" That story too, as we shall
see, illustrates the spirit of the age. For their sculpture they
used the white marble of Paros, being workers in marble especially,
though they worked also in ebony and in ivory, and made use of
gilding. "Figures of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold"--kedrou
zodia chryso dienthismena+--Pausanias says exquisitely, describing a
certain work of their pupil, Dontas of Lacedaemon. It is to that
that we have definitely come at last, in the school of Dipoenus and
Scyllis.
Dry and brief as these details may seem, they are the witness to an
active, eager, animated period of inventions and beginnings, in which
the Greek workman triumphs over the first [235] rough mechanical
difficulties which beset him in the endeavour to record what his soul
conceived of the form of priest or athlete then alive upon the earth,
or of the ever-living gods, then already more seldom seen upon it.
Our own fancy must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience of
the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty
notices--the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending
at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records,
somewhat uncertainly.
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