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A solitary being stood upon the towering crag of the Acropolis, amid the ruins of the Temple of Minerva, and gazed upon the inspiring scene. Around him rose the matchless memorials of antique art; immortal columns whose symmetry baffles modern proportion, serene Caryatides, bearing with greater grace a graceful burthen, carvings of delicate precision, and friezes breathing with heroic life.
Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the formidable friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and there, on the bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous trails which reveal the gods and goddesses engraved in the stone. They were watching in myriads around me, as I knew well, coifed, all of them, in discs or great horns.
Having executed the whole of that ornamentation in half-relief and low-relief, he then divided it up with little scenes, landscapes, foliage, and various friezes, in which he touched the highest level, as it were, that art can reach in that field.
Cracked and time-worn friezes hung upon the walls, grey old busts of senators and soldiers with their fighting heads and their hard, cruel faces peered out from the corners.
Above the roofs at the lower end could be seen houses and more houses with white walls climbing up the mountain slope; and in the background the walls of the Acropolis, the colonnades of the temples sustaining the friezes consisting of enormous carved stones. Actæon, following the road leading to the Forum, was reminded of the maritime suburb of the Piræus.
He saw the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes; he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses of Aeschylus: he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the streets reciting the Shield of Achilles or the Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under a liberal and generous discipline: he was a judge compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite arguments.
Within this space are seen large blocks of sculptured stone, in friezes, cornices, and mouldings. The appearance of the Sea of Galilee, as seen from this point of view at Capernaum, is very grand. Its greatest length runs nearly north and south, from fifteen to eighteen miles, while its breadth averages from five to six.
Based, perhaps, on an admiration of one whose later exploits have dwarfed his earlier in the general estimation, there was yet no more resemblance than between the string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes.
If the day shall come when some future people shall yet once again build their city on this same eternal site, and some future social cataclysm shall have overwhelmed the works and civilization of the present time, those future builders will not find walls constructed in great part of the fragments of statues and the richly-carved friezes of yet older builders and artists, as we have found.
This hall, which is two squares long and one square wide, has the ceiling made not with lunettes, but after the manner of a groined vaulting; wherefore Domenico executed the compartments in painting, thinking that this would give the best result, with friezes and cornices overlaid with gold, and all so beautifully, that, without any stucco-work or other ornaments, they are so well painted and so graceful that they appear to be really in relief.
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