Peonius, we are told, was an Ephesian, but as to even the nativity of the other two architects we are in the dark, although Daphnis is supposed to have been a Miletian. There is also some little uncertainty as to the exact date when they exercised their profession, but it is probably safe to say that it was sometime within the first half of the fourth century before Christ. Two columns of the great temple to Apollo have stood proudly against the attacks of time, and although scarred by their long battles, are yet evidencing the glories of a structure of which they were once but an insignificant part. In the year 555 B.C. there lived four architects, to whose skill was entrusted the building of a temple that should be in all respects worthy to stand for the respect due the dignity, power and extreme longevity of the great Olympian Zeus—the king-god of the Greeks. The foundation for this shrine was laid in the time of Pisistratus, a tyrant of Athens, who contributed several architectural works to that city, but whose several banishments greatly interrupted their building. This was particularly the case with the great temple to Zeus. However, it was sufficiently advanced for Pisistratus to dedicate it before he fell from power. It has been stated that it was due to the genuine dislike which the Athenians felt for Pisistratus and his sons, who succeeded him, that four hundred years were allowed to flow by before the temple was finished. This is hardly just to a ruler of great loyalty to his native city, and of unquestioned integrity in the discharge of his public duties. It is more probable that the delay was due to the animosity of the rival Athenian family of Alcmæonidæ, who, piqued by jealousy, fanned a flame of opposition to the works of Pisistratus that continued for several centuries. Antistates, Antimachides, Calleschros and Porinus were the four architects engaged by Pisistratus, who, like their professional brothers employed on the temples of Diana, Apollo and Ceres, were, according to Vitruvius, entitled to immortality for the grandeur of their works, but about whom there is no other information to be given. This temple to Jupiter was not built upon the Acropolis at Athens, like that to the patron goddess of the city, Minerva, but upon a raised peribolos within the city below, and on the site of an earlier temple to the same god, erected in the time of Deucalion, but which had perished from the ravages of ages. It was like most of the early Doric temples, of peripteral construction, or surrounded by columns on all four sides. Aristotle, who saw it before it was finished, was so much impressed by its size that he compared it to the Pyramids; and one of his scholars remarked that “though unfinished, it called forth astonishment, and when finished would be unexcelled.”