While standard textbooks on Greek temples are organized according to chronology and building type, the two titles under review here attempt to render Greek architecture more accessible and more relevant to contemporary readers. Tony Spawforth’s discussion of Greek peripteral temples stresses the experiential aspect and endeavors to facilitate the study of these structures by, among other things, updating the vocabulary used to describe them. His text is intended as an introduction to the subject, and is thus copiously illustrated (mostly in color) and conveniently divided up into short sections. Alexander Tzonis and Phoebe Giannisi, on the other hand, assume a more advanced readership. They focus initially on historiography and then move on to a design theory developed from their observations of Classical Greek intellectual culture. Their study is flawed, however, by the strong bias in their selection of evidence and their insistence on fundamental similarities between ancient Greek society and our own.

In his introduction, Spawforth immediately qualifies his concept of “complete” by stating that of all the various forms of Greek temples, he will deal solely with the peripteral type because he believes that the Greeks themselves felt this type of religious structure to be the best. He aims to free these buildings from the anachronistic framework through which they have been understood, both in scholarship and in post-Classical architectural revivals, and to view them primarily as religious, rather than political, structures. The numerous illustrations in Spawforth’s introductory chapter exemplify the book’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. The detailed map of the Greek Mediterranean and the timeline of Greek history up to the nineteenth century are very useful. However, the list of milestones in the history of Greek temple building (called “Temple Highlights”) and of the fifteen best-preserved Greek peripteral temples are typical of the rather reductive view, as well as the odd temporal parameters, that characterize this work. Here Spawforth leaves out the Archaic Ionic Colossal temples of Asia Minor (other than a brief indication that the Artemis Temple at Ephesos burned down in 356 BCE), an unjustifiable choice in a history of the development of peripteral temple architecture. (Moreover, the Apollo Temple at Didyma is erroneously assigned a 300 BCE start, rather than rebuilding, date, on pages 13 and 15.) Furthermore, the fact that two of the temples on the “best-preserved” list date to the Roman period reveals Spawforth’s idiosyncratic conception and chronology of Greek culture.

In the first chapter, “Homes of the Gods: Development, Glory and Decline,” Spawforth traces the development of Greek peripteral temples as well as that of the archaeological study of these buildings. He includes the most recent information on early monumental architecture on the mainland, such as Robin Rhodes’s 2003 findings at the first temple of Apollo at Corinth (Robin F. Rhodes, “The Seventh Century Temple and the Earliest Greek Architecture at Corinth,” in Charles K. Williams II and Nancy Bookidis, eds., Corinth: The Centenary, 1896–1996, Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2003); indeed one of the book’s strengths is its up-to-date bibliography. He also acknowledges, albeit briefly and with minimal detail, the influence of the Near East and Egypt on early Greek monumental architecture, thereby calling attention to the debt Western architecture owes to Eastern cultures. One wishes, though, that he had developed this discussion more fully since the student audience he addresses would benefit greatly from exposure to the mounting evidence of cultural and artistic exchange among the Greeks, Egyptians, and Near Eastern cultures and to the increasingly open-minded scholarly attitude that has helped bring this evidence to light.

Spawforth also provides a good general summary of the significance of urban and extraurban temple siting, which will introduce students to François de Polignac’s highly influential argument concerning the interrelation of cult, space, and ritual, first published in 1984 (François de Polignac, La Naissance de la cite greque, Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1984). These worthy inclusions do not, however, outweigh the disadvantages of his exclusive focus on one type of religious architecture. In tracking the spread of the peripteral temple, Spawforth is forced to acknowledge that many areas of the Greek world—including Crete, the Cycladic and Northern Aegean islands, Sparta and neighboring Messenia, and Macedonia—favored other types of religious structures. His narrow focus on a single building type prevents him from discussing the alternatives, and ultimately does his readers a disservice by obscuring the fascinating variations of Greek religious practice and regional identity as expressed in built form. For example, the fact that none of the major cult buildings at the important sanctuary to the Great Gods on Samothrace are peripteral means that Spawforth leaves them out of his study. In doing so, he foregoes an opportunity to explore how deviations from the standard peripteral design originated in specific ritual needs, in this case those of a mystery cult.

Chapter 3, “Building for the Gods,” examines the process of building a Greek peripteral temple and is the strongest in the book. Spawforth’s well-chosen illustrations give the reader a very good idea of the various stages of temple construction, from initial design to painted decoration. In his diagrams of the Doric and Ionic orders, however, he labels most elements yet curiously opts not to identify parts such as “abacus,” “mutule,” and “necking.” Spawforth compounds the problem in the next chapter (“The Living Temple”) by doing away with traditional terminology altogether: “Naos” becomes “shrine,” “antae” is replaced by “pilasters” or “wall-terminals,” and so on. His stated reason for this departure from scholarly convention is to avoid both anachronistic terms such as the Latin “cella” and arbitrary choices among various, interchangeable Greek terms (“front porch” for Spawforth is thus preferable to either “pronaos” or “prodomos”). This practice in chapter 3 is at odds, however, with his reliance upon the traditional nomenclature in the diagrams in chapter 2. Moreover, by rejecting the Greeks’ own terminology for their architecture simply because their usage is occasionally “a muddle” (77), Spawforth is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What Spawforth sees as maddening inconsistency is in fact quite revealing of both the conceptual flexibility and regional variability of Greek architectural practice. It is clear both from extant building records and from ancient literary sources that there was no uniform or monolithic conception of built form in the Greek world. The nuances and ambiguities of the terms match the rich cultural complexity evidenced in the buildings themselves.

