Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/36

 22 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY 31. In accordance with the conception prevailing in Homer, Phidias fashioned the artistically ideal figure of Zeus about 432 B.C. for the temple at Olympia, where the great national games were celebrated in his honor. The ancients believed that during the work there had been before the mind's eye of the artist the words of the Iliad (i. 528 sq.):- " He spoke, and awful bends his sable brows, Shakes his ambrosial curls, and gives the nod, The stamp of fate and sanction of the god : High heaven with trembling the dread signal took, And all Olympus to the centre shook." (Pope's translation.) But Lysippus (about 338 B.C.) is regarded as the creator of the most common type in the representations of Zeus in the art of later times, a type of which a noble example appears in the mask of Otricoli. 32. To a much smaller sphere than Zeus is his son, the lightning god Hephaestus (Lat. Volcanus), confined, who probably was originally peculiar to a different Grecian tribe from that in which the worship of Zeus prevailed. He was born of Hera during a quarrel with Zeus (i.e. in a thunderstorm) ; but since he was lame (i.e. moved with a short, quick motion, like the lightning), his mother herself flung him down into the sea (a figurative expres- sion for the descending lightning), where, in a cave, con- cealed for nine years, he was nursed by the sea, goddesses Thetis and Eurynome. The latter part of this legend doubtless refers to that part of the year in which the lightning seems to be hidden away somewhere in the cloudy vault of the heavens. He is conducted back to heaven by Dionysus, i.e. in the spring; here he cleaves