Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/174

146 The policy which thus turned what was meant to be a confederacy of free states into a kind of empire broke down eventually, but for the present it seemed successful and permanent. In another direction Pericles successfully carried out his ideal of Athens as a centre of art and learning, to which men of letters and artists should naturally come. As a first condition the city was to be supremely beautiful. Buildings, accordingly, of unsurpassed grace and splendour were either begun or completed under his influence. The famous Pheidias (d. about B.C. 430) acted somewhat in the capacity of Minister of Fine Art, and had the general superintendence of the works undertaken at his motion. Various architects were employed, but Pheidias and his assistants added the crown to the glory of the buildings by statues, or by the figures in relief in the pediments, frieze, and metopes of temples. It was not, indeed, at Athens alone that this outburst of building occurred, nor was the activity of Pheidias confined to Athens. In all parts of Hellas, in Sicily, Southern Italy, Corinth, Aegina, and Arcadia, remains of splendid temples still attest the supremacy of Greek genius, and it was at Olympia in Elis that one of his most famous works, the statue of Zeus, in ivory and gold, was completed and dedicated. But the Acropolis at Athens possessed the largest number of his works. The figures in the pediments of the Parthenon and in the frieze and metopes were the creation of his own hands or of those of his school working under his direction. His, too, was the colossal bronze figure of Athena Promachos, holding