VI THE APOLLO SAUROKTONOS 241 



to drive them away with a stick. But they always repeated 

 their attempts to discover the secret. 



In my memoir on Lacerta muralis coerulea, I described 

 how the boys of the island of Capri take advantage of the 

 curiosity of the lizards to catch them with ease, althouoh 

 otherwise their capture is so difficult. They take a long stiff 

 withered stalk of grass and make a noose on its thinner end. 

 Then they lie down at full length, and hold the grass-stalk in 

 front of them with outstretched arm opposite the crevice in 

 which a lizard has just hidden itself. The creature's curiosity 

 is so excited that it comes nearer and nearer to the noose in 

 order to examine it, and the boy is able to pass it over the 

 lizard's head and catch it. In order to further stimulate the 

 lizard's curiosity, the boys by spitting on the noose make a 

 shiny bladder over it. 



In a later publication I attempted to explain the famous 

 statue of the Apollo Sauroktonos by means of this method of 

 catching lizards, the practice of which is widely spread in 

 other parts of Italy also. This statue, as is well known, 

 represents a youth not much beyond boyhood, who, in a watch- 

 ful attitude, leaninsj with his left arm ao^ainst the trunk of 

 a tree, and holding in his right hand a portion of a thin 

 staff, follows with his eyes a lizard crawling up the tree- 

 trunk. Archaeologists suppose that the boy is intending 

 to transfix the lizard with an arrow, of wliich the stick 

 represents a portion. But the lizard is crawling towards 

 the boy. This fact and the whole attitude of the figure, as 

 well as the way in which he holds the stick in his fingers, 

 seem to me to indicate in the clearest way that in the Saurok- 

 tonos we have a boy who is snaring a lizard with a noose of 

 grass. For that attitude is in every detail one of quiet wait- 

 ing, almost of negligence, and the boy holds the piece of stick 

 in his hands lightly and playfully, not firmly and securely as 



1 Variiren der Mauereidechse, Section " Sauroktonos." 



K 



