332 The Evolution of Architecture. 



great builders. They built with tremendous vigor, boldness, 

 grandeur, ingenuity, and here the comparison with Greece, 

 so limited in her structural range, is greatly to their advan- 

 tage. In those stupendous heaps of brick and rubble which 

 alone remain to us of the palace of the Csesars and the 

 baths of Caracalla, the appreciative mind finds all that was 

 foreign to the Roman genius stripped away, and what re- 

 mains is superb in its magnificent suggestion of the highest 

 things. 



In Eoman architecture we have five different columns and 

 their respective orders, the latter much confused, and even 

 the former borrowing freely from each other back and forth. 

 Those unknown to Greek architecture were the Tuscan with 

 its round unfluted shaft, and the Composite, which topped 

 the acanthus capital of the Corinthian column with the 

 volutes of the Ionic, a combination suiting well the Roman 

 passion for excessive ornament. This was the passion of 

 imperial days. That, in the simpler days of the Republic, 

 the Doric order, of which southern Italy and Sicily had so 

 many brave examples, did not attract the Roman builders 

 is perhaps accounted for by the fact that in the unfluted 

 Tuscan they had an even simpler form. Certain it is that 

 when they came to borrow largely from the Greeks in the 

 third century B. c., it was not the Doric but the Ionic that 

 they borrowed. This they not only borrowed, but debased, 

 placing the volutes on all four sides, thus making them as 

 merely ornamental as they had been in their original Asiatic 

 forms. But the Corinthian soon displaced the Ionic in the 

 general taste, and when the two had been united in unlawful 

 marriage, the offspring the Composite was as magnifi- 

 cent as the proudest Roman could desire. 



But none of these forms was used in that logical and 

 organic spirit which was so characteristic of the Greeks. 

 Meantime it was not in their sacred buildings that the gen- 

 ius of the Romans naturally displayed itself. Their religion 

 was a function of the state, an economy, a convenience, and 

 the idea of use was central to their architectural genius. 

 Use, power, pride, luxury these were the ruling passions of 

 imperial Rome. The strength she felt in every limb of her 

 political organization she loved to manifest in the structure 

 of her aqueducts, her basilicas, her triumphal arches, and her 

 baths. And the initiative of this splendid manifestation 

 came from the arch and barrel vault of her Tuscan neigh- 

 bors, who were her earliest architects. It was not until the 



