been the main result of the architectural inquiries made by the Germans into the archaic buildings at Olympia; but it would be tedious to the reader of this book were I to turn aside to discuss technical details. He will find them all put with great clearness, and indeed with elegance, in Bötticher’s _Olympia_. The complete results of the excavations are now to be found in the official work issued by the German Government on the explorations. Unfortunately, there only remains one very realistic head of a boxer from a large class of monuments at Olympia, that of the portrait statues of victors at the games, of which one was even attributed to Phidias, and several to Alkamenes, in Pausanias’s time. All these were votive statues, set up by victors at the games, or victors in war, and in the early times were not portraits strictly speaking, but ideal figures. Later on they became more realistic, and were made in the likeness of the offerer, a privilege said at one time only to have been accorded to those who had won thrice at Olympia. The commemoration of gymnastic victories by these statues seems to have completely supplanted the older fashion of triumphal odes, which in Pindar’s day were so prized, and so dearly bought from lyric poets. When these odes first came to be composed, sculpture was still struggling with the difficulties of human expression, and there was no one who would not feel the great artistic superiority of Pindar’s verse to the cold stiffness of the archaic reliefs of the same epoch, which attempt portraiture. The portrait of Aristion by Aristokles, the similar relief by Anxenor the Naxian, and the relief of the discus thrower, are sufficient examples of what sculptured portraits were in comparison with the rich music of Simonides and Pindar. But while lyric poetry passed into the higher service of tragedy, or degenerated into the extravagance of the later dithyramb, sculpture grew into such exquisite perfection, and was of its very nature so enduring and manifest, that the Olympic victor choose it as the surest avenue to immortal fame. And so it was up to Pausanias’s day, when every traveller could study the records of the games at Olympia, or even admire the most perfect of the statues in the palaces of Roman Emperors, whither they were transferred. But the day came when the poets were avenged upon the sculptors. Olympia sank under general decay and sudden catastrophe. Earthquakes and barbarians ravaged its treasury, and while Pindar was being preserved in manuscript, until his resurrection in the days of printing, the invasion of the Kladeus saved the scanty remains in the _Altis_ from destruction only by covering them with oblivion. Now, in the day of its resurrection, pedestal after pedestal with its votive inscription has been unearthed, but, except the _Niké_ of Pæonius, no actual votive statue had been recovered when I saw the excavations, after two years of labor.