A Greek temple could accommodate figurative sculpture, in the triangle of the pediment, as akroteria, and on the frieze, whether it was a Done frieze divided into metopes or an uninterrupted Ionic frieze. The way in which Archaism solved the problems entailed, by adapting the imagery to predetermined architectural frames, was discussed above. Fundamentally, Classicism was only exploiting the formulas gradually perfected during the sixth and very early fifth centuries. Architectural sculpture later than the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, where, as we saw, the hesitations of Archaism ended, thus requires us to consider other aspects of the subject.

First, let us consider the quantity and spatio-temporal distribution of architectural sculpture of the period. Apart from the monuments built outside Greece itself (and there are good reasons for treating them as a separate subject), most of this body of work is found in Athens. In the form of the monuments still standing on the Acropolis, most of the works made in the second half of the fifth century are found there. The Parthenon reigns supreme in the wealth of its decorative sculpture: two pediments, representing on the east pediment (the façade) the birth of Athena, and on the west pediment the dispute between Athena and Poseidon for the possession of Attica; the frieze of metopes and triglyphs, canonically arranged above the colums of a Doric temple and with ornamentation on all four sides of the building, a gigantomachy on the east side, a centauromachy on the south side, an Amazonomachy on the west side and the sacking of Troy on the north side; and finally, the famous Ionic frieze showing the Panathenaic procession, setting out from the west side, namely, the back of the monument, and making its way along the long north and south sides in two symmetrical files which join to the east in front of the assembly of the gods. In the matter of innovation, too, the Parthenon deserves its special place and the high esteem in which it is held today: it went against traditional Done usage for the Panathenaic frieze to be placed at the top of the exterior wall of the cella, and while Archaism had established the thematic homogeneity of the Ionic frieze on all sides of a building, this particular frieze takes the formula to extremes, exploiting the absence of any break at the angles of the building (while the Done frieze, on the contrary, has a strong break at those angles consisting of two adjacent triglyphs) and developing the same subject all round the four sides of the temple. It is the same on the pediment, where the usual figures shown lying in the angles give way to the chariot of the sun apparently rising above the horizon on the left, while the chariot of the moon is going down at the other end.

The subject matter is almost exclusively mythological and not very varied. Contemporary scenes are unusual. The most notable of them is the Ionic frieze of the Parthenon, showing the participants in the festival of the Panathenaea going in procession all along the temple, like the real procession climbing uphill from the Kerameikos quarter, the area north-west of the Acropolis, to the statue of Athena Parthenos (although it has recently been claimed that past heroes of Athens are shown among them, visual imagery bringing together characters who never co-existed). Then there is the frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike, which seems to show scenes from the Persian Wars, namely, from very recent history. However, the rest of the subjects belong to what we call mythology, including legends of the gods, such as the gigaotomachy with gods and giants in combat, and stories from ancient history such as the “Ilsoupersis” (the sack of Troy), the Calydonian Hunt, and so on. Identification of the various legendary scenes and characters is not always obvious; for instance, opinions on the subject of the akroteria of the temple at Epsdauros have varied widely. Despite these uncertainties, however, a really original subject like that of Dionysos and the pirates on the Monument of Lysiskrates is rare, and we are bound to notice the considerable number of gigantomachies, centauromachies, Amazonomachies and sacks of Troy which populate the Done metopes of the Parthenon, the Ionic frieze of Bassae, and the pediments of Epidauros.

This surprising recurrence of subjects leads one to formulate the question of the relationship between sculptural ornamentation and the edifice upon which it appears in new terms. In discussing Archaism, we studied the way in which the imagery had to conform to architectural constraints, but there is another way for images to relate to a budding: they may also relate to its function or to the individual who commissioned the work. And while sculptural decoration must be strictly subordinated to the frames imposed by the frieze and the pediment, there seems to be more latitude with themes arising from the function and history of the building itself

