| FIG. 1. THE “DISCOBOLUS” OF MYRON | FIG. 2. THE “DIADUMENUS” OF POLYCLEITUS |
Plate XIX
decadence if it had not been for the extraordinary genius of the inspired Pheidias. My illustration gives one of many modern examples of this much-copied statue.[22] But it is leagues removed from the original bronze. The “Discobolus” is an instantaneous photograph of an athlete just poising the heavy disk and preparing to throw. In another moment he will turn right-about on the pivot of his right foot. There are few statues of the fifth century which thus select an instant out of a series of movements. For athlete statues two types stand pre-eminent. One is the athlete[23] just fastening the diadem upon his victorious brow (“Diadumenus”), a type due to Polycleitus, whose examples of figure-drawing were taken even by the Greeks as “classics”—that is, as models of perfection in the direction attempted. His “Doryphorus”[24] was known as “the Canon,” as being a model of proportion, on which subject Polycleitus wrote a treatise. Unfortunately we are compelled here again to rely upon inferior marble copies of an original in bronze, copies which probably do injustice to their model in exaggerating its heaviness and muscularity. The other fine athletic type is that of the “Apoxyomenus,” the athlete engaged with the strigil in scraping off the oil with which all athletes, and especially wrestlers, were anointed.[25] Of all statues dealing with athletics one of the most impressive is the bronze charioteer lately discovered by the French at Delphi. There is a wonderful calm and dignity about the long-robed figure.[26]
To be naked and unashamed was one of the glories of the cultivated Greek. It astonished (and still shocks) the barbarian. When Agesilaus, the Spartan king, was fighting on Persian soil he caused his Oriental captives to be exhibited naked to his men, in order that they might have no more terror of the great king’s myriads. Alone among civilised peoples of the earth the ancient Greek dared to strip his body to the sun, and this too, as Thucydides witnesseth, came from the manly city. “The Lacedæmonians,” he says, “were the first to use simple raiment of the present style, and in other respects were the first to adopt a similar scale of living for rich and poor. They were the first to strip and undress in public, for anointing with oil after exercise. Originally the athletes used to wear loin-cloths about their middles even at the Olympic Games, and that practice has not long been discontinued” (actually in 720 B.C.). “Even now some of the barbarians, especially the Asiatics, continue to wear clothes at contests of boxing and wrestling. One might point to several other analogies between the customs of ancient Greece and modern barbarism.” With female nudity the case is different. Although the girls of Sparta used to strip for their gymnastic exercises, that was a notorious Spartan idiosyncrasy. It is only under foreign influence and in the later periods that feminine nudity is exhibited in Greek art. Hear Plato on the subject: Socrates has been led by the logic of his argument into the assertion that the women of the Ideal Republic ought to be educated just like the men, to go through the semi-military training of the wrestling school and the gymnasium along with them. The only objection he can see to such a course is that the public exercises of women would appear ridiculous to the Athenians of his day. That objection he dismisses as follows:
“Well, then,” says Socrates, “as we have begun the argument we must take the rough with the smooth, and we must beg the wits to leave their usual trade and be serious. They must remember that it is not very long since it seemed to the Greeks ugly and ridiculous that men should appear naked, as it does now to most of the barbarians. And when the Cretans first, and after them the Lacedæmonians, began their stripped exercises the wits of the day had occasion to make fun of such things. Don’t you suppose they did?”
“I do indeed.”
“But when experience showed that it was better to strip than to cover the body, what the eye thought ridiculous was
