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PREPACE: 
The purpose of the present work is to study what is known of one 
of the most important genres of Greek sculpture—the monuments 
erected at Olympia and elsewhere in the Greek world in honor of 
) victorious athletes at the Olympic games. Since only meagre remnants 
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of these monuments have survived, the work is in the main concerned 
with the attempt to reconstruct their various types and poses. 
The source-material on which the attempt is based has been 
indicated fully in the text; it is of two kinds, literary and arche- 
ological. ‘To the former belong the explanatory inscriptions on the 
bases of victor statues found at Olympia and elsewhere, many of which 
agree verbally with epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthologies; the 
incidental statements of various kinds and value found in the classical 
writers and their scholiasts; and, above all, the detailed works of the 
two imperial writers, the elder Pliny and Pausanias. Pliny’s account 
of the Greek artists, which is inserted into his Historia Naturalis as a 
digression (Books xxx1v—xxxvi)—being artificially joined to the 
history of mineralogy on the pretext of the materials used—is, 
despite its uncritical and often untrustworthy character, one of our 
chief mines of information about Greek sculptors and painters. The 
portions of Pausanias’ Description of Greece which deal with Elis and 
the monuments of Olympia (Books v—v1), although they also evince 
little real understanding of art, are of far more direct importance to 
our subject, since. they include a descriptive catalogue, doubtless 
based upon personal observation, of the greater part of the athlete 
monuments set up in the Altis at Olympia, the reconstruction of 
which is the chief purpose of the present work. 
To the archzological sources, on the other hand, belong, first and 
foremost, the remnants of victor statues in stone and metal which have 
long been garnered in modern museums or have come to light during 
the excavation of the Altis. To this small number I hope I have 
added at least one marble fragment found at Olympia, the head of a 
statue by Lysippos, the last great sculptor of Greece (Frontispiece and 
Fig. 69). To this second kind of sources belong also the statue bases 
just mentioned, on many of which the extant footmarks enable us to 
determine the poses of the statues themselves which once stood upon 
them. Furthermore, an intimate knowledge of Greek athletic sculp- 
ture in all its periods and phases is, of course, essential 1n treating a 
problem of this nature. Here, as in the study of Greek sculpture in 
general, where the destruction of original masterpieces, apart from the 
few well-known but splendid exceptions, has been complete, we are 
almost entirely dependent upon second-hand evidence furnished by 
the numerous existing antique copies and adaptations of lost originals 
) -Y~executed in marble and bronze by more or less skilled workmen for 
the Roman market. ne 
