The successors to Alexander’s empire split the new Greek world, which now ran to the borders of India in the east and the Sudan in the south, into separate kingdoms. The generals who ruled them established dynastic control and created a court life that provided a type of stimulus to the arts that had not been experienced in Greece since the Bronze Age. The Attalids, who had become the rulers of Pergamum in northwest Asia Minor, constructed there a new capital city in which influential schools of sculpture and architecture flourished. The Seleucids ruled the Eastern world as far as Persia, and under them the art of architecture in particular evolved in forms that would have an effect on Roman architecture. In Egypt the Ptolemies, at the new capital city that bore Alexander’s name and was founded by him, built the famous lighthouse and library, and another important sculptural school developed there. In the Aegean world, Rhodes proved an important centre and so, of course, did the Macedonian homeland in the north. By comparison, the great cities of central Greece declined in importance, with the exception of Athens, which had a hold on the imagination of Greeks everywhere for its former role against the Persians and the achievements of the Classical period; as a result it benefited from the gifts of the new kingdoms, especially in building.

Alexander’s aspirations and close knowledge of Eastern and Egyptian ways led the new rulers to take more seriously their roles of near divinity. This gave considerable impetus to the art of portraiture, since these rulers thus deserved commemoration as much as any god; in fact, even private citizens aspired now to some heroic status after death, so that portrait monuments for tombs and honorific statues became more common. Except for this growth of portraiture, however, the mood in the arts during the Hellenistic period was to intensify and elaborate styles developed by Classical Greece. Palatial architecture aimed at effects never contemplated hitherto; even domestic architecture for the first time had palatial pretensions. Trade and the newly acquired resources of the East opened up new possibilities for the artist, in both materials and inspiration; the results, however, generally tended to elaboration and grandeur such that the finer qualities of balance and precision characteristic of earlier periods are often difficult to discern in later works.

The Classical form of the Doric temple was out of favour in the new age, and the few that were built are elaborate in plan and detail, impairing the sober quality of the order. This age appreciated the Ionic and the more flamboyant Corinthian forms, and at any rate most new temple building was done in the new eastern areas of the Greek world, where Ionic had been the usual idiom. The 3rd-century architect Hermogenes of Priene codified the Ionic order in his books, and his buildings popularized new features in plan, notably the broad flanking colonnades (“pseudo-dipteral”), where the earlier Ionic temples of eastern Greece had set ranks of columns. For the first time the Corinthian order was used for temple exteriors, and work was resumed on the great Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens, financed by an Eastern king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The two-storied stoa became an architectural form of importance, serving as hotel, emporium, or office block, and the design of central market and administrative areas depended largely on the disposition of such buildings. An Attalid king paid for a fine stoa for Athens’s marketplace, recently restored; and his city of Pergamum seems to have been important in developing stoa design.

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Monumental tombs were naturally still required for ruling families, but nobles and the nouveaux riches could also aspire to them now, designing some as minor sanctuaries for the heroized dead. The finest Macedonian tombs of the period displayed a painted architectural facade below ground, leading to a painted and elaborately furnished vaulted underground chamber. The variety of administrative and court requirements for buildings led to original designs that broke still more decisively with the colonnade orders of Classical temples. A few important examples of particularly original designs are the famous lighthouse (Pharos) of Alexandria with its tiers of masonry 440 feet (135 metres) high; the library of Alexandria; the clock house Tower of the Winds at Athens; monumental fountains and assembly halls; and a new elaboration of stage architecture for theatres, in which for the first time the acting took place on a raised stage. (In the 1990s, as the city of Alexandria prepared for major construction projects, layers of the ancient city were uncovered, including what are thought to be remnants of the Pharos of Alexandria.) To the established decorative repertory of moldings and carved ornament was added a variety of floral and animal forms that enriched the surface decoration of buildings. In the East especially, these forms were combined in original ways that, together with compositions that defied the logic of the Classical orders, tended to a style that in many respects anticipates the Baroque. Slowly, too, the advantages of arch and vault, avoided hitherto by Greek architects, were exploited; architecture was still basically that of mass on mass, however, and it was left to Rome to make significant progress in construction methods.