Among these freer and stronger personalities emerging thus about the beginning of the fifth century before Christ--about the period of the Persian war--the name to which most of this sort of personal quality attaches, and which is therefore very interesting, is the name of Canachus of Sicyon, who seems to have comprehended in himself all the various attainments in art which had been gradually developed in the schools of his native city--carver in wood, sculptor, brass-cutter, and toreutes; by toreuticê+ being meant the whole art of statuary in metals, and in their combination with other materials. At last we seem to see an actual person at work, and to some degree can follow, with natural curiosity, [243] the motions of his spirit and his hand. We seem to discern in all we know of his productions the results of individual apprehension--the results, as well as the limitations, of an individual talent. It is impossible to date exactly the chief period of the activity of Canachus. That the great image of Apollo, which he made for the Milesians, was carried away to Ecbatana by the Persian army, is stated by Pausanias; but there is a doubt whether this was under Xerxes, as Pausanias says, in the year 479 B.C., or twenty years earlier, under Darius. So important a work as this colossal image of Apollo, for so great a shrine as the Didymaeum, was probably the task of his maturity; and his career may, therefore, be regarded as having begun, at any rate, prior to the year 479 B.C., and the end of the Persian invasion the event which may be said to close this period of art. On the whole, the chief period of his activity is thought to have fallen earlier, and to have occupied the last forty years of the previous century; and he would thus have flourished, as we say, about fifty years before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of Fiesole fifty years before the manhood of Michelangelo. His chief works were an Aphrodite, wrought for the Sicyonians in ivory and gold; that Apollo of bronze carried away by the Persians, and restored to its place about the year B.C. 350; and a reproduction of the same work in cedar-wood [244], for the sanctuary of Apollo of the Ismenus, at Thebes. The primitive Greek worship, as we may trace it in Homer, presents already, on a minor scale, all the essential characteristics of the most elaborate Greek worship of after times-- the sacred enclosure, the incense and other offerings, the prayer of the priest, the shrine itself--a small one, roofed in by the priest with green boughs, not unlike a wayside chapel in modern times, and understood to be the dwelling-place of the divine person--within, almost certainly, an idol, with its own sacred apparel, a visible form, little more than symbolical perhaps, like the sacred pillar for which Bathycles made his throne at Amyclae, but, if an actual image, certainly a rude one.