for in antiquity was his statues in bronze or gold and ivory. If Plutarch tells us that he superintended the great works of Pericles on the Acropolis, this phrase is very vague. On the other hand, inscriptions prove that the marble blocks intended for the pedimental statues of the Parthenon were not brought to Athens until 434 B.C., which was probably after the death of Pheidias. And there is a marked contrast in style between these statues and the certain works of Pheidias. It is therefore probable that most if not all of the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon was the work of pupils of Pheidias, such as Alcamenes and Agoracritus, rather than his own.
The earliest of the great works of Pheidias were dedications in memory of Marathon, from the spoils of the victory. At Delphi he erected a great group in bronze including the figures of Apollo and Athena, several Attic heroes, and Miltiades the general. On the Acropolis of Athens he set up a colossal bronze image of Athena, which was visible far out at sea. At Pellene in Achaea, and at Plataea he made two other statues of Athena, also a statue of Aphrodite in ivory and gold for the people of Elis. But among the Greeks themselves the two works of Pheidias which far outshone all others, and were the basis of his fame, were the colossal figures in gold and ivory of Zeus at Olympia and of Athena Parthenos at Athens, both of which belong to about the middle of the 5th century. Of the Zeus we have unfortunately lost all trace save small copies on coins of Elis, which give us but a general notion of the pose, and the character of the head. The god was seated on a throne, every part of which was used as a ground for sculptural decoration. His body was of ivory, his robe of gold. His head was of somewhat archaic type: the Otricoli mask which used to be regarded as a copy of the head of the Olympian statue is certainly more than a century later in style. Of the Athena Parthenos two small copies in marble have been found at Athens (see Greek Art, fig. 38) which have no excellence of workmanship, but have a certain evidential value as to the treatment of their original.
It will be seen how very small is our actual knowledge of the works of Pheidias. There are many stately figures in the Roman and other museums which clearly belong to the same school as the Parthenos; but they are copies of the Roman age, and not to be trusted in point of style. A. Furtwangler proposes to find in a statue of which the head is at Bologna, and the body at Dresden, a copy of the Lemnian Athena of Pheidias; but his arguments (Masterpieces, at the beginning) are anything but conclusive. Much more satisfactory as evidence are some 5th century torsos of Athena found at Athens. The very fine torso of Athena in the École des Beaux Arts at Paris, which has unfortunately lost its head, may perhaps best serve to help our imagination in reconstructing a Pheidian original.
As regards the decorative sculptures of the Parthenon, which the Greeks rated far below their colossus in ivory and gold, see the article Parthenon.
Ancient critics take a very high view of the merits of Pheidias What they especially praise is the ethos or permanent moral level of his works as compared with those of the later “pathetic” school. Demetrius calls his statues sublime, and at the same time precise. That he rode on the crest of a splendid wave of art is not to be questioned: but it is to be regretted that we have no morsel of work extant for which we can definitely hold him responsible. (P. G.)
PHEIDON (8th or 7th century B.C.), king of Argos, generally,
though wrongly, called “tyrant.” According to tradition he
flourished during the first half of the 8th century B.C. He was
a vigorous and energetic ruler and greatly increased the power
of Argos. He gradually regained sway over the various cities of
the Argive confederacy, the members of which had become
practically independent, and (in the words of Ephorus) “reunited
the broken fragments of the inheritance of Temenus.”
