An incident in his life which awakened the affectionate interest of Pericles and the solicitude of the goddess Athene, whom he was serving so well, is told by Plutarch and other early biographers. It is in effect that while inspecting the almost completed work of the Propylæa he fell from the summit of the pediment and was most severely injured. He was taken at once to the house of Pericles, where he received the personal attention of the great ruler. It was while he lay at death’s door that it is said Minerva appeared to Pericles in a dream, and told him to administer to Mnesicles a medicine distilled from the wall-plant pellitory. This was done, and the life of the architect was spared. The only other fact associated with the life of Mnesicles which has been preserved to us is one mentioned by Pliny to the effect that the sculptor Stipax of Cyprus made a statue of the architect which became very celebrated in its time, and which was called _Splanchnoptes_. It was given this name because it represented a person roasting the entrails of the victim at a sacrifice, at the same time blowing the fire with his breath. There is nothing suggestive of the architect in question or his profession, but it is supposed to have been a statue of Mnesicles, from the fact that Pliny speaks of the subject as having been a slave of Pericles, who was cured of the wounds received in a fall from the Propylæa by an herb which Minerva had suggested should be given as a medicine. It is unfortunate that the statue has not survived to give us some idea of the features of at least one of the great architects of antiquity. Some recent discoveries on the Acropolis have, however, brought forth fragments which are supposed to have been parts of the base. If there is any one of the Greek architects of the time of Pericles who can be said to have secured for himself a degree of popular notoriety throughout subsequent ages it is the accomplished Ictinus, the chief architect of the Parthenon and the designer of at least two other conspicuously beautiful buildings of which we know—namely, the temple of Apollo Epicurus, near Phigalia in Arcadia, and the temple of Ceres and Proserpine at Eleusis. It is, no doubt, due, however, to his connection with the Parthenon that his fame has so long endured. As already stated, Callicrates assisted in the building of the Parthenon, and Phidias contributed the designs for the relief carvings in the pediments and metopes, executing much of the work with his own hands. Although Vitruvius says that “both Ictinus and Callicrates exerted all their powers to make this temple worthy of the goddess who presided over the arts,” it is not likely that Callicrates’s share in the work was equal to that of Ictinus, but was confined more to the heavy masonry, and in offering to Ictinus such advice as he might seek in giving to the building the greatest substantiality and permanency.