Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic ArtHyde, Walter Woodburn
History
Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art
Hyde, Walter Woodburn
Olympics; Sculpture, Greek; Sports -- Greece
The Argive school was devoted mainly to athletic statuary. The greatest
name in old Argive art is that of Ageladas or Hagelaïdas,[866] the
reputed teacher of Myron and Polykleitos, who lived from the third
quarter of the sixth century into the second quarter of the fifth
century B. C. While his connection with Myron and Polykleitos is
scarcely to be doubted,[867] his supposed connection with Pheidias has
made the chronology of the life of this sculptor one of the difficult
problems of the ancient history of art. A scholion on Aristophanes’
_Ranae_, 504, dates the statue known as the _Herakles Alexikakos_ in
the Attic deme Melite by Hagelaïdas after the pestilence in Athens of
431-430 B. C., and makes the Argive sculptor (Gelados = Hagelaïdas)
the teacher of Pheidias. As his statue of the Olympic victor Anochos
commemorated a victory won in Ol. 65 (= 520 B. C.), this late date is
manifestly impossible.[868] Furthermore, a better tradition says that
Hegias was the teacher of the Attic master.[869] Furtwaengler’s attempt
to show that these two divergent traditions were really in accord,
by the assumption that Hegias was the pupil of Hagelaïdas and that
his art came from the latter—thus explaining certain similarities in
the work of Hagelaïdas and Pheidias,—does not solve the problem.[870]
As the scholion is based on a good tradition,[871] the best solution
of the difficulty is that of Kalkmann[872] and others, that the
_Alexikakos_ was the work of a younger Hagelaïdas, the grandson of the
famous master, by the intermediate Argeiadas. For a lower limit to the
activity of Hagelaïdas there seems to be no good reason for distrusting
the evidence that he made a bronze _Zeus_ for the Messenians to be
set up at Naupaktos, whither they moved in 455 B. C.[873] This makes
quite possible a period of collaboration of four or five years at least
between Polykleitos and Hagelaïdas.
Pausanias mentions the monuments of three victors at Olympia by
Hagelaïdas: the statues of the pancratiast Timasitheos of Delphi, who
won two victories some time between Ols. (?) 65 and 67 (520 and 512 B.
C.);[874] of the runner Anochos of Tarentum, who won in the stade- and
double-race in Ols. 65 and (?) 66 (= 520 and 516 B. C.);[875] and the
chariot-group of Kleosthenes of Epidamnos, who won in Ol. 66 (= 516 B.
C.).[876]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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