winter; its interior surfaces were protected and enhanced by mosaic pavements and painted stucco wall-decorations; and quite often
there were statues or marble furnishings set in the colonnades. A fine example is the House of the Hermes on Delos, terraced into a
hillside on four levels, with a peristyle court rising through three of them.
Sculpture
For free-standing statuary there is a rather better survival rate in Hellenistic times than in the preceding period. This is partly because
the major artists, following the lead given by Praxiteles, were less disdainful of marble as a sculptural material than had been
Lysippus and, before him, many of the great fifth-century sculptors, whose massive output of works in bronze finished up in the
melting-pots of the Middle Ages; and partly because several of the principal centres of patronage now lay east of the Aegean and in
the Levant and were not subjected to the wholesale plunder suffered by Corinth and other cities of European Greece in the wake of
the Roman conquest. At a minor level there are large series of terracotta figurines, produced in factories such as those of Taranto,
Tanagra in Boeotia (demure ladies in their Sunday best), Myrina in Asia Minor (characters from New Comedy), and Alexandria
(ethnic and genre types).
Peristyle Court In The House Of The Dionysus On Delos (late second century B.C.). Such courts were the normal focus of the well-
to-do houses in the Athenian colony of the second century B.C. One portico was often deeper, and sometimes taller, than the others,
in order to protect and enhance the entrance to a large reception room (here at the rear). A well-head (here in the right foreground)
covers the opening to the cistern which provided the Dehan house with its water-supply.
Despite this relative abundance of evidence the problems of dating already mentioned make it well-nigh impossible to establish any
sort of stylistic framework for the period. The most widely accepted schema is that of the German art historian Gerhard Krahmer,
who postulated three main phases: a severe style distinguished by 'closed form', that is, by statues or statue-groups whose structure