pet goose, water issues from the goose's beak with enough force to arch slightly as the stream falls into the basin.  Delightful.  The bronze cast also can omit the central pillar.  It is a triangle-based composition, hollow in the center, rising and twisting to the child's head (the statue records how small children's forelocks were gathered in a topknot until long enough to be fastened back), the same kind of composition as the Dying Gaul, also designed to enclose space.  By now Greek sculptors were masters of infantile proportions, partly because babyhood was more interesting to this later society.  The Spinario is genre art of the purest kind; a street urchin, unkempt and naked, wholly self-absorbed, finds a place to sit so that he can remove a painful thorn from his foot.  The Italian title, which means Thorn Boy, really belongs to a later variant of this composition [A 72].  We know that the composition was created in the third century B.C., because a clay figurine from Priene (in the Berlin Museum, currently still in the West collection) testifies to the composition and comes from a dated archaeological context, but we don't know who created it.  The British Museum marble copy (of what was certainly an original bronze) is excellent work: every line of the tough little body is expressive of his un-self-conscious concentration on his task, every closely observed detail is subservient to the whole, the composition is wonderfully interesting from every side--because the sculptor has thought through the three-dimensional implications of every line and angle; although it is complicated, the composition reads clearly from any side and from above as well as below.  Like the Dying Gaul, it is a masterpiece of true realism wed to abstract form.  Another shipwrecked bronze original from Cape Artemision, the Bronze Jockey in Athens, may be later (second century rather than third); it is now exhibited on its great horse (reassembling the bronze fragments took years to complete).  It too is truly realistic, studied with intense attention to his wiry anatomy and half-starved face (what price a light jockey?), though there is a little dramatic exaggeration in the flapping scraps of drapery, not to mention the great contrast between the tiny boy and the huge horse.  Many genre subjects appear in statuettes; most of those that we have are terracotta figurines (Tanagras, Myrinas), some of which were made in molds taken off of master bronze statuettes.  A few of the master statuettes survive, and the Baker Dancer in the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, is one of the loveliest.  These are collectors' pieces of the highest order, true connoisseurs' treasures, works of art not for admirers of the colossal but for educated taste.  The veiled dancers, silk over heavier cloth, exist in terracotta, too, but the beautifully finished bronze's great virtuosity in showing thin folds over heavy folds and the rhythm of the dance conveyed from every angle in the Baker Dancer are Hellenistic art at its best, doing something that Classical art did not do at all.  Frivolous subject matter, art of very serious importance.

[A 202] [A 291] [A 491]  The Venus dei Medici is one copy (the Metropolitan Museum has another one, less restored) of a Hellenistic Aphrodite, probably of the third century.  Since the Medici acquired it in the Renaissance it has been most influential in European art, although it can be difficult to be sure whether this type, or another called the "Capitoline Venus", actually inspired the Renaissance, and later, Venus types.  Only in the sense that all Hellenistic nude, nominally modest, standing Aphrodites are variants of Praxiteles' famous Aphrodite of Knidos is it related to Praxiteles.  Her more self-conscious pose, coy rather than surprised, her high, small breasts and high waist, and the style of her head and face all point to a third-century date.  The Metropolitan Museum copy is very lovely in the way the torso bends and leans as the goddess looks up, and the long shapely back is downright seductive.  The even more famous "Venus di Milo", properly the Aphrodite of Melos, in the Louvre, belongs to the second century rather than the third, and it is an original marble statue from a Greek island, rather than a later, Roman Empire period, copy.  It is an eclectic pastiche, but it is not a copy; the composition is borrowed from a Late Classical half-draped type of Aphrodite, the round face with small eyes and mouth is Hellenistic, of the date of manufacture, and the rendering of the drapery, with its emphatic ridges, probably attempts to recreate the drapery style of the Parthenon pediments.  The second century B.C. was indeed an eclectic period; there was a lot of interest in Pheidian art.  The Aphrodite of Melos, in its turning pose and semi-nude body and its academic feeling, is typical of the advent of Late Hellenistic.

And here is the right hand, outstretched and holding nothing, of the Victory, found later in the 20th c. excavations at Samothrace and exhibited near the statue as Rodin knew it.

