The composition of the group in the western pediment is fairly well known, thanks to a French artist, Jacques Carrey, who made a drawing of it in 1674, when it was still in tolerable preservation.  The subject was, in the words of Pausanias, “the strife of Posidon with Athena for the land” of Attica.  In the eastern pediment the subject was the birth of Athena.  The central figures, eleven in number, had disappeared long before Carrey’s time, having probably been removed when the temple was converted into a church.  On the other hand, the figures near the angles have been better preserved than any of those from the western pediment, with one exception.  The names of these eastern figures have been the subject of endless guess-work.  All that is really certain is that at the southern corner Helios (the Sun-god) was emerging from the sea in a chariot drawn by four horses, and at the northern corner Selene (the Moon-goddess) or perhaps Nyx (Night) was descending in a similar chariot.  Fig. 128 is the figure that was placed next to the horses of Helios.  The young god or hero reclines in an easy attitude on a rock; under him are spread his mantle and the skin of a panther or some such animal.  In Fig. 129 we have, beginning on the right, the head of one of Selene’s horses and the torso of the goddess herself, then a group of three closely connected female figures, known as the “Three Fates,” seated or reclining on uneven, rocky ground, and last the body and thighs of a winged goddess, Victory or Iris, perhaps belonging in the western pediment.  Fig. 130, from the northern corner of the western pediment, is commonly taken for a river-god.

We possess but the broken remnants of these two pediment-groups, and the key to the interpretation of much that we do possess is lost.  We cannot then fully appreciate the intention of the great artist who conceived these works.  Yet even in their ruin and their isolation the pediment-figures of the Parthenon are the sublimest creations of Greek art that have escaped annihilation.

We have no ancient testimony as to the authorship of the Parthenon sculptures, beyond the statement of Plutarch, quoted above, that Phidias was the general superintendent of all artistic works undertaken during Pericles’s administration.  If this statement be true, it still leaves open a wide range of conjecture as to the nature and extent of his responsibility in this particular case.  Appealing to the sculptures themselves for information, we find among the metopes such differences of style as exclude the notion of single authorship.  With the frieze and the pediment-groups, however, the case is different.  Each of these three compositions must, of course, have been designed by one master-artist and executed by or with the help of subordinate artists or workmen.  Now the pediment-groups, so far as preserved, strongly suggest a single presiding genius for both, and there is no difficulty in ascribing the design of the frieze to the same artist.  Was