The Statue of Zeus at Olympia

For some eight centuries, visitors to Olympia stood before a seated Zeus so large that the geographer Strabo remarked he would lift the roof off the temple if he rose. The sculptor Pheidias, who had overseen the sculpture of the Parthenon, made it around 435 BCE for the temple at the heart of the sanctuary where the Olympic Games were held. Its skin was ivory and its robe gold, laid over a wooden frame, and the god held a figure of Victory in his right hand and a scepter in his left. Greeks said it was a misfortune to die without having seen it. Nothing of the statue survives, but the workshop where it was made has been found.

Olympia lies in a green valley of the western Peloponnese where the Kladeos stream meets the Alfeios River, beneath the pine-covered Hill of Kronos. The Temple of Zeus, built between about 470 and 456 BCE by the architect Libon of Elis, was a massive Doric building of local shell limestone, and the statue filled the far end of its inner hall, about 12 meters high, with a shallow pool of olive oil before it to keep the ivory from drying and to reflect light. Today the temple is a platform strewn with toppled column drums, lying where earthquakes threw them. Nearby, beneath the ruins of an early Christian church, lies the workshop of Pheidias, where excavators found tools, clay molds for the gold drapery and a small cup scratched with his name.

The statue survived Roman rule, a lightning strike and, according to the historian Suetonius, a plan by the emperor Caligula to carry it to Rome. Its end is uncertain. Pagan cults were banned under Theodosius I in the 390s, and the statue was lost sometime in the 5th century CE. One account holds that it was carried to Constantinople and displayed in the palace of the courtier Lausus, where a fire destroyed it around 475. Others think it perished at Olympia when the temple was damaged and burned in the 420s, and historians still debate which version is right. The Archaeological Site of Olympia was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1989, and the Olympic flame is still lit there before every Games.

• The Temple of Artemis
  The great marble temple of Ephesus, now a single column in a marshy field another ancient wonder
• Mount Olympus
  Greece's highest peak, the mythic home of the gods home of Zeus in myth
• Greece
  The cradle of Western civilization, scattered across the Aegean and Ionian seas located in
• The Acropolis of Athens
  The rock above Athens crowned by the Parthenon, emblem of classical Greece Pheidias also worked on
• Istanbul
  The city straddling Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus possibly destroyed in (as Constantinople)
• The Byzantine Empire
  Romes Greek-speaking eastern half, ruled from Constantinople for more than a thousand years possibly lost in the capital of
• The Roman Empire
  The Mediterranean state whose roads, law and Latin still shape three continents survived under