Thus Sikyon and Argos remained, and it was precisely these two towns which produced a special school of art, of which Polycletus was the most distinguished representative. Dorian sculpture had originally started with figures of athletes, which were dedicated at the temples, and were a sort of collateral monument to the odes of poets—more durable, no doubt, in the minds of the offerers, but, as time has shown, perishable and gone, while the winged words of the poet have not lost even the first bloom of their freshness. However, in contrast to the flowing robes and delicately-chiselled features of the Ionic school, the Dorians reproduced the naked human figure with great accuracy; while in the face they adhered to a stiff simplicity, regardless of individual features, and still more regardless of any expression save that of a vacant smile. This type, found in its most perfect development in the Æginetan marbles, was what lay before Polycletus, when he rose to greatness. He was the contemporary and rival of Phidias, and is said to have defeated him in a competition for the temple of Hera at Samos, where two or three of the greatest sculptors modelled a wounded Amazon, and Polycletus was adjudged the first place. There is some probability that one of the Amazons now in the Vatican is a copy of this famous work; and, in spite of a clumsily-restored head and arms, we can see in this figure the great simplicity and truth of the artist in treating a rather ungrateful subject—that of a very powerful and muscular woman. The Argive school, owing to its traditions, affected single figures much more than groups; and this, no doubt, was the main contrast between Polycletus and Phidias—that, however superior the Argive might be in a single figure, the genius of the Athenian was beyond all comparison in using sculpture for groups and processions as an adjunct to architecture. But there was also in the sitting statue of Zeus, at Olympia, a certain majesty which seems not to have been equalled by any other known sculptor. The Attic artist who appears, however, to have been much nearer to Polycletus in style was Myron, whose _Discobolus_ has reached us in some splendid copies, and who seems to have had all the Dorian taste for representing single athletic figures with more life and more daring action about them than was attempted by Polycletus.(172) Herodotus notices somewhere that, at a certain period, the Argives were the most renowned in Greece for music. It is most unfortunate that our knowledge of this branch of Greek art is so fragmentary that we are wholly unable to tell in what the Argive proficiency consisted. We are never told that the Doric scale was there invented; but, very possibly, they may have taken the lead among their brethren in this direction also, for it is well known that the Spartans, though excellent judges, depended altogether upon foreigners to make music for them, and thought it not gentlemanly to do more than criticise.