Ancient Greek Architecture
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50 free Ancient Greek Architecture trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ancient Greek architecture gave the world a visual language that never went away. Banks, museums, courthouses and capitols on every continent still borrow its columns and proportions, more than two thousand years after the originals were built. This quiz covers the ideas behind those buildings and the buildings themselves: the classical orders and how to tell them apart, the names for the parts of a temple, the Parthenon and the other monuments of the Athenian Acropolis, the great sanctuaries and theatres, Greek sites in Italy and Asia Minor, and the modern landmarks that copied them. It is written for students of art history and classics, for travellers planning a trip to Greece, and for quiz hosts who want a reliable round. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What were Ottoman troops storing inside the Parthenon when a Venetian mortar round blew the temple apart in 1687?
Gunpowder
Gunpowder wrecked a temple that had stayed basically intact for more than 2,000 years, even through its conversions into a church and a mosque.
Q 02How did Greek temples such as the Parthenon originally look, in contrast to the bare white marble seen today?
Brightly painted
Brightly painted reds and blues once stood out against the white stone or stucco of a Greek temple. The idea of pure white classical buildings is a later, idealised image.
Q 03Which American city built a full-scale replica of the Parthenon as the centrepiece of an 1897 exposition?
Nashville
Nashville called itself the 'Athens of the South', which is why the temple was chosen for Tennessee's Centennial Exposition. The replica now holds an art museum and a 42-foot statue of Athena.
Q 04The Greek gymnasium, a training ground for athletes and a place of learning, takes its name from a word meaning what?
Naked
Naked is the meaning of the Greek word gymnós, because athletes trained and competed without clothes. The same buildings later hosted lectures and discussions on philosophy and literature.
Q 05What name is given to the sculpted female figures that stand in place of columns on the Erechtheion's porch in Athens?
Caryatids
Caryatids take their name from the 'maidens of Karyai', a town in the Peloponnese. Six of them carried the porch roof in Athens, and one ended up in the British Museum.
Q 06Which order of Greek architecture, named after a region on the coast of Asia Minor, has capitals shaped like scrolls?
Ionic
Ionic capitals carry a pair of spiral scrolls called volutes. The style grew up in the mid-6th century BC among the Greek cities of Ionia, on what is now the western coast of Turkey.
Q 07Which school of philosophy is named after the public colonnade in Athens where its founder, Zeno of Citium, taught?
Stoicism
Stoicism takes its name from the Stoa Poikile, a colonnade decorated with scenes of mythic and historical battles. Unlike his Epicurean rivals, Zeno chose to teach there in a public space.
Q 08Which Scottish earl had about half of the Parthenon's surviving sculptures removed and shipped to Britain from 1801?
Lord Elgin
Lord Elgin was Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman court and said he acted with its officials' permission. An 1816 act of Parliament transferred the marbles to the British Museum.
Q 09Which race of mythical giants gave their name to the massive boulder walls of Mycenae and Tiryns?
Cyclopes
Cyclopes were, later Greeks assumed, the only beings strong enough to move such enormous boulders. The walls are in fact the work of Bronze Age Mycenaean builders.
Q 10Which landmark in the US capital, ringed by 36 Doric columns, did Henry Bacon design in the form of a Greek temple?
Lincoln Memorial
The Lincoln Memorial has one column for each of the 36 states in the Union when Abraham Lincoln died. Their names are inscribed above the colonnade.
Q 11Which plant's leaves are carved in rows around the capital of a Corinthian column?
Acanthus
Acanthus leaves, in a story the Romans told, were growing around a basket left on a girl's grave in Corinth when the sculptor Callimachus saw them and copied the shape in stone.
Q 12Which Roman emperor finally completed the colossal temple of Zeus in Athens, some 638 years after work on it began?
Hadrian
Hadrian, a devoted admirer of Greek culture, had the job finished as part of a building programme begun on his visit to Athens in 124–125 AD. Athenian tyrants had started the temple in the 6th century BC.
Q 13Which site in the Peloponnese has an ancient theatre for up to 14,000 spectators, renowned for its acoustics?
Epidaurus
Q 21What is the name for the outward swelling in the shaft of a Greek column, designed to counter an optical illusion?
Entasis
Entasis keeps a column from looking as if its sides curve inward, and the bulge is so gentle that the shaft is never wider than its base.
