Book 5
24.1
By the side of the altar of Zeus Laoetas and Poseidon Laoetas is a Zeus on a bronze pedestal. The people of Corinth gave it and Musus made it, whoever this Musus may have been. As you go from the Council Chamber to the great temple there stands on the left an image of Zeus, crowned as it were with flowers, and with a thunderbolt set in his right hand. It is the work of Ascarus of Thebes, a pupil of Canachus of Sicyon. The inscription on it says that it is a tithe from the war between Phocis and Thessaly.
24.2
If the Thessalians went to war with Phocis and dedicated the offering from Phocian plunder, this could not have been the so-called “Sacred War,”355-346 B.C. but must have been a war between the two States previous to the invasion of Greece by the Persians under their king. Not far from this is a Zeus, which, as is declared by the verse inscribed on it, was dedicated by the Psophidians for a success in war.
24.3
On the right of the great temple is a Zeus facing the rising of the sun, twelve feet high and dedicated, they say, by the Lacedaemonians, when they entered on a war with the Messenians after their second revolt. On it is an elegiac couplet:Accept, king, son of Cronus, Olympian Zeus, a lovely image,And have a heart propitious to the Lacedaemonians.
24.4
We know of no Roman, either commoner or senator, who gave a votive offering to a Greek sanctuary before Mummius, and he dedicated at Olympia a bronze Zeus from the spoils of Achaia146 B.C.. It stands on the left of the offering of the Lacedaemonians by the side of the first pillar on this side of the temple. The largest of the bronze images of Zeus in the Altis is twenty-seven feet high, and was dedicated by the Eleans themselves from the plunder of the war with the Arcadians.
