Great image, the people who made these buildings were great artists, they must have had plenty of
time to get the sort of detail that they did.
We just went to the tomb of Phillip II of Macedon this weekend. Alexander the Great's dad. He was buried with some incredibly cool stuff - lots of tiny statues and crowns and golden boxes and stuff. The tomb, when found in the late 1970's, was completely intact. Apparently it had been forgotten, and nobody had thought for more than 2000 years to dig in the hill that existed for no reason in an otherwise flat area. The detail and workmanship in the artifacts was amazing. There was a crown of golden oak leaves and acorns that looked as though the branches were plucked from a golden oak tree - the veins on the oak leaves and dimples in acorn caps looked utterly natural.
The work crafted by the Greeks of the classical period was the culmination of an artistic tradition that stretched back at least 2000 years to the earliest days of the Bronze Age/end of the Stone Age. They had been doing similar figures since 3000 BCE or earlier, passing the ideas and the techniques down through the ages, and when it came time to pay tribute to their gods with the greatest temple in the world, they did it up right. The work at the Acropolis is as great as the work at St. Peter's in Rome or the Terra Cotta Warriors site in Xi'an, China.
Thanks for the compliments, everyone. I, too, look for patterns and shapes and such.
