And as this period begins with the chest of Cypselus, so it ends with
a work in some respects similar, also seen and described by
Pausanias--the throne, as he calls it, of the Amyclaean Apollo. It
was the work of a well-known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia, who,
probably about the year 550 B.C., with a company of workmen, came to
the little ancient town of Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of
traditions of the heroic age. He had been invited thither to perform
a peculiar task--the construction of a throne; not like the throne of
the Olympian Zeus, and others numerous in after times, for a seated
figure, but for the image of the local Apollo; no other than a rude
and very ancient pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high, to which,
Hermes-wise, head, arms, and feet were attached. The thing stood
upright, as on a base, upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which,
according to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince [236]
Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved by Apollo for his
beauty, and accidentally struck dead by him in play, with a quoit.
From the drops of the lad's blood had sprung up the purple flower of
his name, which bears on its petals the letters of the ejaculation of
woe; and in his memory the famous games of Amyclae were celebrated,
beginning about the time of the longest day, when the flowers are
stricken by the sun and begin to fade--a festival marked, amid all
its splendour, with some real melancholy, and serious thought of the
dead.
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