But to proceed: in rich and elaborate decorations the Parthenon resembled the temple of Tentyris. Every part of its exterior, where ornament was admissible, presented to the eye some creation of Hellenic taste and fancy, figures in high and low relief, grouped in action or repose, conceived and executed in a style worthy of the prince of the mimetic art.[269] Many wrecks of these matchless compositions are now protected from further defacements in the metropolis of Great Britain, but withal so mutilated and decayed that none but a practised eye can discern, through the ravages of age, all the sunshine of beauty and loveliness which beamed from them when fresh from the Pheidian chisel. One of the greatest works of this artist filled the interior of the Parthenon with the emanations of its beauty, the statue of Athena in ivory and gold,[270] which, representing a form distinguished for all the softness and roundness belonging to womanhood, and a countenance radiant with the highest intellect, must in some respects have borne away the palm from the Olympian Zeus; for in the latter, after all, nothing beyond masculine energy, dignity, majesty could have existed. These indeed were so blended, so subdued into a glorious and god-like serenity, that this creation of human genius, like the august being of which it was a mute type, possessed in a degree the celestial power of chasing away sadness and sorrow, and shedding benignity and happiness over all who beheld it.[271] But for men at least, the Zeus must have lacked some attributes possessed by the Athena. She was in all her etherial loveliness, a woman still, but without a woman’s weakness, or a single taint of earth. The Athenians paid the highest possible compliment to womanhood when they gave wisdom a female form; and the delicacy of the thought was enhanced by surrounding this mythological creation with an atmosphere of purity which no other divinity of the pagan heaven could lay claim to. Nor in beauty did Athena yield even to Aphrodite herself. Her charms partook indeed of that noble severity which belongs to virtue; and to intimate that she was rather of heaven than of earth, her eyes were of the colour of the firmament. Yet this spiritual elevation above the reach of the passions, only appears to have enhanced, in the estimation of the Athenians, the splendour of her personal beauty, which shed its chastening and ennobling influence among her worshippers like the droppings of a summer cloud. Footnote 269: Vid. Müll. De Parthenon. Fastig. p. 72, sqq. Footnote 270: Thucyd. ii. 13. Schol. t. v. p. 375. Bipont. Müll. De Phid. Vit. p. 22. Footnote 271: Arrian. Epict. I. 6. p. 27, seq.