Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/127

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THE PARTHENON AND ITS SCULPTURES. Ill it is almost exactly like this scene as represented on early vases, and it occurred in the pediment of the Delphi Treasury. No. 12 seems to have contained Athena. (Fig. 107.) No. 14 repre- sented a chariot rising from the sea. (Fig. 108.) The Elgin draw- ing is clearly very accurate in some points, which can be tested. Fig. 109. — Metopes at N.E. angle. This seems a direct rendering Thus, on the last, some small fish are shown, which also appear in Michaelis, and to the left is a water bird which is only a shapeless form in the drawing of the latter. Both of these points are omitted in " Museum Marbles." of the passage in Homer (Iliad, 13), where Poseidon drives his swift flying gold-maned horses over the sea, while dolphins sported beside the chariot. These eastern metopes cannot be profitably discussed until every trace of what actually remains can be brought into comparison with these restora- tions made more than a century ago.* Fig. 109 shows the last metope on the east, seen in relation to the first on the north. The Northern Metopes are so greatly decayed, and so many of them are lost, that it would seem hope- less to make anything of them. Michaelis, however, had the good fortune to find the subject of two which adjoin, Nos. 24 and 25, apparently represented on a vase painting, which figured a scene at the fall of Troy. Helen is shown before a sacred image, while Aphrodite sends Eros towards Menelaus, who, according to the

  • The composition of 2 and 12 may be compared with two Selinus

metopes (Collignon). Fig. no. N. Metopes, No. 29.