It is when he comes to religious art and architecture that Pausanias seems to have felt himself most at home. If in his notice of civic buildings and monuments he is chary of details, he is lavish of them in describing the temples and sanctuaries with their store of images, altars, and offerings. The most elaborate of his descriptions are those which he has given of the temple of Zeus at Olympia with the great image of the god by Phidias, the scenes on the Chest of Cypselus in the Heraeum at Olympia, the reliefs on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, and the paintings by Polygnotus in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi. But, apart from these conspicuous examples; almost every page of his work bears witness to his interest in the monuments of religion, especially when they were more than usually old and quaint. Among the queer images he describes are the thirty square stones revered as gods at Pharae; the rough stones worshipped as images of Love and Hercules and the Graces at Thespiae, Hyettus, and Orchomenus; the pyramidal stone which represented Apollo at Megara; the ancient wooden image of Zeus with three eyes on the acropolis of Argos; the old idol of Demeter as a woman with a horse’s head holding a dove in one hand and a dolphin in the other; the figure of a mermaid bound fast with golden chains in a wild wood at the meeting of two glens; the image of the War God at Sparta in fetters to hinder him from running away; the bronze likeness of an unquiet ghost clamped with iron to a rock to keep him still; an image of Athena with a purple bandage on her wounded thigh; a pair of wooden idols of Dionysus with shining gilt bodies and red faces; and tiny bronze images of Castor and Pollux, a foot high, on a rocky islet over which the sea broke foaming in winter, but could not wash them away. Some of the images he describes as tricked out with offerings of devout worshippers. Such were an image of Pasiphae covered with garlands; a figure of Hermes swathed in myrtle boughs; a crimson-painted idol of Dionysus emerging from a heap of laurel leaves and ivy; and a statue of Health almost hidden under tresses of women’s hair and strips of Babylonish raiment in the shade of ancient cypresses at Titane. Among the appointments of the sanctuaries he mentions, for example, altars made of the ashes or blood of the victims, perpetual fires, a golden lamp that burned day and night in the Erechtheum, a gilt head of the Gorgon on the wall of the Acropolis, a purple curtain in the temple of Zeus, a golden and jewelled peacock dedicated by Hadrian to Hera, the iron stand of Alyattes’s bowl, chains of liberated prisoners, hanging from the cypresses in the grove of Hebe, and bronze railings round the shaft down which the enquirer, clad in a peculiar costume, descended by a ladder to consult the oracle of Trophonius. [Sidenote: His interest in relics.]