test (ἀγών, ἔρις, φιλονεικία, ἀμφισβήτησις, lis, certatio), Poseidon appeals to the sea, which is at his command and which, by his trident, he can call forth wherever he pleases, even on the top of a rock in the midst of a country, and Athena to the olive tree: the same kind of contest between two divinities for a city, which we also find at Corinth, Argos, and other places. The contest, as such, is brought to its conclusion by the verdict; the victor may rejoice and triumph, the defeated may rage, kill himself, turn against the arbiters or his opponent or his country, or those inhabiting it, but all these are only accidental consequences which lie beyond the contest itself. Poseidon's inundation by salt water is revenge, Athena's olive is the quiet working of her divine nature, to which a similar work must correspond on the other side, or else the contest would not be between two beneficent, but between a malignant and a beneficent power. Such a quarrel, then, is said to have been represented by Phidias, and, according to the attitudes of the two divinities, "the dispute itself, the contest waged, not the provocation of it, not its conclusion, not specially the victory of Athene, not emphatically the discomfiture of Poseidon-a quarrel, not a simple contention, p not dixŋ, an occasion for the exhibition of petulance and temper, not a submission to arbitration or dictation, by mutual consent or superior compulsion." We accordingly have a

quarrel resulting from the claims of Poseidon, and actually in progress, before the decision brought about by the olive tree of Athena; or, in other words, a gymnic contest between Poseidon and Athena. "That Pheidias represented the two powers as coming to blows is not pretended or supposed; but sculpture obtains its effects by the exhibition of visible signs, and the personal expression of the disputants sympathises with and symbolises their moral relations." "The extended arm of Athene carries the expression of warning back or barring a passage, and the counter declination of the god suggests as inevitably that he is sensible of opposition, and yields to an impression." The movement of her body, and the action of her limbs, as my opponent thinks, show an active contest, and the difference of vigour and spirit, in which Poseidon is inferior, although the decided superiority of Athena does not prevent him, without any sign of embarrassment and despondency, from displaying his full power and dignity; and strength and weakness, the impetuosity of the assailant and the repulse of the assailed are exactly balanced. It

3

is necessary to read the entire pages in order to see how Mr. Lloyd, "to the best of his powers of appreciation and analysis,” developes the way in which Phidias contrived to avoid the impression of a gymnic contest, although he selected attitudes and muscular opposition as the exponents of a quarrel or dispute, and to convince one's self how much he is in earnest about a view so thoroughly un-hellenic and vulgar as that of even the appearance, that is, the commencement of a physical contest between Athena and Poseidon. And this contest, which in p. 411 is called the "climax" of the dispute (described by the others,) in Apollodorus and Proclus, is said to have for its object to deter Poseidon from his design, the object which, according to Hyginus, is accomplished by Hermes at the behest of Zeus. We cannot understand at all how the onset of Poseidon against Athena can signify the inundation of the country, and how her retreat can imply a command of Zeus not to carry the threat into effect. According to Proclus and Apollodorus, moreover, the threat is not checked, but carried into effect; nor is the deluge withdrawn, (p. 412,) but the salt-lake on the road to Eleusis is the memorial of Poseidon's anger, and cannot be called an "attempt," (p. 413.) Proclus then, on whose authority the new explanation is based, is in direct contradiction to the explanation given of the group of the two divinities. Nor is there any reason for supposing that an actual quarrel or bodily contest is required to justify the term eps, used by Pausanias, as is clearly the belief of my opponent in pp. 400 and 412, who thinks that otherwise dixy would have been used. The contest of the three goddesses on mount Ida is called epic, and why should not that between Poseidon and Athena? The latter, of course, has several phases: the two gods produce those things on which the decision is to be given, or they stand in expecta

3 Quatremère de Quincy thought of an actual fight of the divinities with lance and trident, which opinion was opposed by A. Feuerbach in Vatic. Apoll. p. 80, and against which Müller (in the Hallische Litteratur Zeitung, 1835, for June, p. 229,) observed, that the decision is not implied in the mythus, and that as a mere demonstration it must appear forced and exaggerated, and that moreover the attitude of Poseidon cannot be understood at all on

the supposition of an armed opponent attacking him. Himerius makes the sound observation: the gods do not take up arms against one another, for it would have been inconsistent to shake the ægis or trident on behalf of such favoured divinities; on the contrary, both entrust the decision to them, as arbitrators. In another passage Müller states that "Poseidon obviously shows terror, consternation, and indignation."

tion of the verdict, whereby a more important part would be assigned to the judge, who otherwise is a subordinate person, and for this very reason not the same in the different accounts; or the sentence is pronounced, the parties separate, (which is by no means a subsequent act, like that assumed by Müller and Lloyd, but a special mode of representing the contest itself,) and lastly, there might still follow a representation of indignation on the one side or a celebration of the victory on the other. The fact that there is no trace of the olive tree either in the drawing or among the fragments, is made to support the supposition that Athena did not create the olive tree until she had measured her strength with Poseidon, although it is believed that both the olive-tree and the salt-well were indicated as subordinate accessories.

