Parthenon; there is the same serenity and wholeness of work; power joined to purity of taste; self-restraint; and a sure instinct of symmetry."[3] Sophocles was a friend and companion of Pericles, and therefore probably of Phidias; and in both alike we see the same harmony and absence of exaggeration that are characteristic of Greek art at its best. In this case we may say with some confidence that the poet and the sculptor probably influenced each other. [Footnote 2: Sir R. C. Jebb in _Cambridge Companion to Greek Studies_, p. 110.] [Footnote 3: _Ibid_. p. 113.] It seems a tempting hypothesis to see something of the influence of "Euripides the human" in the individualistic tendencies of the art of the fourth century; but it seems hardly to be justified by the facts. The influence of his dramas is, indeed, to be seen in later vase-paintings; but this is not a matter with which we are here concerned. In his treatment of the gods, Euripides can hardly be quoted as an example of the humanising tendency. "He resented the notion that gods could be unjust or impure"; but the purer and more abstract conceptions of divinity that appealed to him were hardly such as could find expression in art; it has even been said that "he blurred those Hellenic ideals which were the common man's best without definitely replacing them." The bringing of these ideals nearer to the common life of man finds its poetic inspiration rather in the tendency which has already been noticed in the Homeric hymns and the lyric poets, and which now, after the reaction of the fifth century, exerts its full force on the art of Scopas and Praxiteles. There is no need to dwell here on the influence of later poets upon religious art, though we shall have to notice hereafter the parallel development of the representation of the gods in Hellenistic sculpture. The Alexandrian poets expressed in elegant language their learning on matters of religion and mythology, but there was no living belief in the subjects which they made their theme; and the art they inspired could only show the same qualities of a correct and academic eclecticism. The idylls of Theocritus find, indeed, a parallel in the playful treatment of Satyrs and other subjects of a similar character; but these belong to what may be called mythological genre rather than to religious art. The dramatic vigour and intensity which we find in the art of Pergamon cannot easily be traced to the influence of any similar development in literature, though its artificial and learned mythology is such as we find also in the work of Hellenistic poets.