Q 22What are the shallow vertical grooves that run down the shaft of a Greek column called?
Flutes
Flutes on a Greek Doric column number twenty, each rising to a sharp edge called an arris, and the shaft drops straight onto the temple floor with no base.
Q 23What did the Greeks call the open public space at the heart of a city, used as a marketplace and meeting place?
Agora
Agora literally means 'gathering place' or 'assembly', and in modern Greek the word simply means market.
Epidaurus was a healing sanctuary of the god Asclepius, and the dramatic games staged in its theatre were part of his worship. Pausanias names the architect as Polykleitos the Younger.
Q 14The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the tomb that gave English the word mausoleum, stood in which Turkish resort town?
Bodrum
Bodrum's castle is partly made of the wonder itself: crusader knights broke up what was left of the tomb of Mausolus and used the stones to strengthen their walls.
Q 15Which goddess was worshipped in the vast temple at Ephesus that ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?
Artemis
Artemis lost an earlier temple on the site in 356 BC, when an arsonist, popularly named as Herostratus, set fire to its wooden roof beams in a bid for lasting fame.
Q 16What is the low triangular gable above the columns at each end of a Greek temple, often filled with sculpture, called?
Pediment
Pediment sculpture reached its peak on the Parthenon, where both ends were filled with large groups of carved figures. Most of the survivors are now in the British Museum and the Acropolis Museum.
Q 17Which god's temple above the old marketplace of Athens stands largely intact, having served as a church until 1834?
Hephaestus
Hephaestus was the patron of metalworking and craft, and potters' and metalworkers' shops clustered around his temple. From the 7th century it was the church of Saint George.
Q 18Which sanctuary on the slopes of Mount Parnassus held the Temple of Apollo, where the Pythia delivered her oracles?
Delphi
Delphi was, to the Greeks, the centre of the world, a spot marked by a stone called the omphalos, their word for navel.
Q 19On which Mediterranean island does the Valley of the Temples preserve Greek Doric temples from ancient Akragas?
Sicily
Sicily was part of Magna Graecia, the Greek-settled west. The valley's Temple of Concordia takes its name from a Latin inscription found nearby, not from anything the Greeks called it.
Q 20Which German landmark, built from 1788 to 1791, has a design based on the Propylaea of the Acropolis of Athens?
Brandenburg Gate
The Brandenburg Gate borrows the six Doric columns of the entrance to the Athenian citadel, and is crowned by a bronze quadriga by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow.
Q 24In an ancient Greek theatre, what was the circular floor where the chorus sang and danced called?
Orchestra
Orchestra literally means 'dancing place', and a chorus of 12 to 15 performed there in verse. The audience watched from the theatron, the 'seeing place' that gave us the word theatre.
Q 25Which god's sanctuary on the south slope of the Acropolis of Athens held the theatre where drama festivals were staged?
Dionysus
Dionysus was worshipped there as Eleuthereus, 'the Liberator', and his theatre began as a simple terrace laid out in the sixth century BC to host the City Dionysia festival.
Q 26Which goddess shares with Athena the small temple Callicrates designed beside the entrance to the Athenian Acropolis?
Nike
Nike was the goddess of victory, and Athena was worshipped there as victorious in war. Around 410 BC a parapet was added to stop visitors falling from the steep bastion the temple stands on.
Q 27The Parthenon's lost statue of Athena was chryselephantine, meaning made of gold and which other costly material?
Ivory
Ivory, in thin carved slabs fixed to a wooden frame, stood for the goddess's skin, while sheets of gold formed her clothes, armour and hair.
Q 28Which invaders sacked Athens in 480 BC and razed the unfinished temple that the Parthenon later replaced?
Persians
Persians left the citadel in ruins, and the Athenians built column drums from the wrecked temple into its north wall as a reminder of the war, where they can still be seen.
Q 29Which Athenian statesman launched the building programme that gave the Acropolis the Parthenon and the Erechtheion?
Pericles
Pericles began the project when the Acropolis became the seat of the Delian League, the alliance Athens led. The league's money was kept in the Parthenon's back room.
Q 30Which sculptor supervised the building of the Parthenon and made the colossal statue of Athena that stood inside it?
Phidias
Phidias oversaw all the sculpture, but the great Athena is the only piece from the building known to be by his own hand, and it is now lost.