Plate XII
Page 148
guise not of a hoplite but of a peltast or auxiliary. His defensive armour consists only of a conical helmet and a shield. His chiton is girt only on the left shoulder, so as to leave the right arm perfectly free. What he carried in the right hand we cannot be sure. It was filled in in colour, and has disappeared. The attitude makes us at first think of a sling. But it is more likely that the weapon was a light javelin for throwing. Lisas is evidently advancing over rocky ground to the attack.
From monuments of warriors we pass to those of young athletes; and in Greece almost every man who died before coming to full maturity appears on his tomb in athletic guise. The exercises of the palaestra were not reserved, as among us, for a certain number of the most robust young men, but were, like the military service with which they were nearly connected, a part of the life of every man not given up to sloth and luxury. On Pl. XIII is a noble figure of an athletic ephebus. He stands solidly on flat feet, naked but for a chlamys which he holds with the right hand, while the left grasps strigil and oil-flask, the necessaries of the life of the athlete. The bare body is treated with utmost simplicity and without a trace of self-consciousness. A dog sits at his master’s feet with nose upturned. This monument is from Thespiae in Boeotia, and must date from the middle of the fifth century: the letters over the head, Ἀγαθόκλη χαῖ�ε, are, it need scarcely be said, of much later times, proving that this stele, like so many at Athens, was used again in Roman times to mark a fresh tomb.
Of somewhat later date is the relief on an Attic lekythos ([Fig. 57]), in which we find an athlete exercising himself[174]. Stark naked, according to the invariable custom of the Greek palaestra, he rests his weight on one leg, while on the other he balances a heavy stone ball, such a ball as was actually found in the gymnasium of Pompeii. This was doubtless an exercise of the class used for training special muscles and producing a perfect physical development. In front of the athlete stands a slave-boy, holding his oil-flask, and behind him is a pillar on which is his garment.
FIG. 57. ATHLETE BALANCING STONE.
A stele from Thespiae, of the middle of the fifth century[175] ([Fig. 58]), presents us with the figure of a young horseman, seated on a galloping horse. He wears the chiton and the Thessalian horseman’s cloak, the chlamys. The reins were filled in in bronze; the holes for fixing the metal being still visible in the horse’s mouth and neck. The easy and masterly
