Bassai - Temple of Apollo

The temple of Apollo at Bassai shows some unusual features. The column ratio (six by 15) follows the Archaic pattern rather than the classical norm of six by 13, and the temple is oriented not to the east but to the north, though it has a doorway in the east wall of the naos. While the external columns are Doric the naos has two rows of Ionic columns - not free-standing but set close to the walls and engaged in projecting buttresses. A frieze (now in the British Museum) ran round the walls of the naos above the columns, a departure from the previously normal practice of having the frieze on the external walls. Iktinos thus showed himself, in Gruben's words, "a leader of the avant-garde in architecture", carrying a stage farther the trend towards increased emphasis on the interior of the temple which is already evident in the Parthenon. At the far end of the naos, at the entrance to the adyton in which the cult image of the god was housed, there originally stood a column with a Corinthian capital - the earliest known use of this type. The capital was present when the temple was examined by Haller von Hallerstein in 1811 but subsequently disappeared and is known to us only from his drawing. The adyton must have served some unknown cult purpose. With this separate holy of holies within the naos, with its elongated ground-plan and its six by 15 columns, this temple of Apollo is reminiscent of the temple in the central sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, which Iktinos reproduced here, reducing it in size by exactly a third.

The Temple was commissioned by the Phygaleans as a token of gratitude to the god who saved them from a cholera epidemic during the Peloponnesian war.