perfect freedom of style. It is convenient to reckon this period
as extending from the year of the Persian invasion of Greece under
Xerxes to the middle of the century. In the artistic as in the
political history of this generation Athens held a position of
commanding importance, while Sparta, the political rival of
Athens, was as barren of art as of literature. The other principal
artistic center was Argos, whose school of sculpture had been and
was destined long to be widely influential. As for other local
schools, the question of their centers and mutual relations is too
perplexing and uncertain to be here discussed.

In the two preceding chapters we studied only original works, but
from this time on we shall have to pay a good deal of attention to
copies (cf. pages 114-16). We begin with two statues in Naples
(Fig. 101). The story of this group--for the two statues were
designed as a group--is interesting. The two friends, Harmodius
and Aristogiton, who in 514 had formed a conspiracy to rid Athens
of her tyrants, but who had succeeded only in killing one of them,
came to be regarded after the expulsion of the remaining tyrant
and his family in 510 as the liberators of the city. Their statues
in bronze, the work of Antenor, were set up on a terrace above the
market-place (cf. pages 124, 149). In 480 this group was carried
off to Persia by Xerxes and there it remained for a hundred and
fifty years or more when it was restored to Athens by Alexander
the Great or one of his successors. Athens however had as promptly
as possible repaired her loss. Critius and Nesiotes, two sculptors
who worked habitually in partnership, were commissioned to make a
second group, and this was set up in 477-6 on the same terrace
where the first had been After the restoration of Antenor's
statues toward the end of the fourth century the two groups stood