an ordinary connoisseur. Pliny also relates a story which has a bearing in this connection, of a competition between various celebrated artists, who were contemporaries at this period. The subject was an Amazon. The artists themselves were to be the judges; and it was agreed that the statue should be held to be best which each artist ranked second to his own. The result was that the first prize was adjudged to Polyclitus, the second to Phidias, the third to Ctesilaus, the fourth to Cydon, and the fifth to Phradmon. We may reject the story as a fact, but its very existence proves that the fame of Phidias, great as it was, did not so entirely eclipse that of other artists of his time as we generally suppose. Who of us now would think that Phradmon and Cydon, for example, stood on a level to contend with him, with any chance of other than a disastrous defeat? But it is plain that the ancients did not think so, or this story would not have been invented. We now come to the question whether Phidias ever worked at all in marble. His renown undoubtedly rested upon his magnificent statues in ivory and gold, and especially upon his Zeus and Athena of the Parthenon, which towered above all his other works. So wonderful was the Zeus, that it was said to have strengthened religion in Greece; and the Athena of the Parthenon was held to be the glory of Athens. The poets and writers celebrate Phidias always as specially the creator of these great chryselephantine works; and though they praise the beauty of his bronze works, and especially of the Athena Lemnia, it is plain that these held a secondary place in public estimation, or at all events did not stand alone and apart as the others did. Thus Propertius says, characterizing the sculptors:— “Phidiacus signo se Juppiter ornat eburno; Praxitelem propria vindicat arte Lapis; Gloria Lysippi est animosa effingere signa; Exactis Calamis se mihi jactat equis.” So Quinctilian says of him: “Phidias tamen diis quam hominibus efficiendis melior artifex traditur—in ebore vero longe citra æmulum, vel si nihil nisi Minervam Athenis aut Olympium in Elide Jovem fecisset” (lib. xii. ch. 10). But no writer anywhere near this period—even within five centuries of it—ever mentions a marble figure by Phidias, or celebrates him in any way as a sculptor in this material.