On a low hill above the northwestern corner of the ancient agora of Athens, humbler and less conspicuous than the majestic Parthenon, sits the most well-preserved surviving piece of classical architecture in modern Greece: the Hephaisteion, a fifth-century BC temple to the god of fire. Its vertiginous and perpendicular lines, the graceful spaces of light which its angles cut and disclose, are a remarkable and singularly fortunate testimony to the architectural and aesthetic genius of the Greeks.
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