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A fanciful reconstruction of Phidias' statue of Zeus, in an engraving made by Philippe Galle in 1572, from a drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the classical Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was made by the famed classical sculptor Phidias (5th century BC) circa 432 BC in Olympia, Greece.^[1]

The seated statue, some 40 feet (12 meters) tall, occupied the whole width of the aisle of the temple built to house it. "It seems that if Zeus were to stand up," the geographer Strabo noted early in the 1st century BC, "he would unroof the temple."^[2] Zeus was a chryselephantine sculpture, made of ivory and accented with gold plating. In the sculpture, he was seated on a magnificent throne of cedarwood, inlaid with ivory, gold, ebony, and precious stones. In Zeus' right hand there was a small statue of Nike, the goddess of victory, and in his left hand, a shining sceptre on which an eagle perched.^[3] Plutarch, in his Life of the Roman general Aemilius Paulus, records that the victor over Macedon “was moved to his soul, as if he had beheld the god in person,” while the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom wrote that a single glimpse of the statue would make a man forget his earthly troubles.

Coin of Elis illustrating the Olympian Zeus (Nordisk familjebok)

The circumstances of its eventual destruction are a source of debate: some scholars argue that it perished with the temple in the 5th century AD, others argue that it was carried off to Constantinople, where it was destroyed in the great fire of the Lauseion (Schobel 1965). According to Lucian of Samosata in the later second century, "they have laid hands on your person at Olympia, my lord High-Thunderer, and you had not the energy to wake the dogs or call in the neighbours; surely they might have come to the rescue and caught the fellows before they had finished packing up the swag."^[4]

Perhaps the greatest discovery in terms of finding out about this wonder came in 1954-1958 with the excavation of the workshop at Olympia where Phidias created the statue. Tools, terracotta molds and a cup inscribed "I belong to Pheidias" were found here, where the traveller Pausanius said the Zeus was constructed.^[5][6][7] This has enabled archaeologists to re-create the techniques used to make the great work.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble and bronze (restored), following the type established by Phidias (Hermitage Museum)

• Kenneth D. S. Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World, Oxford U Press (2001) ISBN 0198153112
• Alfred Mallwitz and Wolfgang Schiering, Die Werkstatt des Pheidias in Olympia I: Olympische Forschungen V, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (1964)
• Wolfgang Schiering, Die Werkstatt des Pheidias in Olympia II: Werkstattfunde: Olympische Forschungen XVIII, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (1991) ISBN 3110124688

• Chryselephantine sculpture
• Phidias

• "The Statue of Zeus at Olympia"
• Colin Delaney, "A Wonder to Behold: The Statue of Olympian Zeus"
• Archaeopaedia: Statue of Zeus With bibliography
• (Ellen Papakyriakou) Olympia: Art: the chryselephantine statue of Zeus
• Michael Lahanas, "The colossal Zeus statue of Pheidias"