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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.