The long hair on this copy, which is short on the one in the British Museum, falls down the neck, but not over the cheeks, as it should on a head which is thus bent downwards. Pasiteles almost certainly would have tied it with a ribbon. This shows that the original was the work of an artist who was used to making standing statues, and was not aware of the change in the representation of the hair brought about by drooping ones. Such considerations, in conjunction with the archaic facial characteristics, almost certainly refer the original work to the fifth century B. C., a date when _genre_ statues, produced for adornment, did not exist. Consequently a definite incident must be represented by it, and it is quite possible that this incident should be sought in athletic sculpture in the representation of a boy runner. The _Thorn-puller_ became a model for many imitations from the beginning of Hellenistic times on. These imitations tended to greater realism and consequently to the debasement of the original conception, for they were made to represent peasants, shepherds, satyrs, and even negroes. The _motif_ was also transferred to figures of girls, as, _e. g._, in the fragment of a terra-cotta statuette found in 1912 at Nida-Haddernheim.[1462] In the early Empire it was frequently copied in marble, and again, during the Renaissance, the motive was used for small bronzes.[1463] Of Hellenistic copies, showing how the motive deteriorated, we shall mention only two: the marble one found on the Esquiline, in 1874, and known as the Castellani copy, now in the British Museum,[1464] the sculptor of which has made it into a truly _genre_ fountain figure by transforming the noble features of the beautiful Greek runner into the snub nose and thick lips of a street Arab, and the still later bronze statuette found near Sparta and now in the Paris collection of Baron Edmund de Rothschild,[1465] which represents the boy extracting the thorn in anger. Similarly the so-called _Sandal-binder_—with replicas in Paris (Fig. 8), London, Athens, Munich, and elsewhere, has been looked upon, without decisive grounds, to be sure, as a runner who is tying on his sandals after the race.[1466] We have already discussed this statue in Chapter II, in connection with the subject of assimilation. HOPLITODROMOI.