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We read that the statue was still standing so late as 395 A.D., and it is said that its towering height and threatening aspect caused a panic terror in Alaric and his horde of barbarians when they climbed the Acropolis to plunder its temple of its treasure. But it was under the rule of Pericles that Phidias was to find at Athens his richest employment.
Their towns were generally dismantled, while the imperial city herself was fortified with the greatest care and sumptuousness; the accumulated revenues from her tributaries serving to strengthen and adorn to the utmost her havens, her docks, her arsenals, her theatres, and her shrines, and to array her in that plenitude of architectural magnificence the ruins of which still attest the intellectual grandeur of the age and people which produced a Pericles to plan and a Phidias to execute.
After we came to Elis, Phidias treated me with more tenderness and confidence than he had ever done. Perhaps he observed that my proud, impetuous character was chastened and subdued by affliction and repentance. Though we were in the habit of talking unreservedly, he never alluded to the foolish conduct that offended him so seriously.
He is said to have been a great epic painter, as Phidias was an epic sculptor and Homer an epic poet. He expressed, like them, ideal beauty. But his pictures had no elaborate grouping, which is one of the excellences of modern art. His figures were all in regular lines, like the bas-reliefs on a frieze. He took his subjects from epic poetry.
To this, Pericles replied, "We are certainly much indebted to those artists for many of the beautiful and graceful details of that sublime composition; but with regard to the majestic design of the Parthenon, Phidias conquered alone, and may therefore justly be crowned alone." A vote was taken on the question of exile, and the black pebbles predominated.
Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
Such a process may answer in sculpture, because there a quantity of rough-hewing occurs, which can no more be improved by committing it to a Phidias, than a common shop-bill could be improved in its arithmetic by Sir Isaac Newton. It is true, the great dramatic authors were often collaborateurs, but their case was essentially different.
But the cheeks and the front of the face are taken from the 'Garden' Goddess; and so are the lines of the hands, the shapely wrists, the delicately-tapering fingers. Phidias and the Lemnian Athene will give the outline of the face, and the well-proportioned nose, and lend new softness to the cheeks; and the same artist may shape her neck and closed lips, to resemble those of his Amazon.
I want him to know English, and how to worship the Master of Life. Will you take him to your school lodge?" The tall master bowed low, and took the Indian boy by the hand. The boy was a princely youth. His figure would have held the eye of a sculptor in long admiration. The chisel of a Phidias could hardly have exceeded such a form.
She was represented as the bride of Zeus, who annually renewed her maidenhood at the great Argive festival of the divine marriage; and we cannot doubt that Polyclitus expressed in this statue, which was hardly less famous than the masterpieces of Phidias, all the essential features of the great religious ideals that underlay this primitive rite.
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