Word: zeus
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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When Paulus Emilus, Emperor of Rome, beheld the statue of Zeus Olympus which a Greek, Phidias of Athens, had erected at Olympia in ivory and gold, he trembled in all his limbs, and ordered sacrifices to be offered before the image. Twenty years later the Emperor was dead, and in a few years more the statue itself was a fable. Few men alive in the sixth century had ever seen it, fewer still could tell what had become of it. Copies exist, worn faces on coins, busts that show the softening touch of weaker epochs. Last week a new copy...
...studied in copies. Roman workers, little more than capable.artisans, copied bronze in marble, marble in bronze; statues in the round were copied in relief; the size was reduced, even the proportions altered. Only two works of Phidias have been surely recognized in copies-the Athena Parthenos and the Olympian Zeus...
...perfect was the Zeus that later Greeks professed to believe that it had descended from heaven by the will of the gods. A single contemporary description exists- that of Pausanias. "It was an image made neither of marble nor of bronze, but of gold and ivory, embellished with ebony, lacquer, and precious stones." The god, he said, held a Victory on his right hand; his left rested on a sceptre on which was perched an eagle. The throne and a footstool were elaborately carved with figures and reliefs, depicting the contests of Centaurs and Lapiths, the wars and weddings...
Phidias made his Zeus shortly after the dedication of the Parthenon in 438 B. C. His co-operation with the grandiose scheme* of Pericles for making his city more beautiful had involved him in litigation with certain private patrons and when the Olympians asked him to make a Zeus for their temple he seized the invitation as a good excuse for getting out of Athens. It is unlikely that he worked in "gold and ivory"; he was no metalsmith although he cast some of his heads in bronze; he would not have known what to do with the "lacquer...
...serene Olympian at Weimar' as been a favorite phrase applied to Olympus in his old age, as though Goethe, horned in Weimar, were like Zeus in Olympus, in serene calmness far removed from human cares in troubles. But what must we think of a man who, at the age of 74, falls passionately in involve with a girl of 19? . . . 'Passion rings suffering,' he wrote at that time. But the fruit of this passion was one of the deepest and most beautiful love poems ever written, 'The Elegy of Marienad...