New Light on the Ancient Ionic Column
Mikhail Nemtsov, mathematician, physicist, founder and editor-in-chief of the literary and philosophical journal "Here and Now," and literary and art critic.
The author expresses deep gratitude to Ellen Fisсh for her careful, patient, and brilliant editing of the English translation of this article.
A few words about the symbolic meaning of the Ionic column – a wondrous “stone sentence” created by Greek philosophers and architects 2,500 years ago and only now being read.
Communication is the greatest human need. Stranded on a desert island, humans toss a bottle containing a message into the sea; besieged in a fortress, they scratch their names on the walls; builders place capsules containing messages for posterity in the foundations of buildings. And until these communications are received, processed, read, and understood, they continue to hang in their own space, a pre-storm anxiety – and a part of the universal soul remains tense. And some of the most touching stories are those of how a postcard, sent half a century later, managed to escape the depths of the postal service and reach its destination.
In this article, we were able to read the message of the Ionic philosophers and architects, sent to us 2,500 years ago in the form of an Ionic column.
The world of antiquity is one vast whole, where everything—the skies, the valleys, the rocks, the flowers, the trees, the animals, the natural and the artificial, the sublime and the profane—is related to one another in varying degrees. One concept points to another, another makes the third clear, the third and fourth prepare the way for the fifth, and so on.
For the ancients, beauty and meaning were mutually reinforcing. The utilitarian and the technical were inseparable from the aesthetic, symbolic, and semantic—indeed, all perceptions merged into a single whole.
At the same time, we certainly shouldn't be surprised that the same thought, object or image can receive different, sometimes complementary, sometimes opposing, interpretations. After all, we're not surprised that, for example, a Swiss Army knife can be a saw, a corkscrew, and an awl. We humans are also multi-taskers: simultaneously drivers, parents, and radio listeners. And we, without question, accept that Alexandre Dumas's King's Musketeer Athos is also the Comte de La Fère. Objects and humans are multi-faceted and are recognized as such.
Now, let's try to look at this marvelous creation of the ancient genius—the Ionic column—from this perspective. (It was originally created in the 6th century BC in Ionia, the western coast of Asia Minor, and gradually spread throughout the ancient world.)
Why a column? It's a fairly independent and self-sufficient architectural element. It must fulfill a specific technical function, but otherwise its design is largely unconstrained. Its horizontal section can be round, square, hexagonal, or any other shape; its vertical divisions can be freely designed, and so on. Therefore, it can easily be imbued with the necessary meanings. I would say that a column is an "architectural proposal"—that is, a complete thought. And as such, it is very interesting to interpret and analyze.
An ionic column consists of a base (the lower part), a rustication (the trunk, the middle part), and a capital (the upper part). The base, in turn, consists of a plinth—the lowest element—a square parallelepiped, and a rounded element of complex shape lying on it, reminiscent of a "spool of thread." The capital is also distinguished by two parts: the volute (the uppermost element), consisting of two interconnected spirals; and ionic – an ornamental element located between the volute and rustication.
According to many historians the first stone temples copied the architecture of older wooden ones. In this case, the column literally replaces the tree trunk, or the tree itself, metaphorically speaking. In antiquity, "sacred groves" were common, containing springs or altars where sacred rituals were performed. Therefore, it's entirely natural that a person would enter an ancient Greek temple and approach the altar past what were now stone columns, symbolizing trees.
Visually, the volute and floral ornamentation on the Ionic column further enhance the column's resemblance to a stylized tree crown.
The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius proposed his own interpretation, which, thanks to his authority, became established. According to Vitruvius, the Ionic column symbolizes the female form. His arguments include the ratio of the column's width to its height of 1:8, which corresponds to the ratio of a woman's foot to her body height; the volute, reminiscent of a woman's hairstyle; and the flutes (indentations) on the column's shaft, resembling the folds of a woman's dress. Interestingly, the Greek word for "tree" is feminine, allowing the first and second interpretations to easily overlap.
But in this article, I would like to offer yet another, third, conceptual interpretation of the Ionic column.
The design and construction of the Ionic column is, from the bottom up, five sequential elements: square, round, elongated, ornamental element, and element of connected spirals. In my opinion, this particular choice of architectural design motifs by ancient architects was determined not only by technical and utilitarian needs, or even aesthetic expediency, but by the symbolic significance of these elements. I believe that the Ionic column is a brief, yet very capacious and illustrative, encyclopedia of ancient natural philosophy.
Natural philosophy (the philosophy of nature) was the first attempt by the Greeks to explain phenomena in their world not based on myths, but on observations of the surrounding world and the ability of the human mind to construct systems that integrate their assessments into a coherent whole. And the birthplace of natural philosophy was in Ionia. Ionic natural philosophy had two "fundamental questions," formulated as follows: What is the primary cause of all things (the visible, perceptible cosmos)? What is the fate of this cosmos? (Surprisingly, 2,500 years later, modern physics is still preoccupied with these same two questions: the study of matter—elementary particles and fields—and the unfolding of this world over time—from the Big Bang to a possible "heat death.")
In the 7th-6th centuries BC (as we recall, the first Ionic columns appeared in the 6th century BC), Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus developed their teachings, based on a common idea: the existence of a certain "first principle" from which the universe unfolds. For Thales, this was water; for Anaximander, apeiron—a completely unformed primary substance; for Anaximenes, air; for Heraclitus, fire. These "first principles" are simultaneously reality and the philosophical metaphors that shine through them.
