The Roman Podium Temple

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.

The Temple of Portunus beside the Tiber in Rome, remarkably well preserved because it was converted into a Christian church in the medieval period, remains one of the clearest surviving examples of the developed podium temple form, its Ionic columns engaged along three sides and freestanding only across the front porch. Larger and more famous examples, including the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Rome's principal state temple, followed the same essential logic at far greater scale, with the Capitoline temple additionally departing from Greek precedent in housing not one but three cult statues side by side, for Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, the Capitoline Triad.

Because Roman architects and engineers spread this podium form across the empire alongside Roman civic and military presence, provincial temples from Gaul to North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean adopted the same frontal, elevated arrangement for centuries, and the type's influence did not end with Roman religion itself. Renaissance and later Western architects, working from surviving Roman buildings and from Vitruvius' text, revived the podium temple's proportions and frontal emphasis for churches, government buildings and monuments long after the gods it had originally housed went unworshipped, so that the shape built for Jupiter and Juno became, centuries later, a template used to build monumental architecture for entirely different purposes.