Fig. 7. Apollo, found at Tenea. Munich.
Without athletics, says the late Professor Furtwängler,[[101]] Greek art cannot be conceived. The skill of the Greek artist in representing the forms of the naked body is due in the first instance to the habit of complete nudity in athletic exercises, a habit which, even if it were, as Thucydides says, not introduced into all athletic competitions at Olympia till shortly before his own time, must certainly, if we may judge from the evidence of the black-figured vases, have been almost universal in the palaestra of the sixth century. Besides the unrivalled opportunities that this habit afforded the sculptor of studying the naked body in every position of activity, it must have served as a valuable incentive to the youths of Greece to keep themselves in good condition. The Greek, with his keen eye for physical beauty, regarded flabbiness, want of condition, imperfect development as a disgrace, a sign of neglected education, and the ill-trained youth was the laughing-stock of his companions. Hence every Greek learnt to take a pride in his physical fitness and beauty. This love of physical beauty is strikingly illustrated in one of the war-songs of Tyrtaeus:[[102]] “It is a shame,” he says, “for an old man to lie slain in the front of the battle, his body stripped and exposed.” Why? Because an old man’s body cannot be beautiful. “But to the young,” he continues, “all things are seemly as long as the goodly bloom of lovely youth is on him. A sight for men to marvel at, for women to love while he lives, beautiful, too, when fallen in the front of the battle.”
Fig. 8. Statue by an Argive Sculptor. Delphi. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 134.)
We have seen how there arose in the sixth century a demand for athletic statues, and how the early artists endeavoured to express trained strength by the careful treatment of the muscles of the body, especially those of the chest and abdomen. The early athletic statues must have been of the type of those archaic figures which are rightly or wrongly classed under the name of Apollo, and which, whether they represent a god or a man, are certainly inspired by athletics. Though we see in all the same evident desire to express strength yet we find considerable variety of physical type, far more so, in fact, than we find in the fifth century, which was dominated by a more or less definite ideal of physical beauty and proportion. In the sixth century the artists were experimenting, and therefore we may suppose were influenced more by local or individual characteristics. Thus the slim, long-limbed Apollo of Tenea (Fig. [7]), with his well-formed chest, spare flanks, and powerful legs is the very type of the long-distance runner. These long, lean, wiry runners are often depicted on Panathenaic vases, and suggest inevitably these day-runners (ἡμεροδρόμοι), who acted as scouts or couriers in the Persian wars. Quite different is the type of the early Argive statues found at Delphi (Fig. [8]). Square and thickset, with powerful limbs and massive heads, they seem naturally to lead up to the type of the Ligourio bronze and of Polycleitus, and suggest that such a build was characteristic of Argolis. Between the two extremes comes an extensive series of statues from Boeotia, one of which shows strong signs of Aeginetan influence.[[103]] In the fifth century we look in vain for such divergences of type, and the reason is that Greek art was tending more and more towards an ideal, and neither the typical runner nor the typical strong man quite fulfils the artist’s ideal. Vase paintings afford an interesting illustration of this change. The wrestling groups on the black-figured vases show far greater variety and originality, a more realistic imitation of the manifold positions of wrestling than we find on the red-figured vases of the fifth century, where only such types are preserved as commended themselves to the more highly-trained artistic sense of the later craftsmen.
Fig. 9. Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo. British Museum.
Fig. 10. Figure from E. pediment at Aegina. Munich. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 41.)
