The Historians' History of the World 03

Like its capital, Attica too had monuments of victory, of patriotic pride, and pious gratitude to the gods: and all these monuments were constructed in the severe style whose principal models we have just studied. In the sacred city of Eleusis, in sight of Salamis, a vast religious edifice was built, capable of containing the multitude of those initiated into the mysteries of Ceres. Rhamnus which overlooks the plain of Marathon, raised a sanctuary to Nemesis, the goddess of just vengeance; and on the summit of Cape Sunium, two temples consecrated to Poseidon and Athene, the tutelary deities of Attica, signalised from afar, to sailors coming from the isles or the coast of Asia, their approach to the ground where the Persians had found a tomb and the Greeks liberty. When on the days of the sacred festivals, the people arrived in long theoria (embassies) at the promontory now called Cape Colonna, they saw extending at their feet that sea which had now become their own domain, and fervently thanked the two divinities for having given them: for their leaders, political wisdom; for their mariners, favourable winds. At a later time philosophy was to take its seat near the temple of the gods, and we, like it, believe that Sunium heard some of the discourses of Plato.

The school of Athens extended her influence to distant places. It did not build the temple of Olympia, but Phidias made the statue of Zeus; Pæonius of Mende and Alcamenes of Lemnos have been credited, without absolute proof, with the sculptures of the two pediments, on one of which was represented the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus, and on the other the contests of the Lapithæ and Centaurs at the nuptials of Pirithous.

Ruins of Temple of the Olympian Jove. Athens

Time, barbarians, perhaps fire, destroyed the temple, and the Alpheus, in overflowing its banks, covered the plain of Altis which Pausanias had seen in such beauty with eight or ten metres (about 26 or 32 ft.) of alluvium. Before the Expédition de Morée, which brought away some fragments for the Louvre, even the spot in which so much magnificence stood was unknown. The successful excavations of the German commission have brought to light a victory of Pæonius, a Hermes of Praxiteles and other masterpieces.

The Ionic style is also native to the coast of Asia, where the Doric had preceded it. It was exhibited there in all its grace in the sixth century, when the temple of Ephesus was erected. The Cretan Chersiphron and his son Metagenes began its construction, which was carried on, like that of our Gothic cathedrals, with a tardiness that extended it over two or three centuries. Its columns, several of which were given by Crœsus, had a height of eight diameters, with bases which lacked the Doric columns and voluted capitals which the ancients compared to the drooping curls of a woman’s hair. Of the Ionic temple at Samos, burned by the Persians, a single column remains upright, and according to the diameter of the base it was sixteen metres (about 52½ ft.) high. This temple was therefore a colossal structure. At Athens the Erechtheum and the temple of the Wingless Victory are in the same style, but of very small dimensions. The first contained the oldest image of Athene: a statue of olive wood which was said to have fallen from heaven. In the second was a warlike Minerva; in order to attach her permanently to the fortunes of Athens, the sculptor had not given her the wings which are the attributes of the fickle goddess of lucky battles.

In the time of Pericles the Corinthian style has not yet appeared but is about to do so. It is related that Callimachus, having seen on a child’s tomb at Corinth, a basket filled with its playthings and enveloped in the graceful curves of the leaves of an acanthus, took from it the idea of the Corinthian capital. The date of his birth is unknown, but since Ictinus after the plague of Athens, and Scopas in 396 constructed, the one at Phigalia, the other at Tegea, two temples in which traces have been found of the new style of architecture, its invention must have followed very soon after the construction of the Propylæa.