Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/237

 The Reptilse of Persia aiid the Athenian Empi^-e 189 Phidias is the greatest of the sculptors at Athens. In a long Sculpture — band of carved marble extending entirely around the four sides of the Parthenon, at the top inside the colonnades (Plate IV, p. 192), Phidias and his pupils have portrayed, as in a glorified vision, the sovereign people of Athens moving in the stately procession of the Pan-Athenaic festival (Fig. 92). To be sure, these are not individual portraits of Athenian folk, but only types - which lived in the exalted vision of the sculptor, and not on the streets of Athens. But such sculpture had never been seen before. How different is the supreme beauty of these perfect human forms from the cruder figures which adorned the temple burned by the Persians. The citizen has seen the shattered fragments of these older works cleared away and covered with rubbish when the architects leveled off the summit of the Acropolis.^ Inside the new temple gleams the colossal figure of Athena, wrought by the cunning hand of Phidias in gold and ivory — his masterpiece. Even from the city below the citizen can discern, touched with bright colors, the heroic figures of the gods with which Phidias has filled the triangular gable ends of the building.^ These are the gods to whom the faith of the Athenian people The drama still reverently looks up. Have not Athena and these gods raised the power of Athens to the imperial position which she now occupies ? Do not all the citizens recall ^schylus' drama ^Eschylus " The Persians," in which the memories of the great deliverance from Persian conquest are enshrined ? How that tremendous day of Salamis was made to live again in the imposing picture which the poet's genius brought before them, disclosing the mighty purpose of the gods to save Hellas ! As he skirts the sheer precipice of the Acropolis the citizen reaches the theater 1 Till recently they lay buried under the rubbish on the slope (Fig. 91). The excavations of the Greek government have recovered them, and they are now in the Acropolis Museum at Athens. 2 These figures will be found at the end of Chapter VII (p. 195). They repre- sent the battle between Athena and Poseidon, god of the sea, for possession of Attica,