Fig. 76.—View of the Palaestra, with the pedestal, table, and steps.
On the pedestal was undoubtedly a statue of Hermes, but not of the type which we have already met with in the court of the temple of Apollo ([p. 88]), and shall find later in the palaestra of the Stabian Baths [(p. 200]); a base of this sort can hardly have been intended for a herm. No trace of the missing statue has been discovered.
Another statue stood at the foot of one of the columns on the south side. It is a copy of the doryphorus of Polyclitus, and is now in the Naples Museum ([Fig. 77]). Though it has been restored, there seems no good reason to believe that the restoration is incorrect, and that the figure is really a Hermes, having originally carried on the left shoulder a herald's staff with entwined snakes, caduceus, instead of a spear. For the adornment of a place devoted to athletic exercises nothing could have been more appropriate than a copy of the doryphorus as an ideal of youthful strength, of harmonious physical development; and the Elder Pliny bears witness (N. H. XXXIV. v. 18), that it was customary to set up such statues in a palaestra. This figure had no pedestal; it stood on the ground, a man among men.
Fig. 77.—Doryphorus. Statue found in the Palaestra.
At the west end of the court were dressing rooms where the boys, before exercising, could anoint themselves and afterwards could remove the oil and dirt with the strigil; such a dressing room in connection with a bath was called a destrictarium. Water was brought into the court by a lead pipe, which passed through one of the columns at the right of the entrance and threw a jet either into a basin standing below or into the gutter in front of the colonnade.
It would be of interest to know what athletic exercises were practised in the Palaestra; but apart from the pedestal with its steps and table no characteristic remains were found here. The exercises in the Roman period undoubtedly differed somewhat from those practised at the time when the building was erected, when the Greek system was everywhere in vogue.