[A 303]  More dramatic drapery with emphatic ridges, probably earlier than the Aphrodite of Melos and a little earlier than the Gigantomachy frieze of the Great Altar [A 266], is seen on the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, magnificently placed at the head of grand staircase.  Commonly called the "Winged Victory", she is as famous as the Aphrodite of Melos and a much more important sculpture.  The fragments of a stone prow of a ship on which she stands in the Louvre belong to her; she was set up at Samothrace (MAP 2, south of the coast of Thrace=modern Bulgaria) on the ship's prow set on a high base, magnificently.  The foundations of the base have been excavated, and part of her outstretched empty right hand was found (the reason that old publications, before these excavations, dated her "about 300", over art historians' protests on grounds of style, was a coin commemorating a victory in 307 showing Victory (Nike) on the prow of a ship holding a huge trumpet--naturally, there were numerous victory monuments in the Hellenistic world).  Of course, we always think of her as headless and armless, like Rodin's "Iris".  Ancient societies and their sculptors, however, never contemplated making incomplete bodies.  Whether we like it or not, and wonderful as she is in statu quo, she had a head as well as arms.  The mention of Rodin is relevant, though; this great trunk of a statue, which he knew very well, encouraged Rodin to eliminate limbs inessential to his statues.  The style of the Victory of Samothrace, powerful and dramatic, is not exactly like but is easily related to that of second-century Pergamon (see next); the drapery is less academic, more truly exciting; the pinions of her mighty wings show scientific knowledge of the wings of great birds of prey.  In Classical art one does not see so convincing a fusion of anthropoid shoulders with realistic birds' wings (after all, arms and wings are anatomical doublets)

[G 66] [A 265] [A 266]  We already have mentioned the Kingdom of Pergamon in connection with the Dying Gaul.  The acropolis of the city, on its great irregular hill, was complete between 180 and 150 B.C. in the reign of Eumenes II and Attalos II: palaces, stoas, temples, and, a little lower on the acropolis, the Great Altar of Zeus, larger than the temples, a great architectural enclosure of the platform on which the altar, proper, stood; at this level, facing inward, it was adorned with a frieze telling the story of Telephos, son of Herakles and the legendary founder of Pergamon (Hellenistic cities' founding myths were modelled on those of ancient cities that went back to the Bronze Age when myths of this sort had some plausibility).  The more famous frieze, on the exterior below the Ionic colonnade, which is in a different style, melodramatically heroic rather than narrative and pictorial, presents the Gigantomachy, the Battle of Gods and Giants, which we already saw in the north frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.  The Pergamum Museum in Berlin, which was built to house the Great Altar and the Ishtar Gate, reconstructs the front access to the altar (compare [G 66] with [A 265]), and you enter a reconstruction, more or less, of the interior when you climb the steps; there the Telephos frieze is exhibited.  The Ionic Order is very handsome but a little stiffer than Pytheos's on the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos.  In the Gigantomachy, Zeus is made to recall the Zeus in the East Pediment and the Poseidon in the West Pediment of the Parthenon; Athena rushes with windblown drapery somewhat more formulaic than that of the Victory of Samothrace; she is attended by Nike (another Athenian touch) whose wings are almost (not quite) as convincingly scientific as those of the Victory of Samothrace.  Zeus's giants writhe, Athena's (Alkyoneus, as is traditional) poses: it is an Hellenistic pose, but one can't help recalling the Pan Painter's Aktaion balletically dying from Artemis's shafts.  Gê rises, as it were from the earth, or the base of the altar; Gê is Earth, the mother of the giants, who cannot prevent their demise.  The drapery betrays study of Parthenon drapery, but (i) it is exaggerated for dramatic effect, and (ii) it is executed with free use of the running drill, and to make the figures sharply distinct from their background there is a drilled outline all around their contours.  The Attalid kings of Pergamon were deeply motivated to emulate Athens, as well as to keep up with other Hellenistic kingdoms in endowing libraries and adorning ancient cities.  Americans and Australians can understand how they felt.

