[Illustration: Fig. 221.--Eirene and Ploutos, after Kephisodotos.]
The representation, as Friederichs says, of the deep interchange of affection between mother and child, as shown in the Eirene of Kephisodotos, united with much of the hardness of the older works, culminated in two masters--the Parian Scopas and the Athenian Praxiteles, the latter possibly the son of Kephisodotos. Their productions were so nearly related that, even in antiquity, it was doubtful whether a work of celebrity should be ascribed to one or to the other. The chief creations of both were statues of the deities, both worked in marble, choosing this material not by chance, but from the nature of their subjects. With the exception of such colossal figures, of a highly monumental character, as the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athene Parthenos by Pheidias, and the Hera by Polycleitos, the delicate beauty of soft and transparent stone was best fitted for the images of deities enshrined within the temple; bronze, on the contrary, is peculiarly suited to statues of victors and athletes intended for outdoor exposure. It was on this account that it had been so largely employed by Myron and Polycleitos.
[Illustration: Fig. 222.--Apollo Kitharoidos. (Vatican.)]
The Raging Bacchante, designated by epigrams and descriptions as the most celebrated work of Scopas, was one of the first masterpieces of antiquity. The head was thrown back in an ecstasy of passion, the hair loosened, and the long garment fluttering in the wind; thus did the Mainad appear rushing to the heights of Kithairon, holding in her hands the kid rent in her fury. If the rhetor Kallistratos was, as he says, speechless at sight of the countenance, admiring particularly the expression of a soul stung into madness, we can well believe that passion itself was embodied in this work. The excitement was more moderate in the Apollo of the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous, brought by Augustus to the Palatine, playing the lyre and singing with lyric inspiration. It is not improbable that the motive of the Apollo in the Vatican, with the long flowing garments (_Fig._ 222), may be referred to this original. The entire bearing more closely resembles that of the figures of the children of Niobe. We can hardly think without enthusiasm of the Bithynian Achilles group, placed in later times in the Temple of Neptune, near the Circus Flaminius in Rome, which, according to Pliny, would have made the master celebrated even though he had created nothing else during his lifetime. It represented Achilles upon the island of Leuke after his death, and his reception among the deities, and displayed, besides Thetis and Poseidon, numerous fantastic creatures of the sea. Some idea of these last may be gained from a magnificent frieze found in the vicinity of the Temple of Neptune, and now in the Glyptothek at Munich. But it cannot belong to this group, and, in its main features, has no close relations with it.