Perhaps from this hill Ictinus looked down upon the place assigned to him by the Phigalians. Even then the situation must have seemed impressively secluded. Now, certainly, on descending the easy slope, a modern is almost overwhelmed, as if by the appearance of a god laying claim to nature’s secrets, by the sudden sight of a majestic Doric peristyle. The temple is built on a narrow plateau on the southern side of a hill called Cotilius by the ancients. Ictinus’s first approach must have been from Phigalia (where he would have talked with the municipal authorities) up the valley of the Neda, over picturesque and well-wooded hills and dales. But he must have studied the situation from all possible points of vantage. Perhaps for him, too, some special revelation came when out of dark and threatening clouds the sun, at last divinely swift, cleft the darkness, and he saw how effectively massive columns of gray limestone would be illumined by Apollo’s radiant shafts. Probably the architect’s taste and the Phigalians’ desire united to choose as the material of the temple the native rock that could be quarried in the neighbourhood. Marble was imported for the capitals of the inner pillars, for the ceilings of the north and south porticoes, for the roof tiles and for the sculptured frieze which now honours the British Museum. The columns of the peristyle and the architrave, barren of adornment, are singularly noble. They look as if they had sprung from the rocks about them and belonged more to the mountains overshadowing them than to men. Indeed, for many centuries, men forgot the existence of the temple. Pausanias, in his day, six hundred years after its building, could still describe it as surpassing all the temples in the Peloponnesus, save the one at Tegea built a hundred years later, for the beauty of its stone and the symmetry of its proportions. But in time earthquakes and iconoclasm wrought their deadly work, and through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the remaining ruins were known only to shepherds. The temple was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, but not until the present time were any efforts made to reërect some of the interior portions from the fragments lying on the ground. In the wake of the archæologist follows the tourist, and now any one who will may intrude upon Apollo’s long solitude.