The difference between Greek and Roman architecture

The most important difference between Greek and Roman architecture is construction. The Greeks built with columns and straight stone beams and thought in terms of freestanding temples, placed like sculptures in the landscape. The Romans took over the columns but built with arches, vaults, domes and concrete, and so could create large interior spaces: baths, amphitheatres, basilicas and the dome of the Pantheon. Greek architecture is best seen from the outside, Roman from both outside and inside.

Facts

Beam versus arch

A Greek temple is built like a table: vertical columns carry horizontal stone beams, the architrave, and on top of them rests the roof. A stone beam cannot take much bending, so the distance between the columns cannot be large. On the Parthenon there is a little over four metres between the centres of the columns, and the columns themselves are over ten metres tall and nearly two metres thick at the base. The room inside the temple, the cella, was narrow and dark. It was the house of the god, and the people gathered outside, at the altar.

The Romans used the arch instead, in which wedge-shaped stones press against one another and carry the weight down into the supports. Set arches in a row and you get an arcade or an aqueduct; extend an arch and you get a barrel vault; rotate it around its axis and you get a dome. With Roman concrete, a mortar of lime, volcanic ash and stone, vaults could be cast in large sections. How the arch works is shown in the section on arches and vaults in the basics. The dome of the Pantheon in Rome is 43 metres in diameter and was the largest in the world for over a thousand years.

The temple: all round or from the front

Temples show the difference in outlook most clearly. The Greek temple stands on a low stepped platform with steps on all sides and is surrounded by columns. You can approach it from any direction, and it is made to be seen as a whole in the landscape. Its parts, from the steps to the corner figures of the roof, are labelled on the temple diagram.

The Roman temple stands on a high podium with a broad staircase only at the front. The porch is deep and the columns are freestanding only there; along the sides and the back they are often engaged as half-columns in the wall. The Maison Carrée in Nîmes, built under the emperor Augustus, is the best-preserved example. The temple faces a forum and is made to be seen from the front, like a façade. The idea that a building has a main façade facing the street was taken over by the Renaissance from Rome, not from Greece.

The orders: three became five

The Greeks developed the Doric and Ionic orders and later the Corinthian, with capitals of acanthus leaves. The Corinthian order was rarely used in Greece; one of the earliest known capitals stood inside the Temple of Apollo at Bassae. In Greek buildings the columns genuinely bear the load, and the proportions are finely judged. The orders and their parts are explained in the guide to column orders.

The Romans preferred the Corinthian order and added the plain Tuscan order and the Composite order, which combines Ionic volutes and Corinthian leaves. In Rome the orders often became decoration. On the Colosseum, half-columns stand in front of the arches on three storeys, with the plainest forms at the bottom and the richest at the top; it is the arches and vaults behind them that carry the load. The architect Vitruvius wrote down the rules of the orders in the age of Augustus, and his text became the handbook of the Renaissance.

The buildings they left behind

The Greeks' most important buildings were temples, theatres, colonnades and marketplaces. The theatre was built into a hillside, as at Epidaurus, where the audience sat on the rock and looked out over the stage and the landscape. The Romans instead built theatres and amphitheatres that stood free on their own vaults, in the middle of the city, which is why the Colosseum could hold tens of thousands of spectators on level ground.

The Roman building types were new and practical. Baths, such as the Baths of Caracalla, were bathhouses with vaulted halls for thousands of visitors. Aqueducts such as the Pont du Gard carried water across valleys on tiers of arches. The basilica was a large hall for the administration of justice and for trade, and its form later became the model for Christian churches. The triumphal arch, such as the Arch of Constantine, celebrated victories. Architecture was a tool for an empire that needed roads, water, baths and entertainment for millions of people.

The legacy: Rome in the Renaissance, Greece in Neoclassicism

The difference lived on. Renaissance architects in Italy had Roman ruins all around them and imitated arches, domes and pilasters; Bramante's Tempietto in Rome is a small interpretation of a Roman round temple. Greece was harder to travel to, and only in the 18th century did Greek temples begin to be measured and published. A Greek wave then arrived with Neoclassicism: the British Museum in London was given an Ionic colonnade, and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin took the Propylaea on the Acropolis as its model.

Read more about each in the guides to Greek architecture and Roman architecture, or compare the profiles of the styles on the style pages for Greek and Roman architecture. Buildings from both cultures can be found on the map, where the Mediterranean shows how far Rome reached.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

Which feature immediately reveals that an ancient building is Roman rather than Greek?