It is worth pausing for a moment upon this disposition, which was so usual as to be almost conventional in the pediments sculptured during the best epochs of Greek art. In the centre, where the field was very high, and admitted a colossal figure, it was usual to place the god whose providence guided the events around him, and this god was represented calm and without excitement. Then came the mythical event grouped on both sides; but at the ends, where the field narrowed to an angle, it was usual to represent the calmness or impassiveness of external nature. This was done in Greek sculpture not by trees and hills, but by the gods who symbolized them. So thoroughly was nature personified in Greek art, that its picturesqueness was altogether postponed to its living conscious sympathy with man, and thus to a Greek the proper representation of the rivers of Olympia was no landscape, but the graceful forms of the river gods—intelligent and human, yet calm spectators, as nature is wont to be. The very same idea is carried out more characteristically in the pediment of Alkamenes, where, in spite of the violent conflict of Centaurs and Lapithæ, the central and extreme figures, as I shall presently notice, are perfectly unmoved witnesses of lawless violence. The arrangement of the rest of the eastern pediment was evidently quite symmetrical. On Zeus’s right hand was Œnomaus, his wife Sterope, his charioteer Myrtilus sitting before the four horses, and two grooms; on his left, Pelops, Hippodamia, and a like number of horses and attendants. A good many pieces of these figures have been found, sufficient to tempt several art-critics to make conjectural restorations of the pediment, one of which is now set up, I believe, in the museum at Berlin. The western pediment, of which more, and more striking, fragments are recovered, is more difficult to restore, because Pausanias is unfortunately not nearly so precise in describing it, and because, moreover, he is suspected of a serious blunder about the central figure. Contrary to the precedent just mentioned, he says that this central figure is Pirithous, whose wife is just being carried off by the Centaurs, and ought therefore to be in violent excitement. But there had been found, just before we arrived at Olympia, a colossal head, of the noblest conception, which seems certainly to belong to the pediment sculptures, and which must be the head of this central figure. It is perfectly calm and divine in expression, and almost forces upon the spectator the conclusion to which all the best judges lean, that it must be an Apollo, and that this was the central figure, while Pirithous was more actively engaged. There was on each side of this figure a Centaur carrying off, the one a maiden (I suppose the bride) and the other a boy, and Kæneus and Theseus at each side, coming to the rescue.