On 9 June 1764, a ship named the Anglicana set sail from Gravesend, bound for the Ottoman Empire. Among its passengers were a classicist, an architect, and a young artist. These three men were on a mission to discover and document the remains of ancient Ionia, a league of independent city-states united in antiquity by their use of the Ionian dialect.
These states, part of the Greek world from the 8th century BC, were scattered throughout the Aegean Islands and along the coast of Western Anatolia (modern Turkey). In antiquity, you could sail from one gleaming white marble city to another. Strong walls for defence inhibited urban sprawl; the natural beauty of the landscape was not spoilt by urban development. Rather, it was crowned by the splendour of human artifice.
The first essays in colossal temple-building were made in this region, and the Ionic order, with pairs of spiral volutes decorating the capitals of its fluted columns, became standard. The architects themselves became celebrities, including Theodoros and Rhoikos, architects of the 6th-century BC temple of Hera on Samos. The treatises that they wrote about their works were among the first prose texts in the ancient Greek language. These have not survived, but Vitruvius had access to them when he wrote De Architectura in the 1st century BC. Although ruined in antiquity, the beauty and fame of the Ionian cities – Miletus, Ephesus, and Priene among others – lived on in the writings of others, including Herodotus and Strabo.
