Arts: Zeus

When Paulus Emilus, Emperor of Rome, beheld the statue of Zeus Olympus which a Greek, Phidias of Athens, had erected at Olympia in ivory and gold, he trembled in all his limbs, and ordered sacrifices to be offered before the image. Twenty years later the Emperor was dead, and in a few years more the statue itself was a fable. Few men alive in the sixth century had ever seen it, fewer still could tell what had become of it. Copies exist, worn faces on coins, busts that show the softening touch of...

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