Architecture. D'Anvers N.
Monument of Lysicrates"/> Corinthian Entablature from Monument of Lysicrates
CHAPTER III
ROMAN ARCHITECTURE
After the Golden Age of Greek architecture properly so called was over, a kind of aftermath prevailed for some little time in the peninsula and the outlying colonies of Greece, to be succeeded by a transition time to which the name of the Hellenistic has been given, during which is supposed to have been inaugurated the use of the arch and the vault, which were in course of time to revolutionise the art of building.
It has long been customary to give to the Etruscans, an Asiatic people who in very early times occupied a considerable portion of Italy, the credit of the first introduction of the arch in Western Europe. It is however now more generally believed that the Roman style of building was an offshoot of the Hellenistic, in which the dome was certainly employed, though no existing examples of its use can be quoted. The city of Alexandria, founded about 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, is known to have had four principal colonnaded streets leading from a four-arched central building, and many are of opinion that much of the town was built over arched cisterns. The dome may possibly have been in the first instance introduced into western Europe as a cover for the hot baths in which the wealthy delighted, and its form was probably the same as that of the one preserved at Pompeii. The famous arched drain at Rome, known as the Cloaca Maxima, so constantly referred to as the greatest masterpiece of the Etruscans was not, it has now been proved, built until after their subjugation and extinction as a nation. For all that they were without doubt most skilful architects and engineers; the walls of their cities were of cyclopean masonry and were entered from arched gateways, a good example of which is to be seen at Volterra, constructed of wedge-shaped stones fixed without cement. Their rock-cut tombs, such as those at Corneto, Vulci, and Chiusi, are divided into many chambers, the walls adorned with paintings, the roof upheld by columns, and the façades resembling those of Egyptian temples, whilst the tumuli in which they sometimes buried their dead are surmounted by pyramids of earth resting on stone foundations.
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