Vitruvius devotes a book to machines, including the treadwheel crane, which multiplied human effort enough to lift architrave blocks weighing many tonnes. Depictions survive — the Haterii relief shows a crane worked by a treadwheel — and lifting cuttings on the blocks themselves show where the tongs gripped.
Unfinished buildings are the best evidence for sequence. Partially fluted columns, lifting bosses left on blocks that were never dressed back, and rough-finished surfaces intended for later smoothing all record where the work stopped.
The organisation is documented for some Athenian projects by inscribed building accounts, which record payments task by task — including to citizens, metics and enslaved workers side by side, sometimes at the same rate for the same job. That is one of the more surprising things the epigraphy shows.
What the evidence supports
How the largest blocks were moved and placed is only partly understood.
Cranes are attested and their capacity can be estimated, but several surviving architraves and monoliths exceed what a reconstructed treadwheel crane is calculated to lift. Proposals involve multiple machines, earthen ramps or lifting towers, and none is confirmed.
Treadwheel cranes were in use and are depicted.
Described by Vitruvius and shown on the Haterii tomb relief. Lifting cuttings on surviving blocks corroborate the use of tongs and lewises.
Athenian building accounts record the workforce and its pay.
The Erechtheion accounts list workers by status and record payments for specific tasks, including to enslaved workers whose owners were paid.
Unfinished work records the construction sequence.
Partial fluting, retained lifting bosses and undressed surfaces are direct traces of an interrupted process.
Examples
The evidence level on each answers how we know what the building looked like, not whether it existed.
- Evidence level: Documented
Athens · 409–406 BCE
The Erechtheion building accounts
Inscribed on stone, listing tasks, workers and payments. The single best document of a Greek building project in progress. The inscribed stones survive and are published.
- Evidence level: Documented
Ionia · Hellenistic onward
The unfinished Temple of Apollo at Didyma
Never completed, with columns at various stages and full-scale setting-out drawings incised on the walls. Standing unfinished, with the setting-out drawings still incised on the walls.
- Evidence level: Documented
Athens · 437–432 BCE
The Propylaia
Left unfinished at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; lifting bosses remain on some blocks. Standing, with unfinished lifting bosses surviving on some blocks.
Archaeology
Quarries preserve half-extracted blocks and tool marks; unfinished buildings preserve sequence; and setting-out drawings incised at full scale on temple walls at Didyma record the design process itself.
Primary sources
Vitruvius, On Architecture 10
Machines: cranes, hoists, and the mechanical principles behind them.
Athenian building commissioners, Building accounts of the Erechtheion IG I³ 474-479
Task-by-task payments recording the workforce and its composition.
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.