Fig. 12. Bronze Statuette of Hoplitodromos. Tübingen.
Fig. 13. Myron’s Diskobolos (from a bronzed cast made in Munich, combining the Vatican body and the Massimi head).
The last-named statues at once suggest the Diskobolos of Myron (Fig. 13). This statue marks a new departure in athletic art. It is not, as far as we know, a statue in honour of any particular victor, but a study in athletic genre. To the same class belong the Doryphoros and Diadumenos of Polycleitus.[109] The earlier statues had been ideal in as far as they were not portrait statues, but statues of athletic types connected with the name of some victor, and many such statues are assigned to Myron and Polycleitus. But the statues of which we are speaking were avowedly and professedly ideal studies in athletic art. Myron undertook to represent the athlete in motion. He chose that most difficult, yet most characteristic moment in the swing of the diskobolos, which alone combines the idea of rest and that of motion, when the diskos has been swung back to its full extent, and the momentary pause suggests stability, while the insecurity of the delicate balance implies the strong movement which has preceded it, and the more violent movement which is to follow. No other moment could give the same idea of force and swiftness. If we look at the countless representations of the diskobolos on vases and in bronzes, we see that the fixing of any other moment in the swing destroys at once all idea of motion. The movement is checked at an unnatural point, and the result is lifeless. Only at the close of the swing backward does the brief pause give the artist an excuse for fixing it in bronze. It is a magnificent conception, and in spite of minor defects magnificently executed. Unfortunately we know the statue only through more or less late and inaccurate marble copies. Perhaps the truest idea of the grace of the original bronze can be obtained from the bronzed cast in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, from which our illustration is taken. The diskobolos is, as has been said, a study of athletic action, and it is therefore difficult to form a true idea of his proportions, nor was the artist concerned so much with proportions as with movement. Yet if we can imagine the diskobolos standing at rest, he might well take his place besides the glorious youths of the Parthenon frieze, tall like the Tyrannicides, yet of somewhat lighter build, taller and lighter likewise than the type of Polycleitus.
Fig. 14. Doryphoros, after Polycleitus. Naples. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 74.)
Fig. 15. Diadumenos from Vaison, after Polycleitus. British Museum. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 75.)
In the Doryphoros (Fig. 14), and Diadumenos (Fig. 15), we have another type of athletic genre. These statues are studies of the athlete at rest, studies in proportion. The Doryphoros indeed was called the canon, because in it the artist was said to have embodied his ideal of the proportions of the human body. If we consider what such a canon implies, we shall understand why the old diversity of type tended to disappear. The artist of this period was seeking an ideal of human proportion. Such an ideal is not to be found in any extremes of type, in strength or beauty by itself, but only in a combination of the two, in the golden mean, that avoidance of all excess which dominated Greek life and thought. The influence of athletic training had impressed upon him the value of physical strength systematically trained and developed; his artistic sense taught him that no subject was fitting for his art which did not present beauty of outline and proportion. Hence that union of strength and beauty which characterizes the athletic art of this period.
Other circumstances contributed to produce uniformity of type. The three great sculptors of the age, Myron, Pheidias and Polycleitus, whom we now know to have been almost contemporaries, and in the full activity of their art in the middle of the century, were all, according to traditions, pupils of the Argive sculptor Ageladas. In the stern, manly discipline of the Argive school they acquired their consummate knowledge of the human body. The influence of these artists was increased by the concentration at this period of all art at Athens. Polycleitus indeed remained at Argos; but Myron and Pheidias worked at Athens, and through Pheidias the art of Athens spread over the Greek world. The school in which these artists had been trained had devoted itself to the study of athletic proportion, and it was therefore only natural that a similar athletic ideal should prevail generally—a similar but not quite the same ideal. Polycleitus remained true to the Argive tradition of a somewhat thick-set, massive type, with square-jawed, powerful head. At Athens the influence of the softer Ionian art, perhaps, too, the prevalence of other characteristics in the population, produced a slighter, taller, more graceful type. Both schools combined strength and beauty. In both it is impossible to decide in what event any particular athlete had excelled; but while strength continued to be the prevalent idea of Polycleitus, Athenian art was rather dominated by the idea of beauty.
This union of strength and beauty belongs especially to the time of full-grown youth and opening manhood. It is the age when the Greek youth began to undertake some of the duties of citizenship, and when the state took upon itself his training. In most Greek cities somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen the youths were enrolled in corps, and for two years were subject to a strict military discipline under officers appointed by the state. They learnt to use their weapons and to ride; they hardened their bodies by athletic exercises and hunting; they gained practical experience in war by acting as police patrols on the frontiers. This time of life was especially devoted to athletics and physical training. At many of the games there were special competitions for youths of this age—the beardless or ἀγένειοι. To the same age belong these romantic boy friendships which figure so largely in Greek life, from the time of Harmodius and Aristogeiton or earlier. That these friendships did at times lead to serious abuse cannot, unfortunately, be denied. But the charge of immorality brought against them seems to me greatly exaggerated,[110] at least as far as regards the fifth century and the most enlightened states. These friendships arose on the one side from the natural hero-worship of youth, on the other from an intense appreciation of bodily beauty.
This strong artistic feeling is illustrated by the practice which arose among the vase painters of inscribing on their cups the name of some popular youth with the word καλός, or sometimes the more general inscription καλὸς ὁ παῖς, “the boy is fair.” The term “love names” applied to these inscriptions is somewhat unfortunate. The word καλός implies none of that modern maudlin sentimentality so often mistaken for love, but rather the artist’s sense of the beautiful, sometimes his admiration for some popular youth, sometimes, perhaps, merely his satisfaction in the form he has himself created. The point, however, which interests us here is that the beauty which appealed to the Greek of the latter half of the fifth century was not the beauty of woman, nor even of the mature man, but the beauty of manly youth, and the art of the Periclean age has been well described as the glorification of the ephebos.
The growing preference for the younger type can be traced in the lists of athletic statues at Olympia recorded by Pausanias. There