According to Philochoros,[272] this colossus was set up during the archonship of Theodoros, that is, in the third year of the eighty-fifth Olympiad. The Athenians, it has been ingeniously conjectured, seized for the dedication of the statue, on the period of the celebration of the most gorgeous festival in their calendar, the greater Panathenaia, which like a kind of jubilee occurred but once in an Olympiad.[273] What length of time Pheidias employed in finishing this statue we possess no means of determining; but as the Parthenon itself is supposed not to have been completed in less than ten years, the artist need not have been hurried in his work.[274] Footnote 272: Frag. ed. Siebel. p. 54. Müll. Phid. Vit. § 11. p. 22. Footnote 273: Boeckh. Corp. Inscrip. p. 182. Footnote 274: Quatremère de Quincy, Jup. Olymp. p. 222. In the temple of Zeus at Olympia and in every sacred structure we visited in Egypt and Nubia, there was a staircase conducting to the roof. No positive testimony remains to prove this to have been the case in the Parthenon, though antiquarians, with much probability, have supposed it to have been so.[275] Let us therefore assume the fact, and ascending to the summit of the edifice survey the surrounding scene and the superb city encircling the rock at our feet. Few landscapes in the world are more rich or varied, none more deeply interesting. History has peopled every spot within the circle of vision with spirit-stirring associations; or if history has passed over any, there has poetry been busy, building up her legends from the scattered fragments of tradition. Carrying our eye along the distant edge of the horizon we behold the promontory of Sunium, Ægina rising out of the Myrtoan sea, Trœzen, the birth-place of Theseus the national hero, the mountains of Argolis, the hostile citadel of Corinth, with Phylæ and Deceleia rendered too famous by the Peloponnesian war. Nearer the shore is “sea-born” Salamis, and that low headland where the barbarian took his seat to view the battle in the straits. Yonder at the extremity of the long walls are the ports of Munychia, Phaleron and Peiræeus; on our left is Hymettos with its bee swarms and odoriferous slopes;[276] to the right Colonos, the grove of the terrible Erinnyes, and the chasm in the rock by which the wretched Œdipus, having reached the end of his career, descended to the infernal world.[277] Beyond lies Eleusis and the Sacred Way.[278] Yonder in the midst of groves is the Academy; here is the Cerameicos[279] filled with the monuments which the republic erected to its heroes, there the Cynosarges and the Lyceium. The hill of Areiopagos, contiguous to the rock of the Acropolis, divides the Pnyx from the Agora planted by Conon with plane trees. Near at hand, encircled by ordinary dwellings, are the Leocorion, the temple of Theseus, the Odeion, the Stoa Pœcile, and the Dionysiac theatre, with various other monuments remarkable for their