Other buildings are cited and engraved in the treatise of Mr. Oldfield, but unless we could examine them in detail it would be useless to mention them here. They are valuable rather as offering suggestions on points of construction than as affording us real parallels to the plan of the Mausoleum.
The evidence of existing remains must be studied partly in Sir C. Newton’s History of Discoveries, partly in the Mausoleum Room of the British Museum. Lately Mr. Murray has in that museum set up one of the pillars of the pteron, with base and cornice, a reconstruction which will greatly help those who wish to revive in imagination the glories of the most splendid of ancient sepulchres.
For the manner in which out of the data Mr. Oldfield makes a conjectural restoration of the great tomb we must refer the reader to his admirable paper in Archaeologia. We can only conclude, as we began, by referring to his engraving set side by side with Mr. Pullan’s (Figs. [78], [79]). Of the two it is by far the better, closer to the ancient evidence, less clumsy, more Greek. But of course it may be in turn superseded by other restorations hereafter. In one point both reconstructions are certainly wrong, in placing on the top of the whole, in the chariot of Pythis, the magnificent statues of Mausolus and Artemisia, found on the site, which were doubtless carefully preserved in the interior of the building, and not put almost beyond sight and exposed to the weather on the top of it. I have elsewhere[314] maintained this view by the following arguments:—
1. Pliny mentions the chariot of Pythis, but says nothing of any figures in it.
2. The statues at such a height, in a chariot, and behind gigantic horses, would have been almost invisible from below.
3. Neither Mausolus nor his wife is holding reins or clad in the dress of a charioteer.
4. The head of Mausolus in particular is too well preserved to have been long exposed to the weather.
5. Both the horses and the wheel of the chariot are on a far larger scale than the two statues.
6. They are also very inferior to the statues as works of art.