Constantine’s city does not appear to have been so completely Christian as the ecclesiastical writers would have us suppose. Zosimus tells us that Constantine erected a shrine to the Dioscuri in the Hippodrome, and he mentions the temples of Rhea and the Tyché of the city in a large four-porticoed forum. A whole population of bronze and marble statues was brought together from Greece, Asia Minor, and Sicily. The baths of Zeuxippus alone are said to have had more than sixty bronze statues,[6] a still greater number were assembled in the Augusteum and other squares, and in the Hippodrome, where, according to Zosimus,[7] Constantine placed the Pythian tripod, which had been the central object in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. On the triple coils of the bronze serpents in the At-Meidan can still be read the names of the Greek states, which, after the battle of Plataea, dedicated a tithe of the spoil to the Delphic oracle, as described by Herodotus.[8] An extremely valuable description of ancient Byzantium and the reconstruction by Constantine is given by Zosimus, writing not much more than a century after the transformation. “Now the city lay upon the crest of a hill which forms a part of the isthmus that is made by what is called the ‘Horn’ (κέρας) and the Propontis. And formerly it had its gate (πύλη) at the end of the colonnades which Severus built.” ... “And the wall on its western part descending along with the crest reached to the temple of Aphrodite, and the sea of Chrysopolis [Scutari] which is opposite; and in the same way from the crest the wall descended northward to the harbour which is called Neorion, and from thence up to the sea which lies directly in front of the straits through which one enters the Euxine.” ... “This then was the ancient size of the city. And Constantine erected a circular forum _where formerly was the gate_, and surrounded it with porticoes of two storeys. He set up two very big arches of Proconnesian marble opposite each other; through them one entered the porticoes of Severus or issued from the ancient city. And wishing to make the city much larger he further continued the old wall fifteen stadia, and inclosed the city with a wall which cut off the isthmus from sea to sea.”