The Athenian treasury at Delphi was lavishly decorated with sculpture. This was funded, according to the second century CE author Pausanias, by the spoils of the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The date of the treasury however has been debated by scholars, and put at various times between 510 and 480 BCE.

Few of the thirty metopes have survived and those that have are fragmentary. But as these show, the carving is so deep as to be almost in the round. The compositions and the anatomy reveal an adventurousness not found in the more static contemporary kouroi. Featured are the labours of Theseus, the Athenian hero, and Herakles