XLVII. Phidias’s Image of Olympian Zeus.—

The testimony of antiquity to the extraordinary beauty and majesty of the image is very strong. The Roman general Paulus Aemilius was deeply moved by the sight of it; he felt as if in the presence of the god himself, and declared that Phidias alone had succeeded in embodying the Homeric conception of Zeus. Cicero says that Phidias fashioned the image, not after any living model, but after that ideal beauty which he saw with the inward eye alone. Quintilian asserts that the beauty of the image served to strengthen religion, the majesty of the image equalling the majesty of the god. A poet declared that either the god must have come from heaven to earth to show Phidias his image, or that Phidias must have gone to heaven to behold it. The statue was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world, and to die without having seen it was deemed a misfortune. The rhetorician Dio Chrysostom, a man of fine taste, extolled it in one of his speeches. He calls it “the most beautiful image on earth, and the dearest to the gods.” He represents Phidias speaking of his “peaceful and gentle Zeus, the overseer, as it were, of united and harmonious Greece, whom by the help of my art and of the wise and good city of Elis I set up, mild and august in an unconstrained attitude, the giver of life and breath and all good things, the common father and saviour of mankind.” And again in a fine passage he says: “Methinks that if one who is heavy laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortune and sorrow in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that are incident to the life of man.”