Sometimes, of course, there can be no argument. The sculptural imagery may refer to the divinity presiding over the temple, although, contrary to expectations, this is not at all frequent. The Parthenon is in fact quite unusual in that its pediments show two incidents from the story of Athena, and its Ionic frieze is a marble record of the procession organized in her honour every four years. Much more often, there are references to local history or the background and pretensions of the patrons who commissioned the work. For instance, the Telephos story on the west pediment at Tegea is explained by the family tree of Telephns whose grandfather was king of Tegea. At Delos, the abduction of Oreithyia depicted on the roof-ridge of the Temple of the Athenians is an Athenian legend, and the same is also true of the Theseid in the anonymous fourth-century temple. Similarly, the Doric frieze of the Theseion depicts the labours of Herakles and the deeds of Theseus, as the Athenian Treasury at Delos had done some decades earlier; the repetition of both themes shows that the juxtaposition of these two series of exploits was not a matter of chance: the Athenians must have wanted to show that their own national hero was as good as the great hero of their Peloponnessan adversaries. However, this relationship between sculptural imagery and the patrons who commissioned it can be regarded as of frequent occurrence only if we accept the almost certain hypothesis which has long been proposed as an explanation of the choice of gigantomachies, centauromachies, Amazonomachies and depictions of the sacking of Troy. The common factor between those four subjects is that the gods or the Greeks (a flattering correlation) are shown conquering either brutes like the giants and centaurs or “barbarians” like the Amazons and Trojans, and consequently:, less than fifty years after the battle of Salamis, such scenes were like a legendary echo of the victories of the Persian Wars. This transference of the very recent to the very distant past explains the predominance of those four subjects, and also the rarity in Greece of what is called, in Roman art, historical relief the representation of contemporary figures and events. The Parthenon is a perfect illustration of these two kinds of iconographic relationship between architectural sculpture and the building upon which it stands. First, the temple consecrated to Athena bears two episodes from her story on the pediments, and shows the ritual of her worship in the Ionic frieze; second, it was built by the Athenians and its metopes are a fourfold commemoration of their victories over the barbarians, transferred to four episodes of the legendary past.

But not all cases are so clear. For instance, there is no obvious reason why the Calydonian Hunt was chosen for the main pediment of the temple at Tegea. Of course scholars have never been short of ingenious explanations for their belief that the sculptural ornamentation of a temple or other building is iconographically linked to it, but such explanations do not always carry conviction, particularly since people often make the customary choice without much thought about it. For in spite of the admiration for Greek art normally felt to be obligatory, from the fifth century onwards it was extremely repetitive. We have only to observe how constantly the type of the Greek temple is found throughout antiquity, or how all Greek architecture comes down to indefinite exploitation of the peripteros, or external colonnade, and the peristyle, or internal colonnade. After all, adaptation of the decoration to the building which accommodates it is no more obvious in other arts; there have been frequent attempts to detect such links in the choice of subjects for mosaics, but in this case too the recurrence of subjects to which artists and their clients were accustomed obviously prevailed over any supposed concern for relevance.

This kind of iconographical laziness, a penchant for returning to the same subjects, is no bar to variations in their treatment, and indeed this is what seems to have interested sculptors most. In the Parthenon, for instance, the centauromachy was to be extended over more than thirty metopes, their rectangular form allowing each metope to show only two characters, but a centaur may be abducting a woman, brandishing a rock, rearing up in various ways, while his adversary may be shown standing and fighting, or with a knee on the ground, or lying down vanquished. The combination of such attitudes produces as many different single combats as there are metopes to be ornamented. At Bassae, by contrast, the centanromachy is shown in an Ionic frieze, so that the fight is no longer separated into single combats. Instead, the continuity of the struggle had to be shown, and accordingly we see a centaur straddling his lifeless comrade as he bites a Lapith, whose leg touches the leg of another Lapith, who is running the other way and is himself attacked by a third centaur who has fallen to the ground, with the knee of a third Lapith on his hindquarters. This Lapith in turn is threatened by another centaur, and so it goes on for dozens of yards. The exercise was even more arduous when the sculptor had to provide a variation on a hackneyed subject without changing the architectural frame. A sculptor who had seen the Ionic Amazonomachy of Bassac might have felt it possible to adapt the theme for a pediment, as at Epidauros, but have been very reluctant to rework it for a second continuous frieze which, as is demonstrated later, was done in the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos. It is not surprising that modern scholars have often been anxious to define the means used by the sculptors of Halikarnassos to distinguish themselves from their predecessors, turning to a more “airy” composition leaving large gaps between the adversaries, making attitudes tenser, drapery less undulating in order to give an impression of “dryness”, and so on.

This accepted ascendancy of skill over the invention of new subjects is seen again in the story of the painter Zeuxis, who was indignant when the strange concept of his centaur family was praised, rather than his skill in executing the painting. But visual art was not alone in producing countless variations on the same theme, and in its reluctance to renew the repertory; literature was just the same. Nine new tragedies were performed every year in Classical Athens, that is, nine hundred in a century, all drawing on the same stock of legends. The old stories were told again and again; the skill lay in making something new out of an old theme. Though few tragedies have come down to us, we have three about the recognition of Orestes by his sister Elektra, and it has become a classic exercise to contrast the play of Euripides with those of Sophocles and in particular Aeschylus, whose weaknesses Euripides criticized. Novelty of plot was not what made a great poet tragic.