In the fifty years between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars architecture and plastic art attained their highest perfection in Athens.
There is perpetual action and reaction between picture and myth; and a legislator desiring to purify and raise his countrymen's religion must devote no less attention to their plastic art than to their hymnology.
Gilgamesh's conquest of the divine bull was placed under Taurus; his slaying of the tyrant Khumbaba (the prototype of Geryon) in the fifth month typified the victory of light over darkness, represented in plastic art by the group of a lion killing a bull, which is the form ordinarily given to the sign Leo on Ninevite cylinders.
Caelus is sometimes associated with Terra, represented in plastic art as an old, bearded man holding a robe stretched out over his head in the form of an arch.
A collection of casts, likewise in the museum, is designed to display the progress of plastic art from the time of the Egyptians and Assyrians to modern ages.
