A Greek temple was built to hold a god's cult statue, not to hold a congregation. Worship and sacrifice happened outdoors, at an altar set before the building's entrance, so the temple itself functioned as a treasury and a house for the divine image rather than as an assembly space, and its architecture reflects that purpose. The peripteral plan wraps a continuous colonnade around a rectangular core, the cella or naos, that contains the statue and any dedicated offerings, with a shallow porch, the pronaos, before the cella's door and often a matching false porch, the opisthodomos, at the rear for symmetry and additional storage.
In the Doric order, the oldest and, for temples, the most widespread of the Greek architectural orders, the surrounding columns rise directly from the stepped platform without individual bases, their shafts tapering and fluted, capped by a plain rounded capital and topped by a frieze alternating triglyphs, blocks carved with three vertical grooves, and metopes, panels often filled with relief sculpture depicting myth. The Parthenon in Athens, built for Athena Parthenos in the mid fifth century BCE, is the best known example of the type, though the form itself was already centuries old by the time it was built and continued in use, with regional variation, across the Greek world and its colonies from Sicily to Asia Minor.