CHAPTER III. 
VICTOR STATUES REPRESENTED AT REST. 
PiaTes 8-21 anp Ficures 9-31. 
We have seen! that it was a very old custom in Greece to dedicate 
statues of victors at the great national games to the god in whose 
honor the games were held.. On many sites, especially at Olympia, 
tiny statuettes of clay or bronze of very primitive technique have been 
found in great numbers, which represent victors in many attitudes 
and ways—as horsemen, warriors, charioteers, etc. By the sixth 
century B.C. this ancient custom, as we learn from literary, epigraph- 
ical, and monumental sources, had developed, with the rapid progress 
attained by the sculptor’s art, into the regular practice of erecting 
life-size statues of athletes at the site of the games or in the native city 
of the victor. Especially at Olympia hundreds of such monuments 
were gradually collected, whose numbers and beauty must have exerted 
an overwhelming impression on the visitor to the Altis. We shall now 
begin the consideration of these monuments in detail. 
The victor statues at Olympia, as elsewhere, may be conveniently 
divided into two main groups—those which represent the victor as 
standing or seated at rest, before or after the contest, and those which 
represent him in movement, 7. ¢., im some contest schema.” Examples 
of statues of athletes represented at rest are common in Greek athletic 
sculpture. We need only mention the so-called Oil-pourer of Mu- 
nich (Pl. 11), who is represented as pouring oil over his body to make 
his limbs more supple for the coming wrestling bout; the Diadoumenos 
of Polykleitos (Pls. 17, 18, and Fig. 28), who is binding a victor fillet 
around his head after a successful encounter; the Apoxyomenos of 
the school of Lysippos (Pl. 29), representing an athlete scraping off 
the oil and dirt from his body after his victory. In this class of 
statues, which forms by far the greater number and shows the richer 
motives, the poses are quiet and reserved, the figures are compact, 
and the expression earnest and even thoughtful. As examples of 
statues represented in movement we need only recall such well-known 
works as the Diskobolos of Myron with its rhythmic lines and viva- 
cious expression (Pls. 22, 23, and Figs. 34, 35); the bronze wrestlers of 
Naples, who are bending eagerly forward watching for a grip (Fig. 51); 
or the artistically intertwined pancratiast group of Florence (PI. 25). 
1Ch: I, pp. 27 f. and 37 f. 
2This is the usual division of victor monuments: Scherer, pp. 21 f.; Hitz.-Bluemn., II, 2, 
p. 530; Furtw.-Urlichs, Denkmaeler griech. und roem. Skulptur, Handausgabe’, 1911, pp. 104 f. 
(translation by H. Taylor, 1914, pp. 120 f.) Reisch, p. 40, divides Siegerbilder in Motiven von 
allgemeiner Geltung und Bilder in Motiven, die der speciellen Veranlassung der Wethung entlehni 
sind—a division practically amounting to that of rest and motion statues, as we shall see. 
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