Th e buildings of the Athenian Acropolis are the most
famous representatives of Classical Greek architecture. Th ey
suggest an aesthetic of gleaming white marble, but this ide-
alized vision is a mistaken one resulting from an accident:
In antiquity, these buildings were painted in bright colors
that have wholly worn away with time. Large buildings were
invariably built using post-and-lintel construction, with up-
right columns supporting horizontal blocks of stone. Th e
strength of stone lies in its capacity to withstand compres-
sion, not in its capacity to fl ex; when the horizontal beams
(the “lintels”) had to extend across a wide gap, the weight of
the roof or upper fl oor would cause them to crack because
they could not fl ex. So any large building would need many
internal columns to support the roof. In many Classical Pe-
riod Greek buildings, the internal elements, less visible from
the outside, would be made of common limestone, with more
costly marble used only for external elements.
Th e masons used bronze and iron tools, with wooden
mallets to shape the stone. Very rough shaping could be done
by driving wooden wedges into cracks. When these wedges
were soaked with water, they would expand and break off
pieces of stone. Transporting large blocks of stone was labo-
rious. Because the rigid chest-reinforcing harness for horses
was not to be invented until well into the second millennium
c.e., only oxen had the chest strength needed to drag heavy
loads unaided, and their speed was limited to barely more
than one mile per hour. Transportation by sea involved more
risks, but it was cheaper and faster. Th e only famous exporter
of marble was an island, Paros, the source for Parian marble.
Th e blocks for these marble buildings were roughly
shaped in the quarry and fi nely shaped, or dressed, at the
building site. Columns were constructed by stacking many
drums of stone on top of one another. Each drum had a hole
through its center; these holes would be lined up in the fi n-
ished columns and then fi lled with molten metal to provide
rigidity. Fluting, which consisted of vertical grooves, was cut
into the columns aft er they had been entirely assembled.
Stones were lift ed using the simple but sound principles
of leverage, which were famously identifi ed and described
by the Greek mathematician Archimedes during the thirdDolphin fresco in the queen’s megaron (reception hall) at Knossos, the capital of Minoan Crete (Alison Frantz Photographic Collection, American
School of Classical Studies at Athens)
building techniques and materials: Greece 159