THE SPARTA HEAD AN ECLECTIC WORK. 319 
recalls the delicacy of execution in detail which is mentioned by Pliny 
as characteristic of Lysippan art.!_ It surely points to a date for the 
work not much if at all later than the end of the century which was 
made glorious in the history of sculpture by the labors of these three 
great masters. 
In the preceding account I have tacitly assumed with Professor Bates 
that the head from Sparta represents a beardless Herakles. But, as 
Dr. Caskey remarks, one might hesitate to accept this identification 
if 1t were not for the attribute of the lion’s skin above the forehead, for 
here there is little indication of the strength so characteristic of later 
representations of the hero. Dr. Caskey, however, observes that a 
head of Herakles, now in the British Museum, which some have 
regarded as an original by Praxiteles, is even more boyish than this 
one. However, it is very doubtful if the Sparta head should be referred 
to a statue of Herakles at all. Pausanias mentions only three statues 
of Herakles in Sparta, to any one of which it seems futile to try to refer 
the head under discussion; thus in III, 14.6, he speaks of an a&yadua 
apxatov to which the Sphairians, 1. ¢., lads entering on manhood, sac- 
rificed, as standing on the road to the Apouos, outside the city walls; in 
the same book, 14.8, he says that an image of the hero stood at the end 
of one of the two bridges across the moat to Plane-tree Grove, 7. ¢., 
the boys’ exercise-ground; and again in this book, 15.3, he says that an 
ayaa wmArouevoyv of Herakles stood in the Herakleion close to the 
city wall, whose attitude (oxjua), was suggested by the battle between 
the hero and Hippokoon and his sons. ‘The same writer enumerates 
only three other statues of Herakles in Lakonia. One of these was in 
the market-place of Gythion (III, 21.8), another in front of the walls of 
Las beyond Gythion (III, 24.6), and the third on Mount Parnon near the 
boundaries of Argolis, Lakonia, and Tegea (III, 10.6). The head under 
discussion is more probably only one more example of the idealizing 
tendency of athletic Greek art, which assimilated the type of victor to 
that of god.2 In the case of the Agias the sculptor plainly wished to 
raise the victor to the ideal height of the hero. The same idealization 
is visible in the head ascribed to the statue of Philandridas. In both 
these heads the ears, while small, are battered and swollen; the 
remains of the ears in the head from Sparta are too badly damaged to 
indicate whether these were swollen or not. But even if they were pre- 

171, N., XXXIV, 65: propriae huius videntur esse argutiae operum custoditae in minimis 
quoque rebus. Here the word argutiae means “subtlety,” rather than “animation,” as given in 
Harper’s Latin Dictionary. 
27 need hardly add that such an idealizing tendency should be carefully distinguished trom the 
deification of mortals which came into prominence after the time of Alexander, but existed in 
Greece from the early fifth century B. C., at least. The case of heroizing the Thasian Theagenes, 
who won at Olympia in boxing and the pankration in Ols. 75 and 76 (=480 and 475 B.C.), has 
been discussed with similar ones in Ch. I,p. 35. But the fact that a victor wanted his statue to be 
more or less assimilated to the ideal type of the hero, whom he regarded as his athletic prototype 
and ideal, does not mean that he had any idea of looking upon himself as a god. 
