A tholos (from Ancient Greek θόλος (thólos) 'conical roof, dome'; pl. tholoi; Latin: tholus; pl. tholi) is a form of building that was widely used in the Greco-Roman world. It is a round structure with a circular wall and a roof, usually built upon a couple of steps (a podium), and often with a ring of columns supporting a conical or domed roof. It differs from a monopteros (Ancient Greek:ὁ μονόπτερος from the Polytonic: μόνος, only, single, alone, and τὸ πτερόν, wing), a circular colonnade supporting a roof but without any walls, which therefore does not have a cella (room inside). Both these types are sometimes called rotundas.
An increasingly large series of round buildings were constructed in the developing tradition of classical architecture until Late antiquity, which are covered here. Medieval round buildings are covered at rotunda. From the Renaissance onwards the classical tholos form had an enduring revival, now often topped by a dome, especially as an element in much larger buildings. The tholos is not to be confused with the beehive tomb, or "tholos tomb" in modern terminology, a distinct form in Late Bronze Age Greece and other areas. But many other round tombs and mausolea were built, especially for Roman emperors.
Classical world
Greece In Ancient Greek architecture, the tholos form was used for a variety of buildings with different purposes. A few were round temples of Greek peripteral design completely encircled by a colonnade, but most served other functions, and some were architecturally innovative. According to A. W. Lawrence, by the 4th century BC, "their more or less secular functions gave partial exemption from the austere conventions that governed the design of temples". No Greek tholos except the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates remains anything like intact, with most known only by excavation of their distinctive circular foundations, and other parts found lying on the site. The large building known as "the tholos" (but also "the parasol") in the centre of Athens, just off the agora, at the least served as the dining-hall for the executive group of the boule, a council of 500 citizens chosen by lot from ten "tribes" to run daily affairs of the city, since a kitchen leads off the main circular hall. It may also have functioned as their debating chamber or prytaneion. It was about 60 feet across, and built around 470 BC. Inside six columns supported the original conical roof, which seems have been covered with terracotta tiles round the lower parts, and perhaps bronze sheets higher up, leading to an acroterion at the apex, as seems to have been the case in the Philippeion. However this roof seems to have been destroyed by fire around 400 BC, and was probably replaced by one using bronze sheets. The original building, from not long after the Persian sack of Athens in 489–479 BC is "very plain", with no exterior columns, showing "utter economy [in] its construction".
The famous Tholos of Delphi was nearly 13.5 metres across. It has been dated to 370–360 BC. Its role remains unclear. There were 20 Doric columns around the exterior, and ten smaller Corinthian columns around the inside of the wall, rising up from a low stone bench. The building had "a more decorative treatment than would then have been permissible in a temple". It is now partially reconstructed at the site.
Next to the temple at the Sanctuary of Asclepius, Epidaurus was "the finest of all tholoi according to ancient opinion". This was designed by the sculptor Polykleitos the Younger around 360 BC, and was 22 metres across. An inscription tells us the building was called the thymela or "place of sacrifice". It used the Corinthian order, still rather an innovation, for a ring of 14 columns inside, and the "extraordinary dainty" version of the capitals here was probably an influential model for later buildings. It may have introduced to the Corinthian the flower (or "rosette") touching the abacus in the centre of each face. Unlike a Greek temple, it had at least two windows flanking the doorway, and perhaps more higher up. Another Corinthian tholos was the small Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, about 334 BC, the first surviving building to use the Corinthian order on the outside – there was no inside. The Philippeion in the Altis of Olympia (c. 335 BC) was a circular memorial in limestone and marble, the rather cramped interior containing chryselephantine (ivory and gold) statues of Philip II of Macedon's family; himself, Alexander the Great, Olympias, Amyntas III and Eurydice I. Columns were Ionic around the outside, with engaged Corinthian half-columns inside. The largest Greek tholos, of uncertain function, was built in the Samothrace temple complex in the 260s BC. It is often called the Arsinoeum (or Arsinoëion, Arsinoë Rotunda), as a dedication tablet for the Ptolemaic Queen Arsinoe II of Egypt has survived. The sanctuary was a great Hellenistic centre of Greco-Roman mysteries, by this date becoming crowded with buildings. The tholos was 20 metres across (from the lowest step) and, as reconstructed, 12.65 m high, with the lower parts of the wall blank, but small columns high up, where any windows were also placed. One of the many reconstructions proposed by scholars was used as the basis of the Arlington Reservoir, Massachusetts, in the 1920s, functioning as a 2,000,000 gallon water tower. The Befreiungshalle (1840s) near Kelheim, Bavaria, is a victory memorial on the same theme.
Roman world
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