CHAPTER II. 
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTOR STATUES 
A leOby META: 
Piates 2-7 anp Ficures 3-8. 
Only a few insignificant remnants of the forest of victor statues 
which once stood in the Altis at Olympia were unearthed by the Ger- 
man excavators. Most of these statues already in antiquity had 
been carried off to Italy,! while those which escaped the spoliation 
of the Roman masters of Greece were destroyed at the hands of the 
invading hordes of barbarians in the early Dark Ages. Consequently 
only here and there in modern museums can isolated fragments of 
these originals be discovered, which have accidentally survived the 
ravages of time and man. 
In the almost complete absence of originals, therefore, we depend 
for our knowledge of them on a variety of sources. In attempt- 
ing to reconstruct them we have two main sources of information to 
aid us, the literary and the archeological. To the former belong the 
many inscriptions found on the statue bases recovered at Olympia, 
which contain the name and native city of the victor, the athletic 
contest in which his victory was won, and frequently some account of his 
former athletic history; epigrams preserved in the Greek anthologies 
and elsewhere, some of which agree with those inscribed on the statue 
bases; more or less definite statements of scholiasts and the classical 
writers in general, especially the detailed account of the monuments of 
Olympia contained in the fifth and sixth books of the ‘EA\\ddos repinynots 
of Pausanias, who visited the Altis during the reign of Marcus Aurelius 
Antoninus,” and also the somewhat systematic treatment of Greek 
sculptors and their works in the elder Pliny’s chapters on the History 
of Art. To the latter source belong the remnants of statues in bronze 
and marble found at Olympia, as well as the recovered bases, on many 
of which the extant foot-marks enable us to recover the pose of the 

1On the ancient custom of carrying off votive offerings and images from vanquished foes, see 
P., VIII, 46.2-4. He shows that Augustus only followed a long-established precedent. Pliny, 
H. N., XXXIV, 36, in speaking of the great number of statues plundered from Greece by 
Mummius and the Luculli, quotes G. Licinius Mucianus (three times consul), who died before 
77 B. C., to the effect that 73,000 statues were still to be seen at Rhodes in his time, and that 
supposably as many more were yet to be found in Athens, Olympia, and Delphi. 
At the beginning of his description of Elis (V, 1.2), Pausanias says that 217 years had passed 
since the restoration of Corinth. As that event fell in 44 B. C., he was writing his fifth book in 
174 A. D., 7. ¢., in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. With this date other chronological references 
in his work agree. That the fifth book was written before the sixth is deduced from a com- 
parison of V, 14.6 with VI, 22.8 f. Though the sixth book, therefore, can not have been composed 
earlier than 174 A. D., it may, of course, have been written much later. On the dates of the 
various books, see Frazer, I, pp. xv f. On the great importance of Pausanias for the whole his- 
tory of Greek art, see C. Robert, Pausanias als Schriftsteller, 1909, p. 1. 
8Historia naturalis, Bks. XX XIV-XXXVI (ed. Jex-Blake). 
43 
