Persian invader. At the
time when a demand occurred for new statues of the gods, the rapid
progress of the art of sculpture made it inevitable that these new
statues should not be mere reproductions or reminiscences of the ones
they replaced, but fresh and original conceptions, worthy of the
increased skill of the artist and of the nobler ideals of the people.
And by one of those coincidences which we meet so often both in the
history of art and in that of literature, just at the time when the
material conditions, the spirit of the people, and the rapid advance of
art gave the utmost scope for artistic creation, there arose the man of
transcendent genius to give full expression to the religious and
artistic aspirations of the time. The age of Pericles was also the age
of Phidias. It is true that there was an interval between the defeat of
the Persians and the period of highest attainment in Greece; and during
this interval many temples were built or rebuilt, and many statues were
set up as objects of worship or as dedications to the gods. Some of
these may have anticipated to a certain extent the work of Phidias;
several of them were of colossal size, like his chief masterpieces, and
thus, even from the technical point of view, may have prepared the way
before him; one, the Apollo by Calamis at Apollonia, was about
forty-five feet high, and so actually rivalled the Zeus and Athena of
Phidias in size. But of these statues we know little or nothing. As to
the two most famous works of Phidias himself, the Athena Parthenos
within the Parthenon at Athens and the Zeus at Olympia, we are better
informed, so far as elaborate descriptions and the somewhat rhetorical
appreciations of later writers are concerned; and we possess some extant
copies which tell us something of their pose and attributes. But any
notion we may form as to their true artistic and religious character
must be mainly dependent upon our imagination; and even for their
relation to the religious ideals of the people we are dependent for the
most part upon indirect evidence. Though the art of sculpture was so
closely bound up with the life of the people in Greece, we find very few
references to its greatest works; it is evident that the Athenians, for
example, took the greatest pride in the buildings that adorned their
Acropolis and in the sculptures they contained; yet when Pericles, as
reported by Thucydides, speaks of the statue of the Athena Parthenos, it
is