r expression in sculpture was also due in almost every case to
the employment of the artist by the community. In the fourth century, on
the other hand, we find on every side a stronger assertion of
individuality. It was a commonplace among Attic orators in the fourth
century to contrast the private luxury and ostentation of their own day
with the simplicity of life among the great men of the earlier age,
whose houses could not be distinguished from those of the common people,
though their public buildings and the temples they raised to the gods
were of unparalleled splendour. In religion, and above all in religious
art, we find something of the same tendency. There are few if any
records of the dedication during the fourth century of those great
statues of the chief gods which were looked back to by all subsequent
generations as the embodiment of a national ideal. But there were,
perhaps, more statues of the gods made in the fourth century which were
the objects not merely of artistic admiration, but of intense and
sometimes morbid personal devotion. The mere list of the gods preferred
for representation is an indication in itself; while in the fifth
century, Zeus and Athena and Hera, the great gods of the State or of the
Hellenic race, are the subjects of the most famous statues, in the
fourth century it is rather Aphrodite and Dionysus and Asclepius, those
whose gifts contribute to individual happiness or enjoyment, that offer
most scope to the powers of the artist.

And the sculptors themselves, in the fourth century, show more
individuality of style. In the latter part of the fifth century the
genius of Phidias had so dominated religious art that the works of his
successors, men like Alcamenes and Agoracritus, could hardly be
distinguished from his. But the great sculptors of the fourth century,
Scopas and Praxiteles and Lysippus, not to mention others of less note,
devoted themselves not so much to the expression through perfect
physical form of great religious ideals, but to a realisation of the
character and, so to speak, the personality of the gods whom they
portrayed. And they did this by the same means by which they expressed
in their art the characters and passions of heroes or of men, thereby
removing the gods from the sphere of passionless benignity and power
which is assigned to them by the art of the fifth century. Such a
treatment evidently gave more scope for variety in the styles of the
sculptors; and