PYTHAGORAS AND MYRON. 181 
the so-called head of Peisistratos in the Villa Albani, Rome,! as 
works emanating from one school of sculptors—the differences being 
explained by the many copyists. But to attempt to differentiate 
within the group two different sculptors, Myron or Pythagoras, he 
finds impossible, chiefly because we are dealing 1 in every case with 
copies and not with originals, and because in no case are we certain 
that the head belongs to the torso on which it is set.2 Still another 
critic, A. Schober, classes together as more or less related works the 
Riccardi, Ince Blundell, Perinthos, and Ny-Carlsberg heads, the Louvre 
boxer (Pollux), Chinnery Hermes in the British Museum,’ the Bobolli 
athlete, the athlete metamorphosed into a Hermes in the Loggia 
Scoperta of the Vatican, and the Lansdowne athlete, and finds them 
all Myronian. He believes the Perinthos head to be the prototype 
of the Riccardi and Ince Blundell heads.‘ 
In all this confusion of opinion as to the style of Pythagoras, and in 
the absence of any fixed criterion of judgment furnished by an original 
authenticated work, it seems hazardous to ascribe this or that sculpture 
to this little-known artist. The difficulty of separating Myron and 
Pythagoras is even greater than that which confronts us in trying to 
distinguish works of Lysippos and Skopas in the next century. We 
may some day recover a genuine Pythagorean athlete statue, though 
this is extremely improbable now that we have no more to expect from 
Olympia and Delphi, where most of his statues appear to have stood. 
But despite the difficulty, many identifications of his Olympia statues 
have been suggested, some of which we shall now mention. 
As Pausanias says that the victor Mnaseas was surnamed Libys, the 
Libyan, and that his statue was by Pythagoras, it may be that this is 
the statue mentioned by Pliny in the words: [Pythagoras] fecit .. . 
et Libyn, puerum tenentem tabellam eodem loco (=Olympiae) et mala 
ferentem nudum.® However, in that case we can not connect the 
words Libyn and puerum, since one represented a man and the other a 
boy.® Consequently, Pliny is speaking of three different statues, and 
not two, by this artist. Reisch believes that the statues of the boy 
and the nude man were represented at rest,’ the boy bearing a tablet 
(7. e., an iconic mevaxcoy) in his hand, like the Athenian youth appearing 
1M>., p. 176, fig. 73; Mw., Pl. XX (two views). 
2Text to B. B., no. 542; La Glypt. Ny-Carlsberg, text to Pl. XXXVI, p. 60. 
3B. M. Sculpt., 1603, Pl. V, fig. 1; B. B., 224; F. W., 460. 
44. M., XXXVI, 1911, pp. 193 f., and Pl. VII (Athleten Kopf in Athen). 
SH. N., XXXIV, 59. 
6Brunn, pp. 133-4, connected Libyn and puerum, and believed that only one statue was meant by 
Pliny’s sentence, identical with Pausanias’ statue of Mnaseas. Stuart Jones, Select Passages from 
Anc. Writers Illustrative of the History of Gk. Sculpt., 1895, p. 57, makes two alterations in Pliny’s 
text, inserting et between Libyn and puerum, and replacing tabellam of the MSS. with flagellum. 
The boy holding the whip, then, is Mnaseas’ son Kratisthenes, the chariot victor mentioned by 
P., VI, 18.1. Stuart Jones follows Furtwaengler (Jahrbuecher fuer Class. Philol., 1876, p. 509) in 
having Pliny translate raiéa of his Greek authority by puerum instead of filium. ™P. 44. 
