Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Jordan Paul

Author:Jordan, Paul [Paul Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317868842
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2014-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

Mac Dowdy’s Zeus at Olympia. The coin comes from the nearby city of Elis

A final detail of the description of the Zeus and its setting we have from Pausanias offers a fascinating insight into the ups and downs of political and cultural relations within Hellenism. In the temple of Zeus at Olympia, says Pausanias, there was a woollen curtain given as a dedication to the temple by Antiochus (IV, who had forcibly Hellenised Judaea and imposed the worship of Zeus on the Jews in 175 BCE). This curtain was decorated with Assyrian embroidery and dyed in Phoenician purple. We may conclude that it almost certainly came from the temple of Jerusalem where it veiled the Ark until Antiochus turned the place over to Zeus and had swine sacrificed to him there. In the Zeus temple at Olympia, the curtain could be raised and lowered on cords according to Pausanias, presumably behind the statue. It was not, then, a part of the Phidias design, but a novelty added more than 250 years later on.

During his visit towards the end of the second century CE, when that curtain had been hanging for nearly 350 years, Pausanias was also shown the very workshop in which Phidias had made the statue of Zeus. Some centuries after Pausanias, a Byzantine church was built on the foundations of the workshop about 30m behind the temple, with dimensions closely resembling those of the Zeus temple’s interior cella and on the same orientation as the temple, as archaeologists were quick to note. The workshop was even furnished with columns like the temple’s. It seems that it was built to reproduce the size and lighting effects of the inner part of the temple for which its product was destined. Excavations around the church have revealed a pit for bronze casting and the rubbish of the workshop, including slag, earth pigments, lumps of modelling plaster, lots of worked bone and ivory and lead and bronze and iron, even obsidian (a black, glassy flint) together with discarded tools including spatulas and burins. There were spangles for the god’s cloak, and terracotta moulds over which the gold of his drapery was hammered into shape: some of these moulds were numbered to show their place in the overall design. (Ivory, too, could be softened by boiling in vinegar or beer to prepare it for shaping, a technique used in furniture making before the time of Phidias.) In subsidiary workshop debris of the late fifth century BCE, a core of elephant’s tusk probably indicates the need for ongoing repairs to the ivory of the statue, olive oil or no. There was also some rhino and buffalo horn among the debris: the chain of trade in the fifth century BCE reached far into Africa, via Egypt. The broken base of a fifth century jug found with the rubbish proclaims itself the property of Phidias, bringing us very close to the maker of the Zeus statue even as he worked on his masterpiece. Archaeologists don’t estimate

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