Unlike other temples erected to the gods, whom Æschylus describes as “facing the dawn” and flashing back to the worshippers from their “gleaming eyes” the sun’s early rays, the temple at Bassæ lay from north to south instead of from east to west. But this was due only to the character of the situation and the exigencies of the soil. Long before Ictinus’s day a primitive shrine had existed facing the east in the usual manner. And the new temple seems to have had a special door built in its cella in order that the main statue of Apollo, facing the rising sun, might still be approached from the side of dawn. The old statue, like the old shrine, was supplanted by a finer one. Later the great bronze Apollo was sent to adorn Megalopolis. But when Ictinus lived it may well have formed the centre of his noble architectural design, an incarnation of the ideal of physical and of spiritual wholeness realized through beauty. One further fact about the Temple in the Glens has been emphasized by the great topographer Leake: “That which forms, on reflection, the most striking circumstance of all is the nature of the surrounding country, capable of producing little else than pasture for cattle and offering no conveniences for the display of commercial industry either by sea or land. If it excites our astonishment that the inhabitants of such a district should have had the refinement to delight in works of this kind, it is still more wonderful that they should have had the means to execute them. This can only be accounted for by what Horace says of the early Romans:— ‘Privatus illis census erat brevis, Commune magnum.’ This is the true secret of national power, which cannot be equally effective in an age of selfish luxury.” But it must also be pointed out that although the Phigalians had taste and patriotism, no architect or artist rose among them to shape their stone. Ictinus and his fellow artists must come from Athens worthily to incarnate their desires. So a generation earlier they had been obliged to persuade Onatas, the master of the Æginetan school of sculpture, to carve for them a statue of Demeter. Nor were the Phigalians less skilled than other Arcadians. Scopas had to come from Paros to build the temple to Athena at Tegea. And it was foreign poets who turned the legends of Cyllenian Hermes and Pan into literature, and later enshrined in pastoral verse the tossing mountain forests and the cool rivers of Arcady. This was Arcadia’s destiny, to offer the raw material of her domain to the shaping hand of more gifted races. Her greatest son was a soldier. Her own deeds were deeds of blood and strife, her own life was one of work and poverty. But because poets and artists of other blood wrought for her, her name and her inherent beauty have become forever domiciled in our own literature, even in our daily speech and commoner affections.