Significant of the new energy of these authorities and of their desire
to render Olympia itself worthy of the festival, was a practice, which
began in this century, of allowing victors to commemorate their
victories by votive statues. The earliest of these statues, according to
Pausanias, were those of Praxidamas of Aegina, who won the boxing in Ol.
59, and of Rhexibius of Opus who won the pankration two Olympiads later.
These statues were of wood, and we may, therefore, suspect that those
seen by Pausanias were not really the first but only the oldest which
had survived. Certainly there were statues of earlier victors. Some of
these, like that of the Lacedaemonian Chionis, or that of the famous
pankratiast Arrhichion, at his native home Phigalia, were set up by
their countrymen many years after their death. Others, like that of the
Spartan boy Eutelidas, who won the boys’ wrestling and the boys’
pentathlon, may have been contemporary. The first sculptors of athletic
statues, whose names we know, are Chrysothemis and Eutelidas of Argos,
who made the statues for the Heraean Damaretus, who won the race in
armour in Ols. 65, 66, and for his son Theopompus, who won two victories
in the pentathlon. On the inscriptions beneath these statues the artists
claimed to have learnt their art from former artists. Argos and Sicyon,
the homes of the earliest athletic sculpture, were, as we have seen,
closely connected with the newly organized Panhellenic festivals, in
addition to which there were a number of minor local festivals
throughout that district. We may, therefore, safely connect the rise of
the athletic school of art with the athletic movement that produced
these festivals. These early statues were, of course, not portrait
statues. We learn from Pliny that the right of setting up a portrait
statue was confined to winners of a triple victory. The accuracy of this
statement is open to doubt; certainly it cannot have been true before
the fourth century, previous to which portrait statues were practically
unknown. The early artists must have contented themselves with type
statues, representing the various events in which victory had been
gained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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