IV OLYMPIC VICTOR MONUMENTS. 
Finally, not only are the innumerable statuettes and small bronzes 
surviving from antiquity of great value in any attempt to reconstruct 
the pose of a given athlete statue, but also the representations of 
various athlete figures on every sort of sculptured and painted work— 
vase- paintings, wall-paintings, reliefs, gems, coins, etc. 
By using all such sources of information, it is possible to attain 
tolerable certainty in reconstructing the various types and poses of 
these lost monuments, and in identifying schools of athletic sculpture, 
masters, and even individual statues. But it must be stated at the 
outset that such identifications, from the very nature of the problem, 
are at best tentative in character. The attempt to see in Roman 
copies certain statues of athletes has often been made by archeologists. 
However probable such identifications may seem, we must not forget 
the simple fact that up to the present time not a single Roman copy 
has been conclusively proved to be that of an Olympic victor statue. 
Only as our knowledge of Greek sculpture is gradually extended by 
discoveries of additional works of art, and by future researches, will it 
be possible to attain an ever greater degree of probability. “The further 
identification of these important monuments, as that of masterpieces of 
Greek sculpture generally, will thus remain one of the chief problems 
for the future archzologist. In the present book, where the body of 
material drawn upon is so immense and the scientific writings involved 
are so voluminous, manifestly the author can lay no claim to an ex- 
haustive treatment. With due consciousness of the defects and 
shortcomings of the work, he can claim only to have made a small 
selection of such works of art as will best illustrate the various types of 
monuments under discussion. 
The plan of the book is easily seen by a glance at the table of con- 
tents. After a preliminary chapter on the origin and development of 
Greek athletic games in general and on the custom of conferring 
athletic prizes on victors, the more specific subject of the work is intro- 
duced in Chapter II by brief discussions of the more general character- 
istics common to Olympic victor statues—their size, nudity, and hair- 
fashion, their portrait or non-portrait features, and the standard of 
beauty reached by some of them at least, as shown by the esthetic 
judgments of certain ancient writers and by the fragmentary originals 
which have survived. The enumeration of these characteristics is 
followed by a brief account of the various canons of proportion 
assumed to have been used and taught by different schools of sculptors. 
The chapter ends with a more extended account of the little-known but 
important subject of the assimilation of this class of monuments to 
athlete types of gods and heroes. 
In Chapters III and IV, which are the most important in develop- 
ing the problem of reconstruction, a division has been made into two 
great statuary groups: those in which the victor was represented at rest, 
where the particular contest was indicated, if indicated at all, by very 
