These were Zeuxis of Heraclea, in Lower Italy, and Parrhasios of Ephesos. The teachers of the former are not of importance; the impulse through which Zeuxis became one of the most brilliant geniuses of Greece not having been given by these, but rather by Apollodoros, who is not mentioned among them. His fame was at its height during the Peloponnesian war, and in the following ten years; so that we can easily understand why Zeuxis did not establish himself in Athens, where Polygnotos and Apollodoros had raised painting to an art, but, after many wanderings, found an asylum in Ephesos. His works, in contrast to the wall-paintings of Polygnotos, were chiefly upon panels, as, according to Pliny, we may suppose those of Apollodoros to have been. Among those of Zeuxis, the Olympos was exceptional in regard to subject; of the deities, Zeus is particularly celebrated. The only other representations of the deities we find are the Rose-crowned Eros, and Apollo Chastising Marsyas. Neither Pan, nor Heracles Strangling the Serpents in his Infancy, can be reckoned in this category. The Trojan legends appear in three of his more celebrated pictures--Helen in Crotona, the Weeping Menelaos Bringing his Brother the Offering for the Dead, and Penelope, “in whom propriety itself is embodied.” If we may connect with the Odyssey, the Storm at Sea, in which Boreas and Triton are mentioned, it will form a fourth. In his athletes he seems to have intended to establish a canon for painting, as Polycleitos had done for sculpture. Two others, the Family of Centaurs, and the Boy bearing Grapes, are genre pictures.
It is not by chance that we have the fullest accounts of Zeuxis; his aim not being so high as that of Polygnotos, he took his motives from other fields more favorable to the new methods. Historic painting, the foundation of that higher kind of monumental art which gives grand representations of character, was forsaken; as Aristotle expresses it, the works of Zeuxis were wanting in ethic significance. Excessive striving after illusion, after the semblance of reality, brings forward outward and momentary appearances, supplanting the inwardly essential and lasting. Penelope seems to speak, and yet we know not in what situation she is delineated; the weeping of Menelaos certainly does not give his character; and as little does the merry play of the Centaurs with their young, go charmingly described by Lucian, represent the mythological nature of these monsters. Still less can we rank the Helen of Zeuxis, in conception, upon a level with the female figures in the Conquest of Troy by Polygnotos, since we know that Zeuxis chose as models the loveliest virgins of Crotona; that is to say, sought after perfect outward female beauty in truthfulness to nature, but not after that breadth and grandeur expressed in the brow of Cassandra, or which spoke in the glance of Polyxena.