It is difficult to close this chapter, in which but very superficial reference has been made to the architectural lights of the golden age of art in Greece, without glancing back at the magnificent city of Athens, the grand product of much of their creative skill, with feelings of regret that with all her numerous and noble monuments, dedicated to gods and men, there is not one that bears the imprint of its creator. We see in this glance forest-like colonnades of glittering white columns; we see the House of the Five Hundred Senators, the Tholus, the Hall of Hermæ, the Agora, the Pnyx, “where the Athenian orator spoke from a block of bare stone;” the Stoic Hall, in which philosophy was taught; the Prytaneum, where the loved laws of Solon were preserved; the Lyceum, with its hundred columns from Lydia; the Theatre of Bacchus and the Mausoleum of Tolus. We see temples innumerable, the grandest of all those to Jupiter and Theseus; but others of fascinating merit, those of Ceres and of Cybele and of Mars, and of Vulcan, of Venus, of Æacus, of the Dioscuri, of Hercules, of Diana Agrotera, of Bacchus Lunnæus, of Æsculapius, of Eumenides, and that to Glory, erected with the booty from the glorious field of Marathon, wherein stood the Venus of Phidias; and we see the Acropolis towering above all, lending other magnificent architectural triumphs to the ensemble; and although we see slabs among them “inscribed with the records of Athenian history, with civil contracts and articles of peace, with memorials of honors awarded to patriotic citizens or munificent strangers,” we find no monument, whether in the time of Pericles or later, inscribed with the name of Ictinus, or Hippodamus, or Callicrates, or the poor slave, Mnesicles, who was saved by Minerva to be forgotten by man. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [3] The decoration referred to was the work of the distinguished painter Protogenes. CHAPTER VII. LATER GREEK ARCHITECTS. The first architect as well as artist of decided merit who arose to historic distinction at the beginning of the later Attic school, or that which followed immediately upon the school of Phidias, and one of the first to treat the Corinthian idea, then flowering into favor with originality and artistic skill, was the deserving and accomplished Scopas. Reference has already been made to this artist in connection with the temple of Diana at Ephesus, for which, it is said, he furnished the most beautiful of all the numerous columns with which that temple was enriched. This statement is made without prejudice to the great Praxiteles, who was contemporaneous with Scopas, and who excelled him as a statuary, if he did not compete with him as an architect.