The usual word ζωγραφία for painting, and ζωγράφος for drawing-master, suggests to us that _figure-drawing_ was the early and the principal branch of the art known and taught. From the earliest times rude figures had been scratched and colored on vases, and the number of vase-painters in historical Greece must have been so considerable as to disseminate some general feeling for the art, though we hear of no amateur vase-painting, such as is in fashion among ladies of our own day. On the other hand, landscape-painting was of late growth and very imperfect development. The prominence of sculpture, even polychromatic sculpture, made its absence less felt. Owing to the old Greek habit of personifying nature, and expressing every mountain and river by its tutelary gods, we find in the great pediment sculptures of the best epoch that curious indication of the landscape by its tutelary gods--looking on calmly and unconsciously at the action of the principal figures--which is perhaps the most peculiar characteristic of all Greek art. Thus the local rivers, the Alpheus and Cladeus, are represented lying at the ends of the great eastern pediment of the temple at Olympia, witnessing the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus with no more expression of feeling than the landscape which they represent would manifest. The earliest essays at landscape proper were, moreover, not rocks and trees, or that wild country which the Greeks never loved, but buildings and artificial grounds, with regular lines and definite design. The first attempt was made to satisfy the requirements of the theatre, and the fact that scene-painting and shade-painting (or perspective) were used as synonymous terms shows the truth of the report that Apollodorus (_cir._ 400 B.C.) first discovered the art of representing the straight lines of a building in depth, by a departure from that _orthography_ in geometrical drawing which had hitherto been practised. If we may judge from the many sketches of this sort of suburban landscape which are preserved on Pompeian walls, the proper knowledge of perspective was not even in later times diffused among ordinary artists, whose figure-painting on these walls is in every respect vastly superior. On the other hand, the figure-painting even on vases of the best epoch is so conventional that we cannot believe Greek boys were taught to draw figures with a proper knowledge of living or round models, and must assume the drawing-lessons to have been chiefly in geometrical designs.