Aphaia, of which considerable remains are still standing.  There is no trustworthy external clue to the date of the building, and we are therefore obliged to depend for that on the style of the architecture and sculpture, especially the latter.  In the dearth of accurately dated monuments which might serve as standards of comparison, great difference of opinion on this point has prevailed.  But we are now somewhat better off, thanks to recent discoveries at Athens and Delphi, and we shall probably not go far wrong in assigning the temple with its sculptures to about 480 B.C.  Fig. 52 illustrates, though somewhat incorrectly, the composition of the western pediment.  The subject was a combat, in the presence of Athena, between Greeks and Asiatics, probably on the plain of Troy.  A close parallelism existed between the two halves of the pediment, each figure, except the goddess and the fallen warrior at her feet, corresponding to a similar figure on the opposite side.  Athena, protectress of the Greeks, stands in the center (Fig. 98).  She wears two garments, of which the outer one (the only one seen in the illustration) is a marvel of formalism.  Her aegis covers her breasts and hangs far down behind; the points of its scalloped edge once bristled with serpents’ heads, and there was a Gorgon’s head in the middle of the front.  She has upon her head a helmet with lofty crest, and carries shield and lance.  The men, with the exception of the two archers, are naked, and their helmets, which are of a form intended to cover the face, are pushed back.  Of course, men did not actually go into battle in this fashion; but the sculptor did not care for realism, and he did care for the exhibition of the body.  He belonged to a school which had made an especially careful study of anatomy, and his work shows a great improvement in this respect over anything we have yet had the opportunity to consider.  Still, the men are decidedly lean in appearance and their angular attitudes are a little suggestive of prepared skeletons.  They have oblique and prominent eyes, and, whether fighting or dying, they wear upon their faces the same conventional smile.

The group in the eastern pediment corresponds closely in subject and composition to that in the western, but is of a distinctly more advanced style.  Only five figures of this group were sufficiently preserved to be restored.  Of these perhaps the most admirable is the dying warrior from the southern corner of the pediment (Fig. 99), in which the only considerable modern part is the right leg, from the middle of the thigh.  The superiority of this and its companion figures to those of the western pediment lies, as the Munich catalogue points out, in the juster proportions of body, arms, and legs, the greater fulness of the muscles, the more careful attention to the veins and to the qualities of the skin, the more natural position of eyes and mouth.  This dying man does not smile meaninglessly.  His lips are parted, and there is a suggestion of death-agony on his countenance.  In both pediments the figures are carefully finished all round; there is no neglect, or none worth mentioning, of those parts which were destined to be invisible so long as the figures were in position.