* Philokaloumen met’ euteleias, says Thucydides’ Pericles: “We love beauty without extravagance.”²

* “Among the ancients,” said Stendhal, “the beautiful is only the high relief of the useful.”⁴

* He repaid Cimon by making love to his sister Elpinice, and painting her portrait as Laodicea among the women of Troy.¹¹

* A block of marble discovered in Rome in 1887 when the Villa Ludovisi was torn down. The original is in the Museo delle Terme in Rome; there is a good copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

* A method of indicating the depth to which, at various points, a block of sculptural material is to be cut by a carver before the artist takes it in hand. This process came into use in Hellenistic Greece.²⁶

* In the Capitoline Museum, Rome; probably a copy of a fifth-century Greek original

† In the Athens Museum; reproduced in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* We have perhaps an echo of its majesty in the noble head of Juno in the British Museum, reputed to be a copy from Polycleitus.

† Perhaps an Amazon in the Vatican is a Roman copy of this work.

* The Museo delle Terme has the torso of a fine marble copy by a Roman artist. The Munich Antiquarium has a late copy in bronze; the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a copy uniting the Vatican torso with the head from the Palazzo Lancelotti.

† There is a good copy of the Lateran copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* The Nike was pieced together from fragments unearthed by the Germans at Olympia in 1890, and is now in the Olympia Museum.—Almost as beautiful are the Nereids, or Sea Maidens, which were found headless among the ruins of a monument in Lycian Xanthus, and are now in the British Museum. The Greek spirit had penetrated even into non-Greek Asia.

* No authentic copy remains.

† It was carried off to Constantinople about A.D. 330, and appears to have been destroyed in a riot there in 1203.³¹

‡ If we may judge from the “Lenormant” and “Varvaka” models of this statue that are preserved in the Athens Museum, we should not have cared much for the Athene Parthenos. The first has a stout frame and a swollen face, and the breast of the second is crawling with sacred snakes.

§ Ca. 438. There is much uncertainty about the date, and about the sequence of events in the later years of Pheidias’ life.³³

* Nothing remains of this Zeus but fragments of the pedestal.

† A Draped Venus in the Louvre may be a copy of this statue.

* Thirty-eight of the columns remain, the walls of the naos, and parts of the inner colonnade. Fragments of the frieze are in the British Museum.

† Now in the Olympia Museum.

* The name is a mistake, since this temple, erected in 425, could not have been the Theseum to which, in 469, Cimon brought the supposed bones of Theseus; but time sanctifies error as well as theft, and the traditional name is commonly retained for lack of a certain designation.

† The Theseum is the best preserved of all ancient Greek buildings; even so it lacks its marble tiles, its murals, its interior statuary, its pedimental sculptures, and nearly all of its external coloring. The metopes are so badly damaged that their reliefs are almost undistinguishable.

* Statues of Nike, or Victory, were often made without wings, so that she might not be able to abandon the city. The temple was pulled down by the Turks in A.D. 1687 to make a fortress. Lord Elgin rescued some slabs of the frieze and sent them to the British Museum. In 1835 the stones of the temple were put together again; the restored building was replaced on the original site, and terra-cotta casts were substituted for the missing parts of the badly damaged frieze.

* These columns, rather than those of the Parthenon, set the style for later architecture. The foot of each was modulated into the stylobate by an “Attic base” of three members, articulated by fillets or bands. The top of the column was graduated into the voluted capital by a band of flowers. The entablature had a richly decorated molding, a frieze of black stone, and, under the cornice, a series of reliefs. The egg-and-dart and honeysuckle ornament of the molding was as carefully carved as the sculpture; the artists were paid as much for a foot of such molding as for a figure in the frieze.⁴⁸

† This term was applied to the figures by the Roman architect Vitruvius, from the name given to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae in Laconia. The Athenians called them simply korai, or Maidens.

* The naming of the Parthenon figures is mostly conjectural.

* The Parthenon, like the Erechtheum and the Theseum, was preserved through its use as a Christian church; it needed no great change of name, being in each case dedicated to the Virgin. After the Turkish occupation in 1456 it was transformed into a mosque, and acquired a minaret. In 1687, when the Venetians besieged Athens, the Turks used the temple to store each day’s supply of powder for their artillery. The Venetian commander, so informed, ordered his gunners to fire upon the Parthenon. A shell pierced the roof, exploded the powder, and laid half the building in ruins. After capturing the city Morosini tried also to take the pediment statuary, but his workmen dropped and smashed the figures in lowering them. In 1800 Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Turkey, secured permission to remove a part of the sculptures to the British Museum, on the ground that they would be safer there than at Athens against weather and war. His spoils included twelve statues, fifteen metopes, and fifty-six slabs of the frieze. The Museum’s expert on sculpture advised against buying this material; it was only after ten years of negotiations that the Museum agreed to pay $175,000 for them, which was less than half what Lord Elgin had spent in securing and transporting them.⁵³ A few years later, during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), the Acropolis was twice bombarded, and much of the Erechtheum was destroyed.⁵⁴ Some metopes of the Parthenon are still in place; a few slabs of the frieze are in the Athens Museum, and a few others in the Louvre, The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, have built a replica, of the Parthenon., in the same dimensions as the original, with like materials, and, so far as our knowledge goes, with the same decorations and coloring; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art contains a small hypothetical reproduction of the interior.

* One might also note the lack of order in the arrangement of the buildings on the Acropolis, or in the sacred enclosure at Olympia; but it is difficult to say whether this disorder was a defect of taste or an accident of history.