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Art and Literature after Pericles 95 wealth to have pictures in their own houses, and in this way private support of art increased and painting made more rapid progress than ever before. An Athenian artist named Apollo- dorus now began to notice that the light usually fell on an object from one side, leaving the unlighted side so dark that but little color showed on that side, while on the lighted side the colors came out very brightly. When he painted a woman's arm in this way, lo, it looked round and seemed to stand out from the sur- face of the painting ; whereas in the older Greek paintings all the human limbs looked perfectly flat. By representing figures in the background of his paintings as smaller than those in front, Apollodorus also introduced what we now call perspective. 143. Age of Conflict after the Death of Pericles. Any young Athenian born at about the time of Pericles' death found himself in an age of conflict wherever he went : an age of conflict abroad on the field of battle as he stood with spear and shield in the Athenian ranks in the long years of warfare between Athens, Sparta, and Thebes; an age of conflict at home in Athens amid the tumult and even bloodshed of the streets and markets of the city, as the common people, the democracy, struggled with the nobles for the leadership of the State ; and finally an age of con- flict in himself as he felt his own faith in old things struggling to maintain itself against new views which were coming in. He recalled the childhood tales of the gods, which he had heard at his nurse's knee. When he had asked her how the gods looked she had pointed to a beautiful vase in his father's house. There were the gods on the vase in human form, and so he had long thought of them as people like those of Athens. Later at school he had memorized long passages of the Homeric poems and learned more about the gods' adventures on earth. Then he had begun to go to the theater, where he was much delighted with the comedies of Aristophanes, the greatest of the comedy writers (127). Aristophanes ridiculed such men as Euripides and the Sophists, who doubted the existence of the gods. 144. Victory of Doubt; Triumph of Euripides. When, how- ever, this young Athenian left his boyhood teacher behind and went