Mitchell, Lucy M.: A history of ancient sculpture (New York, 1883)

228 ARCHAIC SCULPTURE.

friends, or native town. Before being accepted, statues were subjected to scru
tiny from the judges, more severe, it is said, than that which the victors them-
selves had undergone. Moreover, the horses who had played an important part
in the triumph also came in for a share in these representations ; either bearing
their riders, or represented as harnessed before the chariot, and frequently hav-
ing their names inscribed. Often, however, as discoveries have shown, their
images were very small.3S4 How many masters were employed to people the
grove at Olympia with such commemorative monuments we shall see as we
take up the works from the early half of the fifth century.

But the temples at Olympia, as elsewhere, were also a most important factor
in influencing sculpture ; and recent excavations have thrown untold light on
the development and purposes of both. The temple served, not only to
shelter the statue of the divinity and the other gods, the guests, as it were,
of this divinity: it was also a treasury for the costly and abundant votive
offerings collected through the centuries. Moreover, the house of the god
served, in some cases, as the bank whence the state moneys were disbursed.385
The oldest excavated temple on the soil of Greece, that of Hera at Olympia,
seems to have been pre-eminently a treasure-house ; and its very ancient form,
in which the walls of the sacred place were divided off into niches, something
after the manner of chapels in old Roman-Catholic churches, would have
afforded excellent shelter for the accumulated treasure.3s6 That the temple
building was also very frequently used for sacrificial worship, seems evident
from the pit discovered in two temples at Samothrake, into which flowed the
blood of the offerings.3S7 The distinction once made between temples of
worship and those in honor of the agonistic games, according to which the
latter were not sacred, but mere halls for festive gatherings, has melted away,
as an empty theory, before the discoveries which prove that the new great
temples, in which the prizes were distributed, were quite as holy as the older
ones, having the same relation to them that a new church-building nowadays
has to an old one.3ss To the Greeks the games were, moreover, not a secular
institution. They were ordained by the oracle, like the hecatombs, to pro-
pitiate the gods, memorials of the combats which divine beings had fought
with the powers of evil. Zeus and Athena conquering the giants, Heracles
and Theseus overcoming the Amazons, were the mythic prototypes of the
combats, so religiously observed that they were commenced and closed with
sacrifice. Every thing in connection with them was holy. The judges purified
themselves in a sacred spring, the lots were drawn from a sacred urn, and
Pindar calls the decision a sacred one. Recent discoveries, moreover, make
it probable, that in front of the great temple-statues, both of Zeus at
Olympia, and of Athena in the Parthenon, an altar stood, whose smoke rose
up through the open space over the centre of the holy place or cclla.'^")

Following the guidance of the latest student of the Parthenon, Dorpfeld,