Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/108

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lived to see the eastern pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, by Paeonius, though not the western, by Alcamenes; the subject of the eastern was the chariot-race of Pelops and Oenomaus (Pind. Ol. i. 76); of the western, the war of the Centaurs with the Lapithae (Λαπιθᾶν ὑπερόπλων, Pyth. ix. 14). Pindar's mention of the "fair-throned Hours" (εὔθρονοι Ὧραι, Pyth. ix. 60) reminds us that the Heraion at Olympia possessed a chryselephantine group of the Horae seated on thrones, by Smilis of Aegina, whose date has been referred to the earlier half of the sixth century. Hiero of Syracuse, who was engaged in war while suffering from gout and stone, is compared by Pindar with Philoctetes, νεῖ μὲν χρωτὶ βαίνων, ἀλλὰ μοιρίδιον ἦν (Pyth. i. 55). At that very time Syracuse contained the famous statue of the limping Philoctetes, by Pythagoras of Rhegium, of which Pliny says that those who looked at it seemed to feel the pain (xxxiv. 59). Even if we hesitate to believe that the sculptor intended an allusion to Hiero[1], we may well suppose that Pindar's comparison was suggested by the work of Pythagoras. Pindar touches on a legend which represented Heracles in combat with Apollo and two other gods (Ol. ix. 30 f). A similar contest between Heracles and Apollo was the subject of a group executed in Pindar's time (about 485 B.C.) by three artists of Corinth—Diyllus, Amyclaeus, and Chionis—and offered by the Phocians in the temple at Delphi

  1. See Watkiss Lloyd, History of Sicily, p. 315; and A. S. Murray, History of Greek Sculpture, p. 203.