in the pediment,' as may be seen in our view of the east front (Pl. I.) He has a quadriga, whereas the two deities in the west pediment have only bigae. But that distinction, we may well imagine, was purely artistic. Two quadrigae in the west pediment would necessarily have presented more complicated masses on each side of the two protagonist deities in the centre, and for that reason would have been less effective in accentuating the prominence of the deities. In the angle of the east pediment, where only the heads of the horses were visible, the presence of four was more a gain than otherwise. The same may be said of the four horses of Selenè in the right angle. We possess only one of them (O on Pl. IX., Fig. 2). The others, more or less disfigured, remain in their original place, the fourth being only sketched in on the back of the pediment. In certain late Roman reliefs the horses of Selenè appear plunging downward, their heads already lost beneath the horizon, their bodies still visible. It is otherwise on the Parthenon. There it is the heads of the horses and the upper part of Selenè that remain in view, the rest being out of sight. Yet the head of the nearest horse, O, is cut away at the back to let it overhang the cornice, as if already

1 Athen. Mittheilungen, xvi. pl. 3.

2 For example, the sarcophagus in the Capitoline Museum representing Prometheus making man. But more to our purpose is a Mithraic relief, on which we see between the rising sun on the left and the waning moon on the right a group of deities in two rows. In the front row Zeus sits in the centre. On his right stand Hera,

Athenè, Aphroditè; on his left stand Apollo, Ares, Heracles. In the back row, and visible only as far as the busts, are, behind Zeus, Victory holding a palm branch; on her right, Artemis, Hades, and Persephonè; on her left, Poseidon. This relief was found in 1861, at Kastell Osterburken, and is published in the Obergermanisch. Rhaetisch. Limes, pt. ii. p. 23, pl. 2.

partially below the horizon. Surely no horse's head could be more beautiful. Ordinarily the large flat cheek-bones of a horse-irresponsive to any muscular movement-seem ungainly. But in an animal of noble breed the mobile mouth, the fiery nostrils, the prominent eye and the alert ears at once rivet our attention. The dull expanse of cheekbone then resolves itself into an agreeable contrast, just because of its structural and immobile form. Selenè herself is a mere fragment now in Athens. She had worn a scarf, which passed round the back of the shoulders and had fallen over her upper arms. Both arms had been stretched forward energetically, possibly in the act of pulling back her horses, like Helios, in astonishment.

As we proceed in examining one by one the sculptures of the pediment, we come next to a figure D, which is at once the grandest of them all in an artistic sense and a source of perplexity as to who he is. Long ago he was called Cephalos, and now again that name is in favour. He has been called also Dionysos, but is best known as Theseus. Whatever his name, he is reclining on a rock over which he has thrown both a lion's skin and a mantle. That he had worn a huntsman's boots is inferred from the drill-hole in the marble in front of his left ankle. But how is his attitude to be described? The cramped action of his knees is very peculiar. It seems to indicate awakening from slumber at sunrise. The slight bending forward of the head and body, the partial turning round towards the front, are equally consistent with that action. We can imagine the right hand raised towards the head in a familiar act of awakening. His left hand may have held

two sloping spears, like the Cephalos on our vase (E 466), which represents the sun and moon at dawn in Attica. His whole figure is sunlit, as if the marble Helios were shining full upon it. When, as sometimes happens, the sun strikes full on this figure, the effect is almost magical; but even in diffused light he always appears as if the sun's rays were slanting upwards along his body from the angle. The face is too much damaged to convey any just idea of its original expression. All we can assert is that the forehead is very beautifully modelled and the eyebrows sharply defined, as in metal rather than in marble. The hair has been only roughly blocked out and is now much worn, but at the back there is a suggestion that it had been braided in two plaits twined round the head, as we see in the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo and other slightly archaic statues.

No words of ours could describe the beauty of this figure, with its fearless truth to nature not only in the bodily forms, but also in that sense of energising vitality which Nature herself so strangely communicates to us in her operations. The attitude is such that the nearer side of the figure is strained just enough to bring into play every capacity of the human form, without a touch of exaggeration, but only with the infinite modulation of a living being of the finest type. It was in this aspect that the figure was meant to be seen, and it is there that the sculptor has concentrated his amazing gift of poetic insight and incomparable skill. At the same time, there are other points in this statue which we need not be deterred from examining. For instance, taking the middle line of the body to start from, we observe that the farther half is not only narrower than the nearer half, but is rendered