I know that the size of the Olympian Zeus both in height and breadth has been stated; but I can not bestow praise on the measurers, for their recorded measurement comes far short of what any one would infer from looking at the statue. They make the god also to have testified to the art of Phidias. For they say that when the statue was finished, Phidias prayed him to signify if the work was to his mind; and immediately Zeus, struck with lightning that part of the pavement where in our day is a brazen urn with a lid.
And all the pavement in front of the statue is not of white but of black stone. And a border of Parian marble runs round this black stone, as a preservative against spilled oil. For oil is good for the statue at Olympia, as it prevents the ivory being harmed by the dampness of the grove. But in the Acropolis at Athens, in regard to the statue of Athene called the Maiden, it is not oil but water that is advantageously employed to the ivory; for as the citadel is dry by reason of its great height, the statue being made of ivory needs to be sprinkled with water freely. And when I was at Epidaurus, and inquired why they use neither water nor oil to the statue of Æsculapius, the sacristans of the temple informed me that the statue of the god and its throne are over a well.
THERMOPYLÆ[55]
BY RUFUS B. RICHARDSON
We took Thermopylæ at our leisure, passing out from Lamia over the Spercheios on the bridge of Alamana, at which Diakos, famous in ballad, resisted with a small band a Turkish army, until he was at last captured and taken to Lamia to be impaled....
It may be taken as a well-known fact that the Spercheios has since the time of Herodotus made so large an alluvial deposit around its mouth that, if he himself should return to earth, he would hardly recognize the spot which he has described so minutely. The western horn, which in his time came down so near to the gulf as to leave space for a single carriage-road only, is now separated from it by more than a mile of plain. Each visit to Thermopylæ has, however, deepened my conviction that Herodotus exaggerated the impregnability of this pass. The mountain spur which formed it did not rise so abruptly from the sea as to form an impassable barrier to the advance of a determined antagonist. It is of course difficult ground to operate on, but certainly not impossible.
The other narrow place, nearly two miles to the east of this, is still more open, a fact that is to be emphasized, because many topographers, including Colonel Leake, hold that the battle actually took place there, as the great battle between the Romans and Antioches certainly did. This eastern pass is, to be sure, no place where "a thousand may well be stopt by three," and there can not have taken place any great transformation here since classical times, inasmuch as this region is practically out of reach of the Spercheios, and the deposit from the hot sulfur streams, which has so broadened the theater-shaped area enclosed by the two horns, can hardly have contributed to changing the shape of the eastern horn itself.
Artificial fortification was always needed here; but it is very uncertain whether any of the stones that still remain can be claimed as parts of such fortification. It is a fine position for an inferior force to choose for defense against a superior one; but while it can not be declared with absolute certainty that this is not the place where the fighting took place, yet the western pass fits better the description of Herodotus. Besides this, if the western pass had been abandoned to the Persians at the outset the fact would have been worth mentioning.
As to the heroic deed itself, the view that Leonidas threw away his own life and that of the four thousand, that it was magnificent but not strategy, not war, does not take into account the fact that Sparta had for nearly half a century been looked to as the military leader of Greece. It was audacious in the Athenians to fight the battle of Marathon without them, and they did so only because the Spartans did not come at their call. Sparta had not come to Thermopylæ in force, it is true; but her king was there with three hundred of her best men. Only by staying and fighting could he show that Sparta held by right the place she had won. It had to be done. "So the glory of Sparta was not blotted out."