[MG 221]  It was Antiochos IV Epiphanes (ruled 175-163 B.C.) of the Seleucid Kingdom that endowed Miletos with a new Bouleuterion (Council House).  If we did not study Classical civic buildings, it is partly because they are poorly preserved, but it is in the Hellenistic kingdoms that public buildings develop forms that continue into Roman architectural practice.  The Bouleuterion at Miletos, for example, has applied orders; its Doric half columns and frieze are not structural but forms borrowed from temple architecture used to articulate what without them would be a blank-walled box.  The amphiprostyle gate into the enclosed forecourt, similarly, is shaped like the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis, but this gate is in the Corinthian Order.  The whole complex is a design for a complete space, and indeed the entire agora area at Hellenistic Miletos is carefully thought out and framed by stoas so that the main buildings are not just placed each on a block or two of the pre-existing fifth-century grid plan of the city (the way the Guggenheim Museum is in New York) and crowded by structures of unrelated design.  Inside, as the plan shows, the Bouleuterion had seating arranged like the seating of a small theater, an odeion (concert hall).

By the time that I came with a digital camera, the blue paint (modern latex or acrylic, as I recall)  that is so important on the balustrade (else it looks too, too sold) had faded somewhat, but this photo still shows its effect, and you can see the sky right through the lion-head waterspouts open mouths.

[MG 218]  Attalos II of Pergamon, who completed the Great Altar, gave the city of Athens that he and his dynasty admired so much a new stoa, closing off the agora (market place) on its east side.  His predecessor, Eumenes II, had built (i.e., paid for) a stoa on the south slope of the Acropolis.  In 1953-6 a Rockefeller gift helped rebuild the Stoa of Attalos as the Museum of the Agora Excavations.  It was an opportunity to study ancient stone masonry and construction techniques and to train a generation of skilled craftsmen for this kind of work.  Stoas are not new; they go back to at least the seventh century and had become handsome buildings designed in Orders in the fifth century.  A primitive stoa is nothing more than a roof supported on posts in front of a back wall, providing shade.  Hellenistic stoas like that of Attalos are in two stories (upstairs rooms over ground floor rooms at the back, an interior colonnade in two stories in front of the rooms, and the exterior colonnade making a façade).  The main Order is Doric, but with Ionic in the upper storey; the interior Order is Ionic on the ground floor, Pergamene above (the "Pergamene" capital is a Hellenistic capital patently borrowed from the Egyptian palm capital).  The Stoa of Attalos makes us who live in warm climates wish that we built city centers with stoas today; step into the marble stoa on a broiling afternoon, and it feels about 20° cooler.  The reconstructed Stoa of Attalos also has working lion's-head water spouts, which, with pipes in their mouths, spew rain water from the roof clear of the face of the building.  The basement storey is poros limestone, like the base of the Monument of Lysikrates; Greek architecture is quite consistent in its use of the language of materials.

[G 54] [MG 219]  The Temple of Olympian Zeus had been begun under Peisistratos, who wanted to vie with the huge Ionian temples in the Ionic Order in the Greek east, in the sixth century; construction halted with the Persian threat, not to be resumed until Antiochos IV Epiphanes provided funds to complete it, even as he gave Miletos a new Bouleuterion.  Peisistratos pretty surely meant to build in Doric; now the Order was to be Corinthian.  The standing group of columns at one corner, tall in the great open space of its sanctuary area, is one of the more awe-inspiring sights in Athens.  Here you see very clearly that except for the Corinthian capitals, the Order is similar to Ionic, but Ionian Ionic, with plinths under the turned column bases.  We know the architect's name, Cossutius; that is Latin, and he was Roman, but his architectural design is indistinguishable from what a Greek-named architect of the time would have done: the Hellenistic world is an international world, already like the world that St. Paul travels in.  The Corinthian capital is much leafier than at Late Classical Epidauros, and the flutings are very deep, to create very strong shadows.  Even at this date, the temple was not finished.  It remained unroofed until, in the second century after Christ, another lover of Athens, the emperor Hadrian (117-138) had it finished.  All that remains today is Hellenistic.  The long, narrow dipteral plan of the temple is the Archaic part; the Hellenistic temple was built on Peisistratos's fine foundations.  An important footnote: this Corinthian design is important to Rome for more than the nationality of Cossutius.  When the old sixth-century Etruscan-period Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol of Rome burned, the dictator Sulla, who sacked Athens in 86 B.C., took columns from the Temple of Zeus Olympios for the porch of the new Temple of Jupiter, doubtless considering that Zeus and Jupiter are after all the same god and that these were perfectly splendid columns--and there were no Seleucid kings any more to object, either.  Thus it happened that Cossutius's capitals became the model for Roman architects' Corinthian, and Corinthian is the favorite Order in Roman architecture.

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