CHAPTER VII. 
THE MATERIALS OF OLYMPIC VICTOR MONUMENTS, AND THE 
OLDEST DATED VICTOR STATUE.! 
Ficures 78-80. 
It has been assumed pretty generally by archzologists that the vic- 
tor statues set up in the Altis at Olympia were uniformly of bronze. 
Scherer, in his inaugural dissertation de olympionicarum Statuis, which 
appeared in 1885, was the first to discuss the question fully,? and his 
arguments and aandliaane have been followed, for the most part, by 
later investigators. Thus Dittenberger and Purgold ae unequiv- 
ocally that these statues were “‘ausnahmslos aus Bronze’’,? while more 
recently Hitzig and Bluemner, in their great commentary on Pausanias, 
have again pronounced the dictum that “‘die Siegerstatuen waren durch- 
weg von Erz”.4 Others, however, have not been quite so sweeping 
in their generalization. Thus Wolters believes that these statues, 
because they were set up in the open, were “‘der Regel nach’’ of bronze,° 
and Furtwaengler and Urlichs assume that they were “fast ausschliess- 
lich aus Bronze’’.® 
THE CASE FOR BRONZE. 
The arguments adduced by Scherer and others in defense of the con- 
tention seem at first sight, although inferential in character, quite 
conclusive. In the first place, it has been pointed out that all the 
statuaries mentioned by Pausanias in his victor periegesis,’ if recorded 
at all in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, appear there in the catalogue of 
bronze founders as workers in bronze kat’ efoxnv, while none of them is 
known exclusively as a sculptor in marble. As Hagelaidas is the first 
in point of time, who flourished from the third quarter of the sixth 
century B. C. to the second quarter of the fifth,’ Scherer believed that all 
statues from his date down—posteriorum temporum—were of bronze; 
and as Rhoikos and Theodoros, the inventors of bronze founding, flour- 
ished about Ols. 50 to 60 (=580 to 540 B. C.),° he believed that bronze 
1In the present chapter I have partly rewritten two articles which have appeared in the 4. /. 
A.; the first, entitled, Were Olympic Victor Statues Exclusively of Bronze?, in vol. XIX, 2d Ser., 
1915, pp. 57-62; the second, The Oldest Dated Victor Statue, in vol. XVIII, 2d Ser., 1914, pp. 
156-164 and Oe I. I am indebted to Dr. J. M. Paton, former editor-in-chief, for permission 
to use them in the present work. 
2On p. 16 he says: 1d unum dubitari non potest quin Olympionicarum statuae posteriorum temp- 
orum omnes ad unam aeneae fuerint; on p. 17 he again says: fiert non potest quin existimemus 
illas statuas omnes ex aere factas fuisse. 
3Inschr. v. Ol., p. 235. 4TT, 2, p. 530 (note on P., VI, 1.1). 
5F. W., under no. 213, p. 101. 6Denkm.*, p. 101; Engl. ed., p. 117. VI, 1.1-18.7. 
8Pauly-Wissowa, VII, pp. 2189f.; and cf. Brunn,I,p.72. See supra, Ch. III, School of Argos 
pp. 109-110. 
*Brunn, I, p. 34; etc. 
321 
