Name
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greek Temples
The temples of Ancient Greece were places where people went to pray to their
gods. Every city had one particular god or goddess that they believed
protected the city. The temples varied in their size and ornateness, and unlike
our modern churches, people did not worship inside of them. The interior room
of a Greek temple (called the naos or the cella) was only large enough to hold
a statue of the god or goddess that the temple honored. Offerings like money,
food, or flowers for the deity were brought inside and given to the statue before
gathering outside the temple to pray.
Many temples were built as part of a public works project by the Athenian
general Pericles, who wanted to use public money — dues that had been paid
to Athens by its military allies — in order to promote the city’s artists and thinkers.
Construction of the temples provided employment for Athenian citizens, while
the grand public monuments also encouraged an inflow of tourists and their
money into the city state.
The most famous of the temples built by
Pericles’ project was the Parthenon, honoring
the patron goddess of Athens, Athena. It sits
on the Acropolis, a naturally-formed pedestal
of rock which was the site of the first
settlement in Athens. Other structures were
also built on the Acropolis, but none as spectacular as the Parthenon.
The Parthenon is an excellent example of Greek temple architecture. It had a
rectangular stone platform, a front porch (the pronaos) and a back porch (the
opisthodomos), rows of columns, and a triangular roof. The triangular space at
the end of the roof on each side was called the pediment, and it contained
elaborate scenes in sculpture. The pediment sculptures on the Parthenon show
the birth of Athena on one end and a battle between Athena and Poseidon on
the other.
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