His object was to secure predominance for Argos in the north
of Peloponnesus According to Plutarch, he attempted to
break the power of Corinth, by requesting the Corinthians to
send him 1000 of their picked youths, ostensibly to aid him in
war, his real intention being to put them to death, but the plot
was revealed. Pheidon assisted the Pisatans to expel the Elean
superintendents of the Olympian games and presided at the
festival himself. The Eleans, however, refused to recognize the
Olympiad or to include it in the register, and shortly afterwards,
with the aid of the Spartans, who are said to have looked upon
Pheidon as having ousted them from the headship of Greece,
defeated Pheidon and were reinstated in the possession of
Pisatis and their former privileges. Pheidon is said to have
lost his life in a faction fight at Corinth, where the monarchy
had recently been overthrown. The affair of the games has an
important bearing on his date. Pausanias (vi. 22, 2) definitely
states that Pheidon presided at the festival in the 8th Olympiad
(i.e. in 748 B.C.), but in the list of the suitors of Agariste, daughter
of Cleisthenes of Sicyon, given by Herodotus, there occurs the
name of Leocedes (Lacedas), son of Pheidon of Argos. According
to this, Pheidon must have flourished during the early part
of the 6th century. It has therefore been assumed that
Herodotus confused two Pheidons, both kings of Argos. The
suggested substitution in the text of Pausanias of the 28th for
the 8th Olympiad (i.e. 668 instead of 748) would not bring it into
agreement with Herodotus, for even then Pheidon’s son could
not have been a suitor in 570 for the hand of Agariste. But
the story of Agariste’s wooing resembles romance and has slight
chronological value. On the whole, modern authorities assign
Pheidon to the first half of the 7th century. Herodotus further
states that Pheidon established a system of weights and measures
throughout Peloponnesus, to which Ephorus and the Parian
Chronicle add that he was the first to coin silver money, and that
his mint was at Aegma. But according to the better authority
of Herodotus (i. 94) and Xenophanes of Colophon, the Lydians
were the first coiners of money at the beginning of the 7th century,
and, further, the oldest known Aeginetan coins are of later date
than Pheidon. Hence, unless a later Pheidon is assumed, the
statement of Ephorus must be considered unhistorical. No
such difficulty occurs in regard to the weights and measures,
it is generally agreed that a system was already in existence in
the time of Pheidon, into which he introduced certain changes.
A passage in the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens (x. 2)
states that the measures used before the Solonian period of
reform were called “Pheidonian.”
See Herodotus vi. 127; Ephorus in Strabo viii. 358, 376; Plutarch, Amatoriae narrationes, 2; Marmot partum, ep. 30; Pollux ix. 83; Nicolaus Damascenus, frag. 41 (in C. W. Müller’s Frag. hist. graecorum, iii.); G. Grote, History of Greece, pt ii. ch. 4, B. V. Head, Historia Numorum (1887); F. Hultsch, Griechische und römische Metrologie (1882); G. Rawlinson’s Herodotus, appendix, bk. 1, note 8. On the question of Pheidon’s date, see J. B. Bury, History of Greece, ii 468 (1902); J. P. Mahaffy, Problems in Greek History, ch. 3 (1892), J. G. Frazer’s note on Pausanias vi. 22, 2, and especially G. Busolt, Griechische Geschichte (2nd ed, 1893), ch. iii 12. C. Trieber, Pheidon von Argos (Hanover, 1880), and J. Beloch, in Rheinisches Museum, xlv. 595 (1890), favour a later date, about 580.
PHELPS, AUSTIN (1820–1890), American Congregational minister and educationalist, was born on the 7th of January 1820 at West Brookfield, Massachusetts, son of Eliakim Phelps,[1] a clergyman, who, during the boyhood of his son was principal of a girls’ school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and later pastor of a Presbyterian church in Geneva, New York. The son studied at Hobart College in 1835–1835, then at Amherst for a year, and in 1837 graduated at the university of Pennsylvania. He studied theology at Union Theological Seminary, at the Yale Divinity School, and at Andover, and was licensed to preach in 1840 by the Third Presbytery of Philadelphia. He was pastor of the Pine Street (Congregational) Church in Boston in 1842–1848, and in 1848–1879 was professor of sacred rhetoric and homiletics at Andover Theological Seminary, of which he was president from 1869 to 1879, when his failing health forced him to resign. He died on the 13th of October 1890 at Bar Harbor, Maine. His Theory of Preaching (1881) and English
- ↑ Eliakim Phelps afterwards lived in Stratford, Herkimer county New York, where his house was “possessed” and was long a place of curious interest to students of “spiritualism.”
