To pass through the bronze doors was to enter the realm of the divine. Outside, the world was scorching sunshine, loud with cicadas and the voices of myriad Greeks – Dorians, Ionians, men from Sicily and Libya, the Aegean islands and the Asiatic coast, the Black Sea, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and Argos; athletes and trainers; hawkers and tradesmen; praise poets and mountebanks, philosophers, kings – all drawn here to Olympia by the magnetism of the panhellenic games. But cross the threshold, enter the hushed temple, where the half-light filtered through a roof of wafer-thin marble and the glow of oil lamps danced and flickered on the soaring columns and the polished floor, and, gazing in awe and wonder, eyes locked with the implacable, unblinking eyes of Zeus, it seemed to any worshipper that he had come into the presence of the god himself.
Such at least was the experience of the Stoic Epictetus. ‘The Zeus at Olympia’, he wrote in his Discourses, ‘does not frown haughtily at you. Rather, he fixes you with his eyes as is proper for one who says, “What I have decreed cannot be revoked and it will come to pass.”’ Epictetus went on, ‘You journey to Olympia to gaze on Zeus’ statue, and every one of you would think it a great misfortune to die never having seen it.’
More than 12m tall, its wooden framework overlaid with a skin of ivory (for the flesh) and gold (for the god’s robes), the statue was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The great master, Phidias, who created it in the 430s BC, said he had been inspired by lines from Homer’s Iliad:
