Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sanctuary of pagan Greece in the temple of Olympian Zeus./x It also revealed the oldest Greek temple yet known, in the adjoining fane of Hera, a structure of the ninth century before Christ. The composite structure of this building, with its stone foundations, its walls of unburnt brick, its porch of columns originally all of wood, and its superstructure of wood protected by tiling, brilliantly confirmed the hitherto speculative doctrine as to the development of the Doric order of architecture through translation of a wood construction into one of stone. The same spade revealed a whole series of the costly treasuries erected at Olympia by the principal or the most devout Greek states for the housing of their public offerings to the god. This series is quite unique in the history of architecture. It brought to light the best example of a Greek gymnasium, and likewise of a Greek parliament-house. It made known for the first time the details of an elaborate system of Greek water-works, and determined, by the measurement of the race-course, the exact length (192.4 m.) of the stadion of six hundred Olympic feet, which was as much the Panhellenic distance unit as the series of the Olympic festivals was the principal basis of Grecian chronology. Among sculptural remains, it gave back to the world, for the first time, the complete sculptured adornment of a typical Greek temple, that of Zeus. Twelve sculptured metopes render in bas-relief the labors of Hera- kles, a Dorian subject. The two great gable groups by Paionios and Alkamenes severally represent the chariot-race of Pelops with Oino- maos, and the extermination of the Centaurs by the Lapithai, the former a favorite local, and the latter a favorite national legend. This alone makes a collection of fifty-four pieces, nearly all of col…
