The dissertation engages a well-established topic that demands reconsideration, the meanings of the architectural orders as they emerged and were used in ancient Greece during the Archaic and Classical periods. The research seeks to offer a comprehensive understanding of the role and meanings of the three orders, with a particular focus on their use in Greek temples. A basic premise of this study is that there were several dimensions of significance for the orders, evident in the buildings, but also articulated in ancient Greek myth and ritual, cosmology, and philosophical thought, and informed by the polis’ unique relation with its productive territory and ancient Greeks’ understanding and relation to Nature as Kosmos. Therefore, along with material remains (temples, votive columns, burial monuments, and other artistic media), ancient literature is extensively examined, including Vitruvius’ treatise. I draw from work done in architectural theory and history, but also in related fields, such as anthropology, archaeology, history of art, and classical studies. This study shows that the orders in ancient Greece were related to the Horae, and to the ancient Greek notion of justice-dike as it relates to the Justice of Zeus and Themis, and to the order of the kosmos, to its arrangement and seasonality. The orders were related to practical affairs, such as the annual agricultural labor, and, at the same time, were informed by group-based cultural practices of the polis’ citizens that took place in and out of the temenos, while conveying development in religious beliefs and cosmological ideas. The narrowly conceived anthropomorphism of the orders’ columns is reconsidered by demonstrating their analogical and metaphoric relation both to the anthropic body and to the arboreal world. Likewise, it is shown that the orders were compatible and complementary, tied through the overarching theme of seasonality, and that the Corinthian order was understood to stand in-between the Doric and Ionic orders, not as the last in a historical sequence, a ‘modern’ idea that was established much later, after the “rediscovery” of Vitruvius’ text in the Renaissance.