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The passion for physical beauty found material expression in the great series of athletic sculptures of Argos and Athens. The Parthenon was the outcome of the Hellene’s civic pride. The deepest philosophical beliefs of the fifth-century Greek are to be found in such statues as the “ssss1” and the “ssss1.” These are certainly the finest conceptions of the great god and goddess which have been preserved to us. Both are based on the statues of Phidias and Polyclitus, though there are traces of a more sensuous and florid taste than would have been possible in the fifth century. In the head of Zeus, for instance, the suggestion of awful power is lacking. The great sculptor working under the inspiration of Homer’s lines: “Spake the Son of Cronus and nodded thereto with swart brows and the ambrosial lock of the King rolled backward from his immortal head and the heights of Olympus quaked,” could not have missed this. The two heads convey all the beauty of the first conceptions, but they lack the serene austerity—the stern aloofness—that we may be sure characterized the work of Phidias and Polyclitus. The fifth-century artists were appealing to men who preserved a measure of unreasoning faith in the gods of their fathers.