1883.] on the Influence of Athletic Games upon Greek Art. 285 



statue was a Herakles witli the apple of the Hesperides strongly 

 representative of the Polykleitan type, and then found that it was 

 really an athlete with an oil-flask. This I mention merely to show 

 you how through the establishment of these athletic canons the repre- 

 sentation of mythological subjects was influenced. The same must 

 be said of the influence of the Lysippean canon which can be traced in 

 so many works, not only those immediately of his own school. As 

 the Polykleitan canon, from the nature of its proportious, w^as best 

 suited to the heavier and more muscular gods and heroes, so the 

 Lysii^pean canon corresponded more to the lighter and fleeter gods. 

 Nay, even as late as the last half of the first century B.C., in the 

 school of Pasiteles, we can notice the influence of athletic art upon 

 mythological art in the new eclectic canon which that artist and his 

 school established, represented most fully in the statue of an athlete 

 in the Villa Albani by Stephanos, the pupil of Pasiteles, and traceable 

 in all the mythological statues of that school. 



It is, however, not only in statues that this influence of athletic 

 art upon mythological art becomes manifest. By far the most curious 

 and interesting instances of this influence are to be found in the minor 

 arts, especially in vases. I have collected a large number of such 

 instances on vases with athletic scenes. We find there how, following 

 the normal course of the Greek mind not only in art but also in 

 religion and literature, the Greeks construct their mythical and heroic 

 3onception upon the basis of real life. Thus their rejDresentations of 

 real contests in the palaestra form the groundwork for the representa- 

 tions of similar scenes in the mythical and heroic world, as their 

 religious idealism drove them to establish the ideal prototype for all 

 actions of real life. When Pindar commemorates in an ode the victory 

 3f some living athlete, he generally begins or ends with some typical 

 3ontest from the heroic world related to it. In the same way the vase- 

 oainter, when painting a prize vase or one decorated with athletic 

 scenes* places a scene from the actual palsestra on the one side, and 

 m the other some similar mythical scene, a religious type of the 

 ^ame. Prominent among such types are Theseus and the Minotaur, 

 lerakles and Antaios, Herakles and the Nemeau Lion or the Lernean 

 lydra, Peleus and Atalanta, contests of Trojan heroes, and many 

 'thers. Now the form given to these mythical contests, to which I 

 hall have occasion to draw your special attention, is the same as that 

 Q which the real scene is put, or rather presented itself to the artist 

 ''hile studying his art in the palaestra. So constant did I find this 

 rrangement to be that it almost partook of the nature of a law and 

 ave the observer the greatest gain of science, the power of prophecy.f 



* Except in tlie cases of Panathenaic prize vases, where one side always con- 

 dns the conventional figure of Athene, like the Athenian coat-of-arms. 



t It appears to me that the study of the destination of a vase is often of the 

 reatest use for the interpretation '^of the vase painting. Thus a sepulchral vase, 

 • one meant to be a gift between lovers, or a drinking cup, would be decorated 

 ith mythological scenes appropriate to its original purpose ; and often a typical 



