“He’s called that because his temple is here at Olympia, I suppose?” Rachel said. “Agis told us something about Phidias. He made the statue of Minerva in the Parthenon, didn’t he?”
“And the frieze of riding boys too,” put in Diana.
“Yes—he was the sculptor who adorned the Parthenon at Athens,” said Sheshà, as they followed the huge crowd that was moving towards the temple of Zeus. “But the citizens were ungrateful to him. Therefore he left Athens, and came to live here, near Olympia. And for the people of this part of Greece, he carved a statue even larger and more famous than that of Minerva in the Parthenon—the statue you are about to behold.”
“Look! The doors are open now. They were shut when we saw the temple before,” cried Rachel.
“Let us walk where we may gain a view through the gates,” Sheshà suggested. In another moment the children saw the interior of the temple.
There, towering upwards to the height of sixty feet, they caught a glimpse of a majestic figure. It gleamed with the white ivory and flashed with the gold which crowned it, and for a second they saw a grand calm face looking down upon the olive-wreathed victors who bowed low before the shrine.
“You behold the masterpiece of Phidias—the Seventh Wonder of the World,” murmured Sheshà. “Jupiter Olympius from his temple blesses the victors in the games he was the first to institute.”
The voice of their guide sounded so faint and far away that the children scarcely caught the last words.
But blending with them, uttered in fact almost at the same time, came a remark from Mr. Sheston.... “You see where the frieze, now on the walls of this Museum, really belongs? Phidias, the sculptor, in all probability, saw just such a procession at the Olympic Games, celebrated throughout the world, and even now not forgotten. Didn’t you ask me what the word Olympia meant? Now you know....”