Angell, Samuel: Sculptured metopes discovered amongst the ruins of the ancient city of Selinus in Sicily by William Harris and Samuel Angell in the year 1823 (London, 1826)

mained till its final demolition towards the end of the First Funic
war, forbid our supposing them the works of more recent times.

For the gradual erection of the temples, we have a period
of about two hundred and forty-five years, and assuming, not
without strong grounds, the central temple on the western hill
to have been the first erected after the foundation of the colony,
established by concurring testimony about the thirty-second
Olympiad, or six hundred and fifty years u. c. we may safely
place its sculptures at more than half a century prior to the as-
signed date of the -Kgina marbles, and at least a century and a
half before the sculptures of the Theseium'.

These sculptures, although they are not the production of
Greece herself, and have no pretensions as models of excellence
in the arts, and though some of the peculiarities in the archi-
tecture of the temples at Selinus may be considered as defects,
are not perhaps on these accounts less deserving of consideration.
That they are the works of a colony will not diminish their
value, when it is considered how closely Sicily kept pace in the
career of civilization and the arts, with the most forward of the
Grecian States, of which, even were historians silent on the
subject, the magnificent remains at Syracuse, Agrigentum, and
Selinus would sufficiently attest.

At this day no proofs are wanting of the degree of excel-
lence which the arts attained among the Greeks. In such the
European museums had long been rich, when the discoveries at

' Sec Additional Notes In Leake's Ti>[>OBi-»i)liy of Alliens.