Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/227

Greek Sculpture. 197 riders, foot-soldiers, grave citizens bearing olive-branches, flute-players, and young and lovely maidens carrying graceful jars with infinite beauty of action. The groups on the northern are disposed with greater freedom than the corresponding groups on the southern side, and in the wonderful grace and power with which they move onward with rythmic motion there is the very epitome of " order in disorder." Among all the hundred and twenty-five mounted figures (Fig. 81) who are con- trolling their steeds in every variety of action, although there is an intentional sense of crowding — hurrying onward — yet there is no confusion, and each detail is distinct and clear. The groups on the southern side represent the more formal and regular part of the procession which was charged with the office of conveying the sacrificial victims, attended and preceded by horsemen who, from their ordered progress, are supposed to represent the trained cavalry of Athens. On the eastern pediment of the temple was a magnificent group representing the Birth of Athena, and on the western pediment, the contest between Poseidon and Athena for the city of Athens. These are both in ruins. The bas-reliefs of the Metopes, on the exterior of the temple, represent conflicts of the Centaurs and the Lapithse (Fig. 82). Of the ninety-two original sculptures, sixteen are in the British Museum, and casts of many others. Alcamenes is said to have been the author of many of the finest of these groups, which should be carefully studied in the original sculpture* and the casts in the British Museum, for they belong to the culminating time of the greatest age of Greece, when the purity of the earlier period was combined with the science, grace, and