Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone--glimmering through the dream of things that were. First in the race that led to Glory's goal,-- They're sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, grey flits the shade of power.
To Ictinus is also to be ascribed the most perfect vestige of antiquity now in existence, the Temple of the Apollo Epicurius, in Arcadia, and which is reported to have been one of the most splendid buildings of the Peloponnesus. The magnificent columns which 'crown Sunium's marble steep,' belong to the same era, and probably to the same school. For sixty years afterwards, we have no decline in the grandeur or purity of the Doric, as yet appears in the ruins of Messene, a city built by Epaminondas, and still exhibiting the most perfect specimen of ancient military architecture. But the victories of this warrior were parricidal triumphs; they were gained over those who ought to have been as brothers. In sculpture, we have already seen that this era marks the retrogression of the manly and the grand in style; it is so in architecture, for in less than forty years, a great declension in these respects must have taken place in this the grandest and most severe of the orders, as is attested by the specimen in the isle of Delos, inscribed with the name of Philip of Macedon. After this the Doric either fell into desuetude, or the works have perished, for the only remaining example is the portico, erected by Augustus in one of the _agorai_ or squares of Athens.
Of the remains of Doric architecture in the ancient seats of the Sicilan and Italian colonies, the dates, even with ordinary accuracy, it is impossible individually to ascertain. The former claim the highest antiquity in some, but not in all instances. The temple of Egesta, in the interior of the island, is perhaps one of the oldest, yet among the least imperfect monuments of the art in Europe; contemporary or earlier, is the temple of Minerva, at Syracuse; the other remains near that city are of a later date. The ponderous ruins at Selinus, which consist of no less than six temples, one of which, three hundred and thirty-one feet in length, composed of a double peristyle of columns sixty feet high, must have presented one of the sublimest objects ever reared by human art. Ruins at Agrigentum--Temple of Juno most picturesque, of Concord very perfect--three others, last the grand Temple of Olympian Jupiter, one of the most stupendous buildings of the ancient world, and whose buried materials swell into hills or subside in valleys, over which we have ourselves wandered, without at first knowing that we trode upon the prostrate labours of man, and not the workings of nature.