Word: zeus
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Workshop of Phidias. At Olympia in the Peloponnesus, site of the original Olympic games, stood one of the most magnificent spectacles of the classical world. The great statue of Zeus by Phidias was almost 40 ft. high, and it showed the god sitting benignly on a golden throne. His face and chest were ivory, and his garment was of beaten gold. Everybody in Greece who claimed to be anybody went to admire the statue and came away ecstatic, and many writers described it, but modern scholars are not sure exactly what it looked like. No bit of it has survived...
...stones. In 1951, under a $480,000 government grant (made possible by Marshall Plan aid), he started digging with a crew of 46 workmen, and soon found evidence to support his educated guess. Among his rich preliminary finds: a colored, life-size terra-cotta statue of a god, probably Zeus adorned with a thin, Dali-like mustache; a rare, ten-inch nude model of Hera, wife of Zeus and the goddess of fertility, in the squatting position of ancient Greek women in childbirth...
...Bosporus (meaning ox or cow ford) is a deep, narrow strait separating Europe and Asia, named in honor of an early swimmer: Io, daughter of the river god Inachos. Io, a looker, dallied with Zeus, who took the precaution-unavailable to other philandering husbands-of changing her into a heifer whenever his wife hove in sight. But Hera (Mrs. Zeus) was a shade too smart for him. One day she archly asked her husband to give her the heifer as a pet. To get out of the fix, poor Io galloped down over the plains of Illyria, across the Balkan...
...other hand, says Menzel, seeing flying saucers is not the same thing as believing that they are space ships manned by intelligent beings from another planet. This science-fiction approach is like "explaining" lightning by calling it a weapon of Zeus: it merely supplants one mystery by another mystery. Calling the saucers space ships explains them, after a fashion, but it summons up the greater mystery of a godlike super-race living on Mars or Venus. "How simple is this sort of science," says Menzel, "and how wrong...
Sculptor Milles has long been fascinated by the legend of the winged horse and heroic rider who angered Zeus by their presumption at trying to mount the heavens. The infuriated god sent a hornet to sting Pegasus' flank, and Bellerophon, thrown from the horse's back, plummeted to earth. Milles made a sketch model that stood in his Cranbrook, Mich. studio "for years," until Des Moines Publisher Gardner Cowles came along and commissioned him to complete it for the Art Center...