The reason why the privilege of erecting portrait statues was given so seldom to Olympic victors was probably not because it was a highly esteemed honor. The real reason seems to have been that portraiture, with its tendency to realism, subordinated beauty to that realism and so conflicted with the Greek artistic ideal. The Thebans had a law which forbade caricature and commanded artists to make their statues more beautiful than the models. The Greeks worshiped beauty and hated ugliness. Many games in Greece were held in honor of personal beauty. Thus a contest of manly beauty among old men (ἀγὼν εὐανδρίας) was a part of the Panathenaic games at Athens.[524] A contest of beauty among women, originating in the time of Kypselos, king of Arkadia, was kept up until the time of Athenæus.[525] We hear of contests of beauty in Elis, at which three prizes were given,[526] and of similar ones on the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos.[527] The Crotonian Philippos, who won at Olympia in an unknown contest about 520 B. C., was honored after his death by the people of Egesta with a _heroön_ and sacrifices because of his beauty.[528] At Tanagra, in Bœotia, the most beautiful ephebe was chosen to carry a ram on his shoulders around the city wall at the festival of Hermes Kriophoros.[529] At Aigion in Achaia the most beautiful boy was anciently chosen to be priest of Zeus.[530] The most beautiful youths among the Spartans and Cretans dedicated offerings to Eros before battle.[531] These and similar examples show the Greek feeling for beauty. The representation of passion and violence was foreign to the spirit of the best Greek art; it was rather the “quiet grandeur” (_Stille Groesse_) or “repose,” of which Winckelmann made so much, that was characteristic of that art. In Homer both men and gods, when wounded, shriek. Philoktetes, in the drama of Sophokles, wails throughout a whole act, when suffering from a gangrened foot. With the poets Zeus casts his thunderbolt in anger, but Pheidias has him hold it quietly in his hand. So we can see why portrait statues were rare at Olympia, where the representation of manly beauty and vigor was the rule. They were ruled out, not because of their increasing the honor accorded to the victor, but rather because they honored his egotism.[532] ANICONIC STATUES.