After so strange a distortion of the mythus, and after a misinterpretation of the main figures so surprising in our days, we might cease to wonder at a new explanation of secondary figures; but who will not be still more astonished at the originality of the idea, that the figure holding the horses belongs as a sister to the two seated figures, that the three together are the daughters of Cecrops, that the one of the dewy sisters is riding in a chariot drawn by horses, her rearing pair standing nearest the victorious goddess, and prominent in the whole series of figures? Surely there is a sufficient number of groups in which divinities and demons are represented as brothers and sisters; but is there one instance of one brother or sister being on horseback or in a chariot, and the other not? The Dioscuri, either on horseback or on foot, are both always either the one or the other; in like manner the Charites, Hore and others, are always represented together in the same manner as sisters.

The new expositor was led by an expression of his Proclus to transfer the three daughters of Cecrops, who are so probable on the eastern side, both from the composition and the proportions of the other whole, to the western part, and to take the boy between two of the pretended sisters, for Erysichthon, the son of Cecrops. Proclus says, Poseidon advances with his floods ènì Kexрoniono, i. e. according to our expositor, upon Cecrops and his family, from anger at the arbitrator, (Cecrops, according to Apollodorus and Callimachus,) who had insulted him by rejection (pp. 412, 428); and the remaining group on this side, in which I recognise Heracles and Hebe, represents, according to

Mr. Lloyd, Cecrops and his spouse. Ares himself is present, not on account of Athena, but as the husband of Aglauros, beside her chariot (p. 435). According to this, we have on the one side the gods who during the contest joined Poseidon, and on the other the arbitrator with his family, in the former gods, in the latter mortals, and Athena, perfectly alone, without any followers or partizans at all. The outward harmony of the parts, and the even balance and requisite harmony of conception which, in the compositions of the Greeks, and especially in their sculptured pediments, are invariably united with each other, would accordingly be wanting only in this composition of Phidias. To render this bold supposition possible, it was worth the trouble to make a female charioteer into an Aglauros, and into a sister of two goddesses closely united with each other by a youth placed between them; and in order to put one of the daughters of Cecrops with horses in opposition to Amphitrite with her yoke of hippocampæ, so as to make even their figures correspond, it was worth while, even morally, to degrade Poseidon, who is physically repulsed by Athena, for he does not leave behind a sign of his power by inundating the country which was not to be called after him, but he rages against an arbitrator (who, as king of the country, had a right to make his own choice and form his decision,) and the whole of his innocent family. But, according to the common usage since the time of Herodotus, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the name Cecropidæ means nothing but the Athenians, and Proclus means only to say that Poseidon sends the waves of the sea upon the country of the Athenians. It would, in fact, be hardly possible to derive more comprehensive errors and inconsistencies from any one passage which in itself is as easy and clear as the ten lines of Proclus.

It will not be superfluous to add a passing remark, concerning the boy who is said to be Erysichthon. If it were otherwise possible to believe that the three figures said to be Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosos, are actually what they are said to be, the boy who is added to them, would alone be a sufficient reason not to do so, for he does not occur any where, where Cecrops with his daughters is mentioned in a mythus, (as in Eurip. Ion. 1163,) or represented in a work of art. Erysichthon signifies the tearer up of the soil, or the ploughman; and in Athenæus an ox drawing the plough is actually called spuci

Xoov. He is another, but less celebrated Triptolemus; and in reference to his original import or his symbolism of nature, Cecrops is represented as his father, no less than as the father of the dewy maidens; others, from different reasons, call him a son of Triopas. The mythographers, therefore, had to count four children of Cecrops, and, adding Oreithyia, five; but a relation between the son and the three sisters is not noticed anywhere, so that there was no reason for representing them together. The vehement manner in which, in our pediment, the boy turns from the one female figure towards the knees of the other, is not clear to us, but had no doubt a distinct significance. The mythical relation between Demeter, Cora, and Iacchus, is of that kind that it may have been the reason for representing the three in a striking group; this is very possible, though we cannot divine the reason with certainty. An Erysichthon, however, if we make all possible allowance, could have been represented only as standing or sitting beside his three sisters; for a special relation to two of them, to which the group might allude in any way, cannot be discovered. Or shall we perhaps say that Phidias acted thoughtlessly, according to unmeaning and wily fancies?

It is not quite so easy to get rid of the parents, Cecrops and Aglauros, whom my opponent recognises in the group beside the river god; although every one who, in judging of a series of figures, is accustomed to bring before his mind also the artist and the manner in which his mind could conceive a specific problem, before he assigns names to individual figures, must at once feel more than one scruple. Can Cecrops, the arbitrator, be so far distant from the main action, and concealed behindhis four children? Is it possible to conceive that the artist should have assigned to him a place so obviously (even by the smaller space,) subordinate to the figures standing in front? Can Cecrops be accompanied by his wife, considering that elsewhere he is mentioned only in conjunction with his three daughters, while their mother, as is so often the case, is added only to complete the genealogy, without having any importance by herself, either in worship or in legend? It is true, once we

see her introduced in a large vase painting representing Boreas carrying off Oreithyia, who is likewise a daughter of Cecrops. In this instance the three sisters of Oreithyia, (not Erysichthon,) her father and mother, and her grandfather Erechtheus,