Pheidias

That Pheidias made the Zeus at Olympia and the Athena Polias at Athens of gold and ivory is doubtless clear to all;

The Athenian Pheidias inscribed on the finger of the Olympian Zeus, "Pantarkes is fair";

Let your Pheidias come, and your Polycleitus, and Praxiteles again, and Apelles, and all who pursue the menial crafts, earthy workers of earth.

It is by that purpose that the bird is said to be dear to Athena, the fairest and wisest of the gods, and it found favour even in the art of Pheidias among the Athenians, who did not think it unworthy to set it beside the goddess, with the people's consent.

Or ought those who have come hither to be merely spectators — both of the other sights, evidently all-beautiful and most renowned, and especially of the worship of the god and of his truly blessed image, which your ancestors, sparing no extravagance of expense and attaining the highest art, fashioned and dedicated as the fairest and most god-beloved of all the statues that are upon the earth — Phe …

For suppose someone should call Pheidias to account, the first among the Greeks — this wise and god-gifted craftsman of the august and all-beautiful work — having seated as judges those who award the prize to the god in the contest, or rather a common tribunal of all the Peloponnesians, and besides of the Boeotians and Ionians and the other Greeks everywhere throughout Europe and Asia:

(whose statue, it seems, Pheidias wrought expressly that Demosthenes might have it to perjure himself by and to make profit of) that if any one should say that we ought to make peace with Philip, he would seize him by the hair and drag him to prison—in this imitating the politics of Cleophon, who, they tell us, in the time of the war against the Lacedaemonians, brought ruin to the state.

The term Wisdom is employed in the arts to denote those men who are the most perfect masters of their art, for instance, it is applied to Pheidias as a sculptor and to Polycleitus as a statuary.

Or would Pheidias and Polycleitus, if they had been greatly proud of the gold and the ivory—of which the one made the Zeus for the Eleans, the other the Hera for the Argives—have been laughing-stocks, adorning themselves with another's wealth and forsaking their art, through which the gold itself was shown sweeter and more precious?

The fact is that, although I have known that some of the sophists traduce my occupation, saying that it has to do with writing speeches for the courts, very much as one might have the effrontery to call Pheidias, who wrought our statue of Athena, a doll-maker, or say that Zeuxis and Parrhasius practiced the same art as the sign-painters, nevertheless I have never deigned to defend myself against t …