Athena Review Image Archive ™
Agrigento: Temple of Olympian Zeus, view of side
Agrigento: View of the temple of Zeus (Athena Review)
The Temple of Olympian Zeus at Agrigento, built in 480 BC but never completed, is considered the largest Doric temple ever built. It was seven columns wide and fourteen columns long. The temple measured 113 x 56 meters at the stylobate, with a height of some 20 meters. The columns tood on a five-stepped platform 4.5 meters above the ground. Between the columns were colossal stone atlas figures called telemones, each 7.5 meters high.
The interior plan of the temple includes the cella or naos preceded by a porch (pronaos ) with an episthodomos in back. The cella walls contained 12 pilasters on each long side, The interior of the cella contained a vast triple-aisled hall of pillars,
The temple may have been built to commemorate the defeat of the Carthaginians by Agrigento and Syracuse in 480 BC. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus, the temple was built using Carthaginian slave labor, but remained unfinished due to the Carthaginian conquest of the city in 406 BC. Eventually destoryed by earthquakes, the temple in the 18th century was quarried for building materials in Agrigento.
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