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 consider that the gold alone used upon it was valued at forty-four talents, equal to five hundred thousand dollars of our money,—­an immense sum in that age.  Some critics suppose that this statue was overloaded with ornament, but all antiquity was unanimous in its admiration.  The exactness and finish of detail were as remarkable as the grandeur of the proportions.  Another of the famous works of Phidias was a colossal bronze statue of Athene Promachos, sixty feet in height, on the Acropolis between the Propylaea and the Parthenon.  But both of these yielded to the colossal statue of Zeus in his great temple at Olympia, represented in a sitting posture, forty feet high, on a pedestal of twenty feet.  The god was seated on a throne.  Ebony, gold, ivory, and precious stones formed, with