dyers, melters and moulders of gold, and ivory painters, embroiderers, workers in relief; and also men to bring them to the city, such as sailors and captains of ships and pilots for such as came by sea; and, for those who came by land, carriage builders, horse breeders, drivers, rope makers, linen manufacturers, shoemakers, road menders, and miners.  Each trade, moreover, employed a number of unskilled labourers, so that, in a word, there would be work for persons of every age and every class, and general prosperity would be the result.

XIII.  These buildings were of immense size, and unequalled in beauty and grace, as the workmen endeavoured to make the execution surpass the design in beauty; but what was most remarkable was the speed with which they were built.  All these edifices, each of which one would have thought, it would have taken many generations to complete, were all finished during the most brilliant period of one man’s administration.  We are told that Zeuxis, hearing Agatharchus, the painter, boasting how easily and rapidly he could produce a picture, said, “I paint very slowly.”  Ease, and speed of execution, seldom produces work of any permanent value or delicacy.  It is the time which is spent in laborious production for which we are repaid by the durable character of the result.  And this makes Perikles’s work all the more wonderful, because it was built in a short time, and yet has lasted for ages.  In beauty each of them at once appeared venerable as soon as it was built; but even at the present day the work looks as fresh as ever, for they bloom with an eternal freshness which defies time, and seems to make the work instinct with an unfading spirit of youth.

The overseer and manager of the whole was Pheidias, although there were other excellent architects and workmen, such as Kallikrates and Iktinus, who built the Parthenon on the site of the old Hekatompedon, which had been destroyed by the Persians, and Koroebus, who began to build the Temple of Initiation at Eleusis, but who only lived to see the columns erected and the architraves placed upon them.  On his death, Metagenes, of Xypete, added the frieze and the upper row of columns, and Xenokles, of Cholargos, crowned it with the domed roof over the shrine.  As to the long wall, about which Sokrates says that he heard Perikles bring forward a motion, Kallikrates undertook to build it.  Kratinus satirises the work for being slowly accomplished, saying

     “He builds in speeches, but he does no work.”

The Odeum, which internally consisted of many rows of seats and many columns, and externally of a roof sloping on all sides from a central point, was said to have been built in imitation of the king of Persia’s tent, and was built under Perikles’s direction.  For this reason Kratinus alludes to him in his play of the ’Thracian Woman’—­

    “Our Jove with lofty skull appears;
    The Odeum on his head he bears,
    Because he fears the oyster-shell no more.”