Dryads, in Classical mythology, were wood nymphs inhabiting – inspiriting – oak trees. The columns of the earliest Greek temples, usually in the unornamented Doric style (as is this column), were originally of wood and alluded to trees – specifically the strong, long-lived oak tree sacred to Zeus – physically, formally and metaphorically. Here the dryad’s trace, or memento, is her pair of sandals seemingly abandoned in the haste of her transformation into a tree/column and also now commuted into perdurable gold, signaling her divinity and a Golden Age when gods still walked the earth. The trace, or memory, of the living oak within the stone column is the tangible – not merely visible – rippling and irregular carved bark pattern that covers the column’s shaft. Two metamorphoses, each realized through consummately devout human imagining and art, are conflated: a tree becomes a goddess, and the tree-goddess becomes a column commemorative, in turn, of both. The tree is long gone, the goddess has departed, but they are vividly re-conjured through metaphor (synecdoche, simile). At the column’s top are lightly incised, schematic “volutes,” at once suggesting the dryad’s femininity and recapitulating, quite deftly, the capitals of subsequent Classical Orders: the Ionic with its two opposed scrolls, the Corinthian with its curling acanthus leaves.