Facing Forward, Standing High

Roman temple builders inherited the basic vocabulary of Greek temple architecture, a colonnaded porch fronting a chamber holding a god's image, but reworked it toward a different visual and processional logic. Where a Greek peripteral temple presented roughly the same face on all four sides and could be approached and viewed from any direction, a Roman temple was built to be approached from one direction only. It stood on a tall, solid podium reached by a single flight of steps at the front, with a deep porch of freestanding columns leading to the cella, while along the building's sides and rear the columns were frequently only half engaged in the wall rather than freestanding, a treatment sometimes called pseudoperipteral because it keeps the visual rhythm of a full colonnade without its structural cost or its all-around walkway.

The effect concentrated a viewer's and a worshipper's attention on the temple's single grand approach and its high, commanding position over the altar and open space in front, which stood, as in Greek practice, outside the building rather than within it. Vitruvius, writing under Augustus, treats this frontal, elevated arrangement as normal Roman practice by his own day, distinguishing it explicitly from Greek convention even as he draws on Greek architectural theory throughout his treatise.