ound during the progress of excavations at Athens,
between the ancient gate of the Peloponnesus and the temple of
Theseus. Having passed from this relic, the visitor will at once
examine the architectural relics of different parts of the Erectheum,
which are more interesting to the architectural student than to the
general visitor. The fragment 109 is the lower portion of a draped
female statue; the relic marked 110 is part of the shaft of an Ionic
column; the capital of a column, 125, is very beautiful: but the
object that will be most attractive to the general visitor is the
statue marked 128, known in architecture as a Caryatid, which was used
in the temple of Pandrosus instead of columns. Hereabouts also, amid
the miscellaneous fragments, the visitor should notice a colossal
headless and heavily-draped figure, marked 111. This is the wreck of
the great statue of Bacchus which surmounted a monument erected three
hundred and twenty years before the Christian era, by Thrasyllus of
Deceleia, to record the victory of a tribe at a great festival of
Bacchus. This statue has been variously christened. Some believe it to
be the fragment of a Niobe; others of a Diana. It is generally allowed
to be a noble sample of Greek sculpture. Hereabouts, also, is the
well-known imperfect statue of Icarus (113), brought in fragments from
the Acropolis. The urn marked 122 is a sepulchral vessel, with figures
in bas-relief; 123 is a sepulchral column, with an Athenian name upon
it; and then the visitor will pass rapidly the fragments of Doric and
Ionic columns from various Greek temples. With the casts beginning
from 136, the visitor will start with his examination of the fragments
from the
TEMPLE OF THESEUS.
When the ashes of Theseus, long after his death, were conveyed in
state to Athens, festivals were instituted in his honour; and a
magnificent temple was erected to his memory nearly five centuries
before our era. The sculptures of the temple represented the exploits
of Theseus, and of Hercules, with whom Theseus was always on terms of
great friendship, and to whom he gave the highest honours his country
could afford. The subject of the frieze (which the visitor will find
against the eastern wall of the saloon, numbered from 136 to 149), has
been variously explained, but is shrewdly conjectured to be the Battle
of the Giants, in which Hercules played a prominent part, and in which
the giants are said to have hurled rocks at their a
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