ABSTRACT
My business is with building, especially monumental building, one of the basic non-agricultural activities of any society which attains a certain level of technological achievement and of surplus of production over subsistence. For brevity I confine myself to Archaic and Classical Greece, to temple building, and to one specific temple, that of Apollo at Delphi. Four reasons prompt that limitation:
1 The evidence. The processes of financing and management which created non-public buildings (houses, farms, etc.) are virtually undocumented epigraphically from Classical Greece, even for major genres such as synoikiai or bath-houses.1 Even for public buildings, until well into the fourth century BC, only the construction of temples was felt to require accessible record in permanent public form.2
