t wealth are no romance or idle story, was his construction of the
public and sacred buildings.

The materials were stone, brass, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress-wood;
the artisans that wrought and fashioned them were smiths and carpenters,
moulders, founders and braziers, stone-cutters, dyers, goldsmiths,
ivory-workers, painters, embroiderers, turners; those again that
conveyed them to the town for use, merchants and mariners and
ship-masters by sea; and by land, cartwrights, cattle-breeders,
wagoners, rope-makers, flax-workers, shoe-makers and leather-dressers,
road-makers, miners. And every trade in the same nature, as a captain
in an army has his particular company of soldiers under him, had its own
hired company of journeymen and laborers belonging to it banded
together as in array, to be as it were the instrument and body for the
performance of the service of these public works distributed plenty
through every age and condition.

As then grew the works up, no less stately in size than exquisite in
form, the workmen striving to outvie the material and the design with
the beauty of their workmanship, yet the most wonderful thing of all was
the rapidity of their execution. Undertakings, any one of which singly
might have required, they thought, for their completion, several
successions and ages of men, were every one of them accomplished in the
height and prime of one man's political service. Although they say,
too, that Zeuxis once, having heard Agatharchus, the painter, boast of
despatching his work with speed and ease, replied, "I take a long
time." For ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting
solidity or exactness of beauty; the expenditure of time allowed to a
man's pains beforehand for the production of a thing is repaid by way of
interest with a vital force for its preservation when once produced.
For which reason Pericles's works are especially admired, as having been
made quickly, to last long. For every particular piece of his work was
immediately, even at that time, for its beauty and elegance, antique;
and yet in its vigor and freshness looks to this day as if it were just
executed. There is a sort of bloom of newness upon those works of his,
preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial
spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.

Phidias had the oversight of all the works, and was surveyor-general,
though upon the various portions other g