From the banishment and death of Phidias, which occurred some time before his patron died of the plague, in the last year of the eightyseventh Olympiad, the history of art is carried forward through a period, one of the most stormy and unsettled in the Grecian annals. He beheld the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, an event, indeed, Pericles is accused of having at least hastened, in order to screen his remaining friends from those accusations of which the sculptor had been the guiltless victim. During thirty years of hostile commotions, the arts flourished with almost unimpaired vigor, except that towards the close of the contest, sculpture, which had naturally participated in the fortunes of Athens, suffered a decline in this its capital school. The spirit of the age generally, however, united with the sentiment of hostility a more generous rivalry in excellence of every kind. The grand and beautiful in art continued to be followed and admired, while, amid the contention of arms, eloquence began to attain that nervous elegance which yet renders attic oratory the finest model of deliberative procedure. Even the less friendly interval which followed, the establishment of the iron rule of Sparta--the ruin of the milder and more splendid dominion of Athens--and, more disastrous still, the war kindled by the ambition of Thebes, with the various isolated struggles arising out of these leading events, appear to have produced no material degradation in that heroic style, whose lofty character harmonized with the strong excitement of contests for freedom or empire.
Of the artists who adorned this stirring era, the names of nearly fifty, with descriptions of certain of their works, have been handed down in the incidental notices of contemporary history, or in the more detailed accounts of Pausanius, Strabo, and Pliny. Naucydes was author of that beautiful figure holding a discus, and measuring in his own mind the distance, of which antique copies remain, admired for fine position, sweet variety of contour, and unaffected expression. Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus, assisted in the erection of the tomb of Mausolus, where Scopas, superior to all others mentioned, presided.