So far as we know, the statues of wrestlers, runners (except hoplitodromes), and probably pancratiasts were not distinguished by special attributes. In these cases the sculptor was obliged to express the type of contest in the figure itself. His problem, therefore, was to represent the victor in the characteristic pose of the contest in which he had won his victory, that is, by representing the statue as if in movement. This brings us to the second division of our treatment of victor statues, those which represented the victor not at rest, but in motion, a scheme which, in course of time, was extended not only to victors in wrestling and running, but to those in all contests, by representing them in the very act of contending. The treatment of this class of monuments will occupy the chief portion of Chapter IV.
CHAPTER IV.
VICTOR STATUES REPRESENTED IN MOTION.
Plates 22–25 and Figures 32–62.
Just when the important step of representing the victor in motion instead of at rest was taken in Greek athletic sculpture we can not definitely say. The statement of Cornelius Nepos that the statues of athletes were first represented in movement in the fourth century B. C., after the time of the Athenian general Chabrias—whose image he describes as representing Chabrias in his favorite posture with his spear pointed at the enemy and his shield on his knee—has long since been shown to be worthless.[1278] Nor is the assumption of many archæologists[1279] that this advance in the plastic art was taken over into athletic sculpture soon after the statues of the Tyrannicides were set up at Athens, which represented them in the midst of their impetuous onslaught on Hipparchos, to be relied upon. These statues, however, occupy so important a place in the history of Greek sculpture that we shall consider them briefly in this connection.
THE TYRANNICIDES.
The bronze statues of the popular heroes Harmodios and Aristogeiton, by the sculptor Antenor, were, in all probability, set up in the Athenian agora in 506–5 B. C.[1280] The group was carried off to Susa by Xerxes in 480 B. C., and to replace it a new group, doubtless a free imitation of the older one, and probably also of bronze, was set up in 477 B. C., the work of the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes.[1281] Nearly a century and a half later the stolen group was restored to Athens by Alexander the Great[1282] and the two continued to stand side by side in Athens down to the time of Pausanias. Neither of these groups has survived to our time, but a late Roman marble copy of one, somewhat over lifesize, found in the ruins of Hadrian’s villa and now in Naples, gives us a good idea of the original, despite restorations (Fig. [32], Harmodios).[1283]