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Updated: May 16, 2025
And it may be true the legend as Pausanias tells it 600 years after that the old wooden idol having been burnt, and the worship of Demeter neglected till a famine ensued, the Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of Delphi, hired Onatas, a contemporary of Polygnotus and Phidias, to make them a bronze replica of the old idol, from some old copy and from a drama of his own. The story may be true.
There, robed in black, she tarried so long that the fruits of the earth were perishing, and mankind would have died of famine if Pan had not soothed the angry goddess and persuaded her to quit the cave. In memory of this event, the Phigalians set up an image of the Black Demeter in the cave; it represented a woman dressed in a long robe, with the head and mane of a horse.
It was erected by the Phigalians, out of gratitude to Apollo the Helper, who kept from their city a plague which ravaged the rest of the Peloponnesus. Owing to its secluded position, it has escaped the fate of other temples, and might be restored from its own undestroyed materials. The cella had been thrown down, but thirty-five out of thirty-eight columns are still standing.
It would not seem that such a commission gave much scope to his artistic powers; but it is noteworthy that the Phigalians employed one of the most famous sculptors of the day. Elsewhere the conditions were more favourable, and it was possible for the artist, while conforming to the accepted type, to give it a more correct form and more pleasing features.
And this image may have been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and Poseidon that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the place, till the Phigalians were glad for it was profitable as well as honourable to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for the loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all the earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her forth, and restore fertility to the world.
No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with the head of a mare. The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked Admiralty Islanders.
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