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As the maidens entered, with their faces covered, he looked up, and said coldly, "I bade that daughter of unknown parents come into my presence unattended." Eudora keenly felt the reproach implied by the suppression of her name, which Phidias deemed she had dishonoured; and the tremulous motion of her veil betrayed her agitation.
Pericles, who succeeded Cimon, both in the government and in the patronage of art, is said by Plutarch to have entertained the idea of making Athens the capital of federated Greece; in this he failed; but his encouragement of such men as Phidias and Anaxagoras led the way to her acquiring a far more lasting sovereignty over a far wider empire.
He proceeded as follows: "Philothea, whom you all know was, not long since, one of the Canephorae, and embroidered the splendid peplus exhibited at the last Panathenaea humbly begs of the Athenians, that Eudora, Dione, and Geta, slaves of Phidias, may remain under his protection, and not be confiscated with his household goods.
The city was full of sculptors, many of whom had come directly under the influence of Phidias, and they were not left idle. The demand from private individuals for votive sculptures and funeral reliefs must indeed have been abated, but was not extinguished; and in the intervals of the protracted war the state undertook important enterprises with an undaunted spirit.
Of the many attempts FOUR have been most celebrated, the first two known to us only by the descriptions of the ancients, and by copies on gems, which are still preserved; the other two still extant and the acknowledged masterpieces of the sculptor's art. The statue of the Olympian Jupiter by Phidias was considered the highest achievement of this department of Grecian art.
He learns; and what he has learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on perfection.
Who could portray himself as Phidias had portrayed Athene? Could the Muses speak with their own voices as they had spoken by Sappho's? He was especially pleased to see his own moral superiority to Zeus so eloquently enforced by Æschylus, and delighted in criticising the sentiments which the other poets had put into the mouths of the gods.
His statue stands in the sacred grove at Olympia, bearing the simple inscription; 'Phidias, Son of Charmides, sculptor of the Gods. At his death, the Elians bestowed gifts on all his servants; endowed me with the yearly revenues of a farm; and appointed his nephew Pandaenus to the honourable office of preserving the statue of Olympian Zeus."
Christian Fiction, for example, is pervaded by an interest in the development and elevation of character for which we look in vain in the Arabian Nights, where there is no development of character, nothing but incident and adventure. Christian sculpture, inferior perhaps in workmanship to that of Phidias, derives its superior interest from its constant suggestion of a spiritual ideal.
In particular we can learn this from the case of the sculptors and painters of antiquity. Those among them who were marked by high station or favourably recommended have come down to posterity with a name that will last forever; for instance, Myron, Polycletus, Phidias, Lysippus, and the others who have attained to fame by their art.