The poets, in giving a moral and human character to the gods, never quite forgot their origin as powers of nature.  Jupiter Olympus is still the god of the sky, the thunderer.  Neptune is the ruler of the ocean, the earth-shaker.  Phoebus-Apollo is the sun-god.  Artemis is the moonlight, pure, chaste, and cold.  But the sculptors finally leave behind these reminiscences, and in their hands the deities become purely moral beings.  On the brow of Jupiter sits a majestic calm; he is no angry wielder of the thunderbolt, but the gracious and powerful ruler of the three worlds.  This conception grew up gradually, until it was fully realized by Phidias in his statues at Olympia and Elis.  Tranquil power and victorious repose appear even in the standing Jupiters, in which last the god appears as more youthful and active.

The conception of Jupiter by Phidias was a great advance on that of Homer.  He, to be sure, professed to take his idea from the famous passage of the Iliad where Jove shakes his ambrosial curls and bends his awful brows; and, nodding, shakes heaven and earth.  That might be his text, but the sermon which he preached was far higher than it.  This was the great statue of Jupiter, his masterpiece, made of ivory and gold for the temple at Olympia, where the games were celebrated by the united Hellenic race.  These famous games, which occurred every fifth year, lasting five days, calling together all Greece, were to this race what the Passover was to the Jewish nation, sacred, venerable, blending divine worship and human joy.  These games were a chronology, a constitution, and a church to the Pan-Hellenic race.  All epochs were reckoned from them; as events occurring in such or such an Olympiad.  The first Olympiad was seven hundred and seventy-six years before Christ; and a large part of our present knowledge of ancient chronology depends on these festivals.  They bound Greece together as by a constitution; no persons unless of genuine Hellenic blood being allowed to contend at them, and a truce being proclaimed for all Greece while they lasted.

Here at Olympia, while the games continued, all Greece came together; the poets and historians declaimed their compositions to the grand audience; opinions were interchanged, knowledge communicated, and the national life received both stimulus and unity.

And here, over all, presided the great Jupiter of Phidias, within a Doric temple, sixty-eight feet high, ninety-five wide, and two hundred and thirty long, covered with sculptures of Pentelic marble.  The god was seated on his throne, made of gold, ebony, and ivory, studded with precious stones.  He was so colossal that, though seated, his head nearly reached the roof, and it seemed as if he would bear it away if he rose.  There sat the monarch, his head, neck, breast, and arms in massive proportions; the lower part of the body veiled in a flowing mantle; bearing in his right hand a statue of Victory, in his left a sceptre with his eagle on the top; the Hours,