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.

for of such things all men are utterly unbeholding and uninformed.

But if you blame me for the figure, you would do well first to be angry with Homer;

and if anywhere there were small and obscure likenesses made by earlier craftsmen, we neither greatly trusted nor heeded them.

(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 …

They call Pheidias a sculptor and Homer a poet:

And suppose you had a mind to approach Polycleitus the Argive or Pheidias the Athenian and pay them a personal fee, and somebody asked you—What is it that you consider Polycleitus or Pheidias to be, that you are minded to pay them this money?