On the fourth was Mars in Corinthian brass, and a lion at his feet.
On the fifth was Venus in copper, the metal of which Aristonides made Athamas’s statue, that expressed in a blushing whiteness his confusion at the sight of his son Learchus, who died at his feet of a fall.
On the sixth was Mercury in hydrargyre. I would have said quicksilver, had it not been fixed, malleable, and unmovable. That nimble deity had a stork at his feet.
On the seventh was the Moon in silver, with a greyhound at her feet.
The size of these statues was somewhat more than a third part of the pillars on which they stood, and they were so admirably wrought according to mathematical proportion that Polycletus’s canon could hardly have stood in competition with them.
The bases of the pillars, the chapters, the architraves, zoophores, and cornices were Phrygian work of massive gold, purer and finer than any that is found in the rivers Leede near Montpellier, Ganges in India, Po in Italy, Hebrus in Thrace, Tagus in Spain, and Pactolus in Lydia.
The small arches between the pillars were of the same precious stone of which the pillars next to them were. Thus, that arch was of sapphire which ended at the hyacinth pillar, and that was of hyacinth which went towards the diamond, and so on.
Above the arches and chapters of the pillars, on the inward front, a cupola was raised to cover the fountain. It was surrounded by the planetary statues, heptagonal at the bottom, and spherical o’ top, and of crystal so pure, transparent, well-polished, whole and uniform in all its parts, without veins, clouds, flaws, or streaks, that Xenocrates never saw such a one in his life.
Within it were seen the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve months of the year, with their properties, the two equinoxes, the ecliptic line, with some of the most remarkable fixed stars about the antartic pole and elsewhere, so curiously engraven that I fancied them to be the workmanship of King Necepsus, or Petosiris, the ancient mathematician.
On the top of the cupola, just over the centre of the fountain, were three noble long pearls, all of one size, pear fashion, perfectly imitating a tear, and so joined together as to represent a flower-de-luce or lily, each of the flowers seeming above a hand’s breadth. A carbuncle jetted out of its calyx or cup as big as an ostrich’s egg, cut seven square (that number so beloved of nature), and so prodigiously glorious that the sight of it had like to have made us blind, for the fiery sun or the pointed lightning are not more dazzling and unsufferably bright.