Antiphilus is, besides, the first painter, whose name has come down to us, who painted fire-light effects. His most famous work of this kind was a boy blowing a fire with his mouth, in which the natural character of the boy, and the effect of the light throughout the room, were greatly admired. Another favourite picture represented a number of women spinning and gossiping, highly valued for its truth. Pliny seems doubtful whether it be not beneath the dignity of painting to praise Pyreicus, who loved to paint interiors, especially the shops of tailors, shoemakers, and sempstresses; giving every thing its true nature and character, to a degree that attracted much admiration and many purchasers; and as he delighted in making pictures of the houses of the humble classes of men, he loved also to paint the animals that especially belong to them. The nickname of _Rhyparographus_, was given him, on account of his skill in painting asses bringing vegetables and fruit to market. These pictures were of small size, and very highly finished, and were sold for large prices. Serapion, the contemporary of Pyreicus, on the contrary, painted nothing but play-house scenes, mock architecture, and other things of enormous size, but was incapable of drawing either men or animals. Heraclides the Macedonian was celebrated as a marine painter. His friend Metrodorus, I conjecture to have been a scene painter, and as he combined considerable knowledge of the arts, with the science requisite for a tutor to young men, he was employed by Lucius Paulus both to bring up his sons, and to paint his triumphs. But I will close my account of the painters of Greece with two names of greater eminence, Nicias and Timomachus, who lived in the time of Julius Cæsar. Nicias was an Athenian of considerable private fortune, so that having painted a picture of the descent of Ulysses to the infernal regions, he refused to sell it at a very high price to a foreign prince, and presented it to his native city. He was famous above all for the beauty of his women, and the bold relief of his figures, which are said to have appeared ready to leave the ground they were painted upon, and to walk out of their frames. I have mentioned in the last Essay the subjects of some of his principal pictures which were carried to Rome, and highly prized by Augustus Cæsar. There seems to have been another painter of the same name[140], who was also a sculptor and pupil of Praxiteles, who esteemed him highly on account of the exquisite finish of his works.