With the serpent king and his prophylactic tomb clearly in our minds, we turn with new eyes to examine certain fragments of sculpture discovered in the recent excavations. Nothing perhaps caused more surprise when these fragments came to light than the size and splendour of the snake-figures. We have already seen (p. 27) that the western pediment of the Hecatompedon held two sea-monsters, a Triton and Typhon; the eastern pediment held two land-snakes of even greater magnificence. The design of this pediment as restored by Dr. Wiegand[92] is as follows (Fig. 19*). In the apex is seated Athena; to her right hand a figure seated and crowned, and therefore a king or a god; this figure survives, but the figure which must have balanced him to the left of the goddess is lost for ever. Athena is supreme; the surviving figure is usually called Zeus, but from his subordinate place it seems to me that it is more likely he is either a subordinate god, Poseidon, or a local king, Erechtheus. Possibly Athena is seated between Poseidon and Erechtheus. It is, after all, not the seated protagonists of the pediment, be they Olympians or local kings, who most interest us, but the two great snakes who in the angles keep watch and ward. These snakes are often described as ‘decorative’ or ‘space-filling.’ But surely they are too alive, too large, too dominant to be mere accessories. One of them is shown in Fig. 19* in detail, so far as he can be represented by an uncoloured reproduction. In the original he is blue and orange, and his companion in the other angle is a vivid emerald green. Herodotus[93], it is true, speaks of one snake only as guardian of the Acropolis, the snake who when the land was beset by the Persians, would not eat its honey-cake; but then Herodotus writes as if he had no personal knowledge: ‘the Athenians _say_ there is a great snake.’ In the story of Erichthonios tradition, and good Attic tradition, knew of two. Hermes in the _Ion_ of Euripides[94] says, referring to Erichthonios, ‘To him What time she gave him to the Agraulid maids Athena bound for watch two guardian snakes; In memory whereof Erechtheus’ sons In Athens still upon their nursing babes Put serpents wrought of gold’; and on the well-known vase in the British museum[95] depicting the scene, two snakes appear. We need not say that the two snakes of the pediment are a duplicated Kekrops, but we may and do say that they are two hero-snakes, guardians of the city, and we may further _conjecture_ that they were an old pair, male and female. This conjecture brings us to the woman counterpart of Kekrops, the snake king, his ‘daughter’ Pandrosos. 2. _The Pandroseion._