In the remainder of chapter 3 and the subsequent chapters, Spawforth fleshes out his study of peripteral religious buildings with a much-needed and interesting critical re-examination of received ideas about the accessibility of Greek temples as well as discussions of cult images and objects, religious personnel, and sanctuary space. Spawforth then concludes with a catalogue primarily of Greek colonnaded temples (although a few Roman examples are also included, organized quite successfully by regions: Italy and Sicily, Athens and Attica, etc.), and a brief summary of the current state of scholarship and conservation.

Tzonis and Giannisi’s purported objective is to reveal why Classical Greek architecture, specifically the process of construction, shares so much with products of our current era. In the introduction, the authors discuss concepts of multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and globalization and make a case for their relevance to the Greek world. The first chapter then gives a history of the construction of the Apollo Temple at Bassai, followed by a brief analysis of the architecture. It is unclear how this material fits into the authors’ overall objective until the final paragraphs, when they muster evidence of various mason marks and types of marble to claim that the Bassai temple is a testament to the “existence of a unique network of diverse, distributed experts bringing together their knowledge for one project for . . . the creation of a new idea that was to be diffused globally” (59). Understanding the cooperation among different cities and craftsmen certainly is invaluable when studying the nature of Greek temple building in the fifth century BCE, yet the assertion that this system of labor and design was to be disseminated on a “global” scale is unclear and confusing since the geographical scope of their text is limited to the Greek world. Chapters 2 and 3 then trace the historical development of Greek monumental architecture, with particular emphasis on the peripteral temple, in order to explain how this “global” process explored at Bassai originated and developed over time (again, within the confines of the Greek world). The fourth chapter explores the relationship between Greek deities and the spaces associated with them, while the final chapter describes the complex, integrated system of architectural design developed by the Classical period.

Overall, one is left with the impression that the authors believe Classical Greek architecture, and the study of it, is in danger of being undervalued in our era of advanced technology and globalization. Tzonis and Giannisi seek therefore to revive interest in the subject by arguing that the Greeks were much more similar to us than has been previously recognized because they too encouraged and relied upon a broad network of design ideas and a broad range of materials and technologies from various parts of the world in the creation of their built environment. The emphasis on cultural exchange in the Greek world is commendable, but the authors gloss over the specifics of this exchange, and the resultant vagueness does little to further our understanding of the Greeks and their architecture.

There are other problems with the book. The best sections are in chapter 5, in the authors’ complex and sophisticated discussion of Greek architecture in a broader cultural and intellectual context. Their exploration of the manner in which Greek music, poetry, philosophy, and architecture share certain patterns of organization shows their knowledge of Greek culture to great advantage and provides much food for thought. Much of this discussion, however, has been rehashed from Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s 1986 book Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), and so while interesting, it is not original.

Finally, Tzonis and Giannisi have been ill-served by their editors. The frequency of grammatical and spelling errors and mistranslations (from French to English) increases the further one reads. As for the illustrations, it is confusing to read in the preface that the authors will only use photographs from the first half of the twentieth century, not only because the sites were in better condition at that time but also because the photographers from that period “all share a special rigor in the representation of spatial structure, which is vital to the representation of Classical Greek space and is rare among contemporary photographers” (8). The authors do not specify the exact nature of this “special rigor,” and therefore do not convey what can be learned from these photographs in particular. Moreover, the images are not used in an especially successful manner. The text and images make no reference to one another, but rather sit side by side; it is up to the reader to intuit the connections between them. Some of the captions of the temple plans give the date and others do not. The drawings located after the footnotes are rife with errors. In the diagrams of the Doric and Ionic orders, the lines connecting the terms with the parts of the building often go astray: “necking” is linked to an arris between the true necking and the echinus; “fillet” appears with the Doric, rather than Ionic, column, and is connected, inexplicably, to the base of the echinus; and “peristylion” is joined to the bottom level of the stereobate. Furthermore, the word “echinus” that appears in conjunction with the Ionic diagram floats untethered to any part of the building—not surprising given the fact that an Ionic capital has no echinus.

The appearance of The Complete Greek Temples and Classical Greek Architecture: The Construction of the Modern coincides with a recent surge in interest in Greek architecture, fueled in part by Manolis Korres’s highly publicized restoration of the Parthenon. One hopes that the momentum that brought these books to publication will continue to generate further studies with new archaeological data and fresh perspectives.