Lactantius[385] speaks of Prometheus as the inventor of fictile images for religious purposes, and of figures in bronze and marble as a later development; the Latin poets[386] bear similar witness to the primitive use of clay for sculptured images, and Pliny marvels at its long-continued employment in Italy.[387] Among early Greek legends the most noteworthy is that of Butades, the potter of Sikyon, to whom the invention of modelling clay in relief was ascribed by Pliny[388] and Athenagoras. The story as told by the former was that, in order to preserve the likeness of his daughter’s lover, he moulded in terracotta the shadow of his profile which the girl drew on the wall. This account, however, is not very intelligible, and the clue is perhaps to be found in the words of Athenagoras,[389] who says that he hollowed out the lines of the face in the wall, filled in the grooves with clay, and so obtained his relief as from a mould. This primitive work of art was said to have been exhibited in the Nymphaeum at Corinth. But this same invention was also claimed by the Samian sculptors, Theodoros and Rhoikos, who flourished about the end of the seventh century. They were pre-eminently artists in bronze, and were associated with the introduction of hollow-casting in that material into Greece; it may therefore be supposed that they actually were among the first to use clay models for statues, this being an essential preliminary to the hollow-casting process. This would not be incompatible with the invention of moulding reliefs by Butades, admitting the truth of his story. The latter was also credited with the invention of antefixal ornaments (see above, p. 98) and the introduction of a mixture of red ochre or ruddle with clay in order to give it a warmer tone. The clay models used by sculptors as the basis of their work, which were known as προπλάσματα, were probably made on the same lines as the large works of art in clay. We read that Lysistratos of Sikyon, the brother of Lysippos, was the first to make casts of statues by means of terracotta moulds,[390] implying that it was about this time that the practice arose of multiplying the principal statues in the same manner as is now done by means of plaster casts. Some of the latter artists combined the plastic art with that of painting, and Zeuxis is said to have previously modelled in terracotta the subjects which he afterwards painted. Pasiteles, an artist who lived at Rome in the first century B.C., always first modelled his statues in terracotta, and spoke of the plastic art as the mother of statuary.[391] But it must not be supposed that as a general rule the Greek sculptors worked their marble statues from models; rather, the contrary was the case, and Pasiteles seems to have been peculiar in this respect.