The most famous works of Phidias were the two chryselephantine statues to which reference has just been made, and two or three other statues of the same materials were ascribed to him.  He worked also in bronze and in marble.  From a reference in Aristotle’s “Ethics” it might seem as if he were best known as a sculptor in marble, but only three statues by him are expressly recorded to have been of marble, against a larger number of bronze His subjects were chiefly divinities, we hear of only one or two figures of human beings from his hands.

Of the colossal Zeus at Olympia, the most august creation of Greek artistic imagination, we can form only an indistinct idea.  The god was seated upon a throne, holding a figure of Victory upon one hand and a scepter in the other.  The figure is represented on three Elean coins of the time of Hadrian (117-138 A.D.) but on too small a scale to help us much.  Another coin of the same period gives a fine head of Zeus in profile (Fig. 117),[Footnote:  A more truthful representation of this coin may be found in Gardner’s “Types of Greek Coins,” Pi XV 19] which is plausibly supposed to preserve some likeness to the head of Phidias’s statue.

In regard to the Athena of the Parthenon we are considerably better off, for we possess a number of marble statues which, with the aid of Pausanias’s description and by comparison with one another, can be proved to be copies of that work.  But a warning is necessary here.  The Athena, like the Zeus, was of colossal size.  Its height, with the pedestal, was about thirty-eight feet.  Now it is not likely that a really exact copy on a small scale could possibly have been made from such a statue, nor, if one had been made, would it have given the effect of the original.  With this warning laid well to heart the reader may venture to examine that one among our copies which makes the greatest attempt at exactitude (Fig. 118).  It is a statuette, not quite 3 1/2 feet high with the basis, found in Athens in 1880.  The goddess stands with her left leg bent a little and pushed to one side.  She is dressed in a heavy Doric chiton, open at the side.  The girdle, whose ends take the form of snakes’ heads, is worn outside the doubled-over portion of the garment.  Above it the folds are carefully adjusted, drawn in symmetrically from both sides toward the middle; in the lower part of the figure there is the common vertical division into two parts, owing to the bending of one leg.  Over the chiton is the aegis, much less long behind than in earlier art (cf.  Fig. 98), fringed with snakes’ heads and having a Gorgon’s mask in front.  The helmet is an elaborate affair with three crests, the central one supported by a sphinx, the others by winged horses; the hinged cheek-pieces are turned up.  At the left of the goddess is her shield, within which coils a serpent.  On her extended right hand stands a Victory.  The face of Athena is the most disappointing part of it all, but it is just there that the copyist must have failed most completely.  Only the eye of faith, or better, the eye trained by much study of allied works, can divine in this poor little figure the majesty which awed the beholder of Phidias’s work.