Scopas in Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)

A distinguished sculptor, a native of Paros, who appears to have belonged to a family of artists in that island. He flourished from B.C. 395 to 350. He was probably somewhat older than Praxiteles, with whom he stands at the head of that second period of perfected art which is called the Later Attic School (in contradistinction to the Earlier Attic School of Phidias), and which arose at Athens after the Peloponnesian War. Scopas was an architect and a statuary as well as a sculptor. He was the architect of the Temple of Athené Alea at Tegea, in Arcadia, which was commenced soon after B.C. 394. He was one of the artists employed in executing the bas-reliefs that decorated the frieze of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Caria. A portion of these bas-reliefs are now deposited in the British Museum. Among the single statues and groups of Scopas, the best known in modern times is his group of figures representing the destruction of the sons and daughters of Niobé. In Pliny's time the statues stood in the Temple of Apollo Sosianus (Pliny, xxxvi. 28). The remaining statues of this group, or copies of them, are all in the Florence Gallery, with the exception of the so-called Ilioneus at Munich, which some suppose to have belonged to the group. There is a head of Niobé in the collection of Lord Yarborough, which has some claim to be considered as the original. But the most esteemed of all the works of Scopas, in antiquity, was his group which stood in the shrine of Cn. Domitius in the Flaminian Circus, representing Achilles conducted to the island of Leucé by the divinities of the sea. It consisted of figures of Poseidon, Thetis, and Achilles, surrounded by Nereids, and attended by Tritons, and by an assemblage of sea monsters. See the monograph by Urlichs (1863); Perry, Greek and Roman Sculpture, pp. 378 foll. (1882); and the article Statuaria Ars.