although we can sometimes trace the influence of one upon
another, yet each clearly shows his own characteristics. We are
expressly told of Praxiteles that he showed the most admirable skill in
infusing into his marble works the passions and emotions of the soul;
and the extant remains of the statues made by Scopas and Lysippus show
that they also, each in his own way, attained the same results.

If the sculpture of the fifth century was ethical, expressing noble
ideals of character whether in gods or men, that of the fourth century
may be called psychological. It is not content with character; it
expresses also mood and even passion, and thereby gives more prominence
to individuality. At first sight it is not easy to realise how this
change came to affect the representations of the gods. The gods of Homer
are, indeed, full of individual character; but we have seen how in the
fifth century, though the greatest sculptors declared it was the gods of
Homer that they represented, these representations were idealised and
raised above those human touches in which the individuality is most
conspicuous. There was, in the Homeric hymns and in the lyric poets, a
delight in details of incident and in personal peculiarities and even in
romantic tales about the gods; and in the fourth century, when the high
idealisation of the preceding age is no longer so strong in its
influence, we find a similar tendency in art as well. While the great
statues of the gods in the fifth century are almost all represented as
either enthroned or standing, not employed in any particular action or
function, the most characteristic examples of the statues of gods made
in the fourth century have almost all some definite motive. We may take
as an example what was perhaps the most famous statue of antiquity, the
Aphrodite by Praxiteles at Cnidus. The goddess is represented as nude;
and it is often said that goddesses would not have been so represented
in the fifth century. It is true that full drapery seems more consistent
with the dignified and august figures of Phidian art. But if the
religious type had required that Phidias should make a nude goddess, we
may be sure he would have made her naked and unashamed, with no more
self-consciousness than a nude Apollo; above all, he would not have
thought it necessary to provide a motive for her nudity. With Praxiteles
it is otherwise. He represents the goddess as preparing for the bath,
and just letting her last