A myriad of statues and monuments commemorated personal interests or feeling. From a haul of tunny fish to the discovery of stolen goods, no event was too prosaic to inspire an offering from island or village. And, throughout Greece, from Macedonia to Crete, towns delighted to express their reverence by gifts of marble and bronze. Midas from Asia Minor sent a chair of state and Crœsus sent a golden lion and silver bowls. Arcesilas of Cyrene in northern Africa, in the fifth century, celebrated a Pythian victory by the gift of a sculptured chariot and charioteer. The statue still remains, the most famous single object discovered at Delphi. Dominating one room in the Museum, he seems in his bronze dignity as untroubled by the chilling silence of to-day as was his living prototype, in the hippodrome in the plain below, by the noise and tumult of the day of victory. The description by Sophocles of the Delphic chariot race in which Orestes was supposed to be killed reproduces the excitement against which many a charioteer must have had to steady his nerves.[27] Footnote 27: The passage is quoted in chapter xviii, p. 406. Of statues of mortals dedicated by themselves or by their admirers there was no end. Among these persons were the great rhetorician Gorgias, to whose teaching Greek prose owed its first artistic development, and Phryne, the famous courtesan of Thespiæ. With her statue, seen by men of Demosthenes’s age between the figures of the Spartan king Archidamus and Philip of Macedon, we may surrender the effort to distinguish the links in the mighty chains which, as in Plato’s vision, bound the Greek earth to a heavenly throne. It is less difficult to understand the Greek harmony between the graver and brighter needs of the common life which added to the temples and treasuries of Delphi buildings for recreation and enjoyment. A club-house was erected by the rich Cnidians, where conversation, the favourite amusement of all Greeks, could be carried on. Centuries later Plutarch made it the scene of his dialogue on the decay of oracles. If the age of the Antonines showed a loss of faith, art at least held its own, and the talkers must have added to the pleasure of skeptical speculation a delight in the decorations which dated from the fifth century before Christ. They consisted of pictures by Polygnotus of the capture of Troy and Odysseus’s journey to hell. Now only bits of stucco painted blue betray their presence, and fragmentary stones alone are left of the splendid building. Little more is left of the beautiful colonnades which furnished protection from sun and rain to the frequent crowds. In fairly good preservation still is the Theatre, where, as in all the religious centres of Greece, dramatic representations added literature to the pageant of artistic gifts. Equally inevitable was a Gymnasium; but most important of all was the Stadium, in which the quadrennial games were held.