Pytheos was a theorist as much as a builder, and at Priene he treated the temple as a problem in proportion. Every dimension was an integral multiple of the Attic foot, the standard unit of 29.46 centimeters used in Athenian construction. The peristyle ran eleven columns long by six wide. The shafts rose 11.5 meters, the same height as those of his Mausoleum. He left the walls almost entirely undecorated, as if any sculpted ornament would muddy the math. The exception was the southern wall, which carried inscriptions, including Alexander's edict to the Prienians granting them autonomy and tax relief. The Britannia Encyclopaedia later called it a textbook example of pure Ionic style. The German archaeologist Gottfried Gruben pushed back, arguing that academic late-Classical elements had been mixed in. Either way, Pytheos was working out a theory in stone, and the building was meant to be read as much as seen.

Construction began around 350 BC, before Alexander was born. The eastern half went up first, including the pediment, and Alexander's dedication followed in 334 BC. Then the project stalled. The western half remained unfinished for almost two centuries. The Prienians kept building, on and off, through the entire Hellenistic period and into the early Roman Republic. By the second century BC the city itself was draining away. The Maeander River, which once gave Priene access to the sea, was silting up. Mud blocked the river mouth. A lake formed. Mosquitoes bred in vast swarms. People moved to Miletus to escape the gnats. The temple was finally completed under Augustus, whose name was carved into the eastern architrave as a deified emperor. He died before the inscription was even weathered. Construction had taken roughly three hundred years.

What looks like white marble today was once a riot of color. Excavators found traces of cinnabar red and a copper blue-green pigment on the moldings. The Ionic egg-and-dart was painted red. The bead-and-reel sat against red. The figures of giants and Amazons on the coffered ceiling were left in marble white, set against painted blue backgrounds, so that the human and mythological forms read as light against shadow. Polychromy on Greek temples was the rule, not the exception, but the rule has been forgotten because almost all of it has weathered away. At Priene the traces survived in protected corners of the cella, the inner chamber where a six-and-a-half meter statue of Athena once stood. The statue was three times smaller than the original Athena Parthenos in Athens, and its exact form is unknown.

Two French travelers, Jacob Spon and George Wheler, recorded the site in the 17th century, the first modern witnesses. In 1764, Richard Chandler arrived on an Asia Minor expedition funded by London's Society of Dilettanti, a club of British aristocrats interested in classical antiquity. He shipped fragments to the British Museum, where they remain. German archaeologists have worked the site since. The lowest layer of the cella stayed undisturbed across two thousand years. Pillaging was minor. Earthquakes did most of the damage. Today the temple's columns lie scattered across the terrace like fallen trees, drums tumbled off their bases, capitals upended. Five columns have been re-erected. The rest is a field of carved stone.

Priene itself is the rarest kind of ancient site, a Hellenistic city preserved almost intact because no one rebuilt over it after the population left. The grid of streets, the agora, the theater carved into the hillside, the bouleuterion where the council met, all sit on terraces stepped up the slope of Mycale mountain. From the temple terrace the view runs across the broad green plain that was once the Aegean Sea. The Maeander has filled the gulf entirely. The coast is now thirteen kilometers west. Ships that once called at Priene's harbor now would have to anchor in farmland.