se figures which are
designed to represent beauty of form. Even the comparatively few statues
which have survived the wars and violence of two thousand years,
convince us that the moderns can only imitate; they can produce no
creations equal to those by Athenian artists. "No mechanical copying of
Greek statues, however skilful the copyist, can ever secure for modern
sculpture the same noble and effective character it possessed among the
Greeks, for the simple reason that the imitation, close as may be the
resemblance, is but the result of the eye and hand, while the original
is the expression of a true and deeply felt sentiment. Art was not
sustained by the patronage of a few who affect to have what is called
_taste_; in Greece the artist, having a common feeling for the beautiful
with his countrymen, produced his works for the public, which were
erected in places of honor and dedicated in temples of the gods."

It was not until the Persian wars awakened among the Greeks the
slumbering consciousness of national power, and Athens became the
central point of Grecian civilization, that sculpture, like architecture
and painting, reached its culminating point of excellence under Phidias
and his contemporaries. Great artists had previously made themselves
famous, like Miron, Polycletus, and Ageladas; but the great riches which
flowed into Athens at this time gave a peculiar stimulus to art,
especially under the encouragement of such a ruler as Pericles, whose
age was the golden era of Grecian history.

Pheidias, or Phidias, was to sculpture what Aeschylus was to tragic
poetry,--the representative of the sublime and grand. He was born four
hundred and eighty-four years before Christ, and was the pupil of
Ageladas. He stands at the head of the ancient sculptors, not from what
_we_ know of him, for his masterpieces have perished, but from the
estimation in which he was held by the greatest critics of antiquity. It
was to him that Pericles intrusted the adornment of the Parthenon, and
the numerous and beautiful sculptures of the frieze and the pediment
were the work of artists whom he directed. His great work in that
wonderful edifice was the statue of the goddess Minerva herself, made of
gold and ivory, forty feet in height, standing victorious, with a spear
in her left hand and an image of victory in her right, with helmet on
her head, and her shield resting by her side. The cost of this statue
may be estimated when we conside