But the tendency towards an increased interest in the needs of the
individual citizen is even more strongly exemplified by the growth of
home life. Home life had been sacrificed to public life in the age
of Themistocles and Pericles. The victors of Salamis lived in small
houses, which were particularly dark and uncomfortable owing to the
lack of glass. The poorer citizens lived in a single “cella.” Families
of moderate means had two sets of rooms, the upper floor for the women,
and the lower set apart for the men. In the fifth century only a few
rich men could afford the series of rooms grouped round the two courts
which enabled the wealthy Athenian to receive his friends and enjoy
some of the privileges of home life. Under the circumstances, we cannot
wonder that the Greek left his home early and preferred the gymnasium
or the market-place, the law courts or the covered corridors. A few
met in the courtyards of their friends but, as a whole, social life in
Athens was public.
In the fourth century, however, the richer members of the community
began to build magnificent houses in the suburbs of Athens. Attempts
at decorating the interiors followed as a matter of course. It is said
that Alcibiades was the first Athenian to try, calling in Agatharchus,
the painter, to his aid. The poorness of the light in the majority of
the houses doomed the painters’ efforts to failure, but the sculptor
had a better chance. His work could be used, at any rate, for the
decoration of the courtyards. He was employed to supply portrait
busts and a host of single figures, which, appealing as they did to
the individual taste alone, would have had no place in the art of the
preceding century.
The range of subjects was still further increased by the popular
sculptor being no longer chiefly engaged upon huge chryselephantine
statues of deities, in which it was manifestly impossible to depart far
from the popular types which had been fixed by sculptors like Phidias
and Polyclitus. Moreover, the sculptor was no longer compelled to spend
most of his time in filling a triangular pediment, a square metope,
or shaping his design to the long narrow frieze. The consequence was
the discovery of numbers of mythical subjects capable of objective
realisation in bronze and marble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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