"First principles" generate other "building blocks" of the universe. According to Heraclitus the Allegorist, Thales describes it this way: "Moist matter easily… takes on variegated forms. Its evaporating part turns into air, and the subtlest air ignites like ether. Water, turning into sediment and silt, becomes earth." Anaximander's apeiron, constantly in motion, disintegrates into opposites: moist-dry, cold-warm. From the combination of these opposites arise earth (dry + cold), water (moist + cold), air (moist + hot), and fire (dry + hot). And here are the transformations that Anaximanes’ air undergoes, according to Simplicius: “…the outgoing air becomes fire, the condensing air becomes wind, cloud, water, then earth…”, and according to Diogenes Laërtius, Heraclitus’ fire: “…condenses into air, air turns into water, water into earth.”
As we can see, despite the difference in the "entry points", all the teachings are united by the allocation of four primary elements of the cosmos, which are obvious to Ionians: EARTH, WATER, AIR and FIRE.
Modern school physics also teaches about the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma («a very hot fire»).
As we can see, these four states were obvious to the ancient Greeks as well. They were also called the elements, which, in varying proportions, constituted everything that exists. Virgil, in his sixth Eclogue, Bucolic, speaks of this as self-evident:
"The seeds of the earth, and the winds, and the sea,
and liquid fire, were gathered together; like these rudiments, they came together, creating all things; like the young world, from them arose." (32-34)
As for the fate of the cosmos, the Greeks saw it as similar to the fate of nature, with its four seasons and their corresponding birth, flowering, maturation, and death.
Anaximander: "Things acquire their being and composition temporarily, 'on credit,' and then, according to law, at a certain time, they return what is due to the principles that gave birth to them."
Heraclitus: "This cosmos, the same for all, was not created by any god or man, but it always was, is, and will be an eternally living fire, steadily flaring up, steadily dying down."
In my opinion, the first four figures of the Ionic column symbolize the four primary elements of the universe; and the fifth figure, shows the history of the universe, its development over time.
The earth—a solid body—and the heaviest primary element—corresponds to the square base of the column.
This is understandable. The Earth has four cardinal directions. Plato's regular polygonal equivalent to the Earth is the cube. In the construction of houses and furniture—tables, chairs—people use right angles.
The next element of the column has a round shape and corresponds to water.
Our childhood acquaintance with water begins with throwing pebbles and observing the ripples that form. Water is present around us in the form of rivers, lakes, and seas, but it falls to Earth from the heavens (the abode of the gods!) in the form of raindrops, rounded drops, and—following Virgil's terminology—the "seeds of the sea," which are rounded.
The next element is air, and it corresponds to the most extended, upward-reaching element: the shaft of a column.
And this is also quite clear: if we stand, for example, on the shore of a lake or sea and look ahead, we'll see the bottom, the water, and then above the lake or sea most of the space will be occupied by air.
Next comes the primary element of fire, and it's "geographically" located "above" air, above our usual habitat, and here there's no longer the literalness that existed with the other three primary elements. On the column, it corresponds to the decorative element Ionic. What is depicted on it?
In the above representation of the decorations on the column’s capital, clearly, the downward-pointing arrows can be interpreted as representing the element of fire, such as lightning. In ancient cosmogony, the true abode of fire is above. The presence of fire on Earth, in hearths and campfires, is only an occasional occurrence. Lightning strikes and the fires that followed them accurately showed the path of the fire's movement from top to bottom.
Regarding the egg-shaped elements in the design, Virgil, in the passage we've already quoted, speaks of "liquid fire." This is likely a reference to volcanic eruptions, which have left their mark on historical memory. The eggs are depicted with the thick ends pointing upward, that is, the ones that break and release the contents of the egg. The eggs symbolize mountains and potential eruptions of liquid fire; the arrows represent lightning.
The presence of the element of fire is quite obvious here.
Now we come to the fifth element, volute (or the scroll), which shows how, in the words of Heraclitus, “the Universe regularly perishes in a universal conflagration and is reborn again.”
What a delightful illustration of this we see in the volute executed by Claude Perrault (incidentally, the translator of Vitruvius into French – that is, a man who was well versed in this matter).
If, to reiterate, the first four elements of the column were "static," personifying the "primary elements," then the volute is "dynamic," the unfolding of these four elements over time. On the left, in the center of the volute, we see a quatrefoil—the four seeds, the primary elements, of which Virgil wrote. From them, the world spirals outward, unfolding, then passes before our eyes, as if across a stage, at the culmination of the acme, its flowering, from left to right, and then begins to twist, contract, and fade in the right spiral, once again disintegrating into the four primary elements.
(Often in the center of the volute there is not a quatrefoil, but a circle.)
In this case, essentially nothing changes; it's just that the starting point for the world's unfolding becomes not the "quaternary," but a single primordial element.
We can now better imagine how some Greeks, walking to the temple, passed these columns as if they were trees in a sacred grove.
Others saw female images in them—their loved ones or goddesses—there were no fewer female images than male ones in the ancient pantheon.
And there were still others who, within the structure of the column, read the narratives of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus about the most sacred things: the structure of the cosmos and its fate! And, of course, such a person stood at the altar with a completely different feeling!
Or perhaps they felt all of this simultaneously!
It's incredible... after 2,500 years, to receive such a clear, obvious, direct, precise, unambiguous message...
Just as half a century ago, relying on cosmic intelligence, we transmitted to the Universe the atomic numbers of the chemical elements that form the basis of life. So too, through the Ionic Column, the ancient Greeks transmitted to us their then-most advanced knowledge about the structure and fate of the Universe. Thank you. We have received it. We have read:
Earth, Water, Air, Fire –
From them, worlds are born, blossom, and descend into them.