PRAXITELES AND THE HERMES WITH THE DIONYSOS-CHILD FROM THE

HERAION IN OLYMPIA.

BY CHARLES WALDSTEIN, PH.D.

(Read December 17th, 1879.)

PAUSANIAS, in the 16th Chapter of the 5th Book of his Travels in Greece, describes most minutely the Temple of Hera, the Heraion in Olympia. It was a most ancient temple of peculiar construction: Pausanias mentions that one of the pillars was of oak. Once in every Olympiad the sixteen priestesses of Hera offered to the goddess a cloak woven by themselves; a similar custom obtained in Athens, where the garment was dedicated to Athene Parthenos in the Parthenon. On the occasion of this festival there was a foot-race between the maiden priestesses of Hera, and the victors were crowned with olive and received a share of the cow offered to the goddess. The statue1 of a maiden in the act of running, clad in a short skirt or chiton, barely reaching the knees, in archaic folds, most probably represents one of these priestesses.

Pausanias mentions, in the 17th Chapter, a number of statues which he remarked in this temple ; among others, those of Zeus and Hera. He characterizes these two statues as of poor work, and

1 Visconti, Museo Pio Clementino, iii. Tav. 27.

does not mention the artist. After noticing several other statues and giving the names of their sculptors, he mentions another chryselephantine (gold and ivory) group, the names of whose sculptors, however, he declares he does not know. They were, he says, of archaic origin. The Heraion contained many very ancient monuments, such as the chest of Kypselos. He then goes on to state that in later times other statues were dedicated to the temple, such as "a Hermes of stone (marble), carrying the infant Dionysos, a work moreover of Praxiteles."

In the spring of 1877, the German excavators at Olympia came upon a dipteral temple, in which they found columns of unequal construction and style. From this and various other topographical reasons, they concluded, apparently with justice, that they had found the Heraion mentioned by Pausanias.

If by a stretch of sympathy you put yourselves into the place of excavators in the distant Greece and in the lonely valleys of Olympia, burning with scientific ardour, and conscious of the fact that not only the country that sent them, and whose government defrayed the enormous expenses of these excavations, but also the whole of civilized Europe was eagerly watching their proceedings in expectation of great results; and if, furthermore, you bear in mind that the results up to that moment, though considerable, were far below what had been hoped for-then you can adequately figure to yourselves the excitement and joy which thrilled through these men, when in this temple the pick and spade of the diggers cleared away the soil and débris of centuries until pure white marble gleamed forth, and gradually the beau

tiful form of a youthful male figure firmly embedded in the fragments of the wall which had sunk over it, was brought to light.

The legs below the knee, the right fore-arm, the plinth and parts of the trunk of the tree on which the figure rested, were missing. Subsequently, however, fragments of a little child, which evidently was seated on the left arm of this figure, together with some drapery which hung down from the left arm, and other fragments, were found.2 Behind the statue, which had fallen on its face, a square block was found, between the two pillars which evidently served as a pedestal for the statue. The face, moreover, and the whole surface is in an unprecedented state of preservation, not a particle of the finely-cut nose injured. Perhaps in falling forward, the right arm, now broken, served to weaken the fall, and so to preserve the face. There could now be no doubt that this was the marble Hermes with the Dionysoschild by Praxiteles, which Pausanias mentions.

Here was a statue which could undoubtedly be identified with its master, as we can the pedimental figures of the Parthenon with Pheidias, the Discobolos with Myron, the group of Laokoon with Agesandros, Polydoros, and Athenodoros, the Gauls with the Pergamese school; nay, even with greater certainty, for the Parthenon marbles are not from the hand of Pheidias, the Discobolus statues and the Gauls are ancient copies, while there has been some debate about the age and school to which the Laokoon group belongs.

2 Since this paper was read a foot of the Hermes with clear traces of gilding and in excellent preservation, as well as the head and upper part of the Dionysos, have been found.

It is hardly conceivable, how, despite of all this evidence there should have been archæologists who could still doubt. Prof. O. Benndorf, in Lützow's Zeitschrift (Vol. XIII, p. 780), points out, that it is not at all certain whether by Praxiteles is meant the Praxiteles; and he even finally endeavours to make it probable that the sculptor of the Hermes was a Praxiteles who lived about 300 B.C., a grandson of the famous Praxiteles, and a contemporary of Theocritus and of Theophrastus. It was a common custom for grandsons to bear the names of their grandfathers, and it was a frequent occurrence in Greece that children should inherit the specific talents of their fathers, and adopt their callings in life. Out of a combination of these two facts, Benndorf constructs the following Praxiteles pedigree. Pausanias mentions a Praxiteles as the sculptor of a group of Demeter Kore and Iacchos in Athens, with an inscription in Attic letters which were in use before the time of Euclid (403 B.C.); this sculptor he supposes to be the grandfather of the famous Praxiteles. (Whenever we mean the famous Praxiteles we shall, as is always done in such cases, use the name without any distinctive attribute.) We know that Kephisodotos the elder, the sculptor of the famous Eirene3 with the Plutos child (formerly called Leucothea), now in the Glyptothek at Munich, was the father of Praxiteles, and that Kephisodotos lived about the beginning of the fourth century B.C. Praxiteles flourished about the middle of the fourth century. In the second half of the fourth century

3 Brunn, Ueber die sogenannte Leukothea, etc., Sitzungsber. der k. bayr. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1867.

The

Kephisodotos the younger and his brother Timarchos followed in the footsteps of their father. About 300 B.C., we hear of a Praxiteles to whom Theophrastus (who died about 287 B.C.), gave an order to execute a bust at Athens; and this is no doubt the same one mentioned in the Scholia to Theocritus as belonging to the time of Demetrius. To illustrate the frequent recurrence of the name, Benndorf mentions two artists named Praxiteles in Roman times. one executed a statue of Gaius Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt from 26 to 24 B.C.; another made the portrait of the proconsul Cn. Acerronius Proclus (Consul 37 A.D.) These facts, Benndorf maintains, go so far as to show a possibility that the sculptor of the Hermes was not the Praxiteles. (Dr. Klein supports Benndorf's theory and developes it still further.) Lysippian elements, which Benndorf believes he has discovered in the Hermes, and which we shall consider hereafter, drive him to insist upon the probability that the Hermes is the work of the supposed grandson of Praxiteles, who was not exempt from the influence of the renowned sculptor Lysippos, who flourished a generation before him. I shall merely remark here, a point which has already been noticed by Dr. Treu (Der Hermes mit dem Dionysos Knaben, etc., Berlin, 1878), that Lysippos might have been, and I say most probably was, influenced by the work of Praxiteles in the constitution of his canon of human proportions.

The simplest answer to all these objections is, that if Pausanias had meant one of the less famous sculptors of the name, he would have added some attribute or mark of distinction; while, whenever he uses the