The adjective ‘Doric’, as applied to a certain well-defined style of art, has become a convention of such long standing, and so widely spread, that to question its appropriateness would be both meticulous and embarrassing. At the same time its origin affords considerable ground for speculation. It may, as Mitford suggested in the eighteenth century, have expressed to the ancients the idea of an out-of-date, old-fashioned style, at a time when the Athenians were introducing the Ionic or Asia Minor fashions on the Acropolis. At the same time it is difficult to imagine or explain why the Dorians, always regarded as a rude or rustic element in the formation of the conglomerate Greek world of the first millennium b.c., should be credited with the invention of the most refined form of architecture ever known, or how Phidias came to select it for enshrining his sculpture at the Parthenon. We must, perhaps, presume that the unintentional honour conferred upon the Dorians may have been due to some phase of that inter-racial and political antagonism between different factions which constitutes so much of the history of ancient Greece. The term ‘Doric Art’ must have originated long after the erection of the Parthenon, if it was used in any sense as an expression of reproach or contempt, and its connexion with the people from the north who invaded the Peloponnesus c. 1100 B.C. can only be of the very vaguest.