Chapter VII. The Materials of Olympic Victor Monuments, and the Oldest Dated Victor Statue

Figures 78–80.

It has been assumed pretty generally by archæologists that the victor statues set up in the Altis at Olympia were uniformly of bronze. Scherer, in his inaugural dissertation de olympionicarum Statuis, which appeared in 1885, was the first to discuss the question fully, and his arguments and conclusions have been followed, for the most part, by later investigators. Thus Dittenberger and Purgold state unequivocally that these statues were “ausnahmslos aus Bronze”, while more recently Hitzig and Bluemner, in their great commentary on Pausanias, have again pronounced the dictum that “die Siegerstatuen waren durchweg von Erz”. Others, however, have not been quite so sweeping in their generalization. Thus Wolters believes that these statues, because they were set up in the open, were “der Regel nach” of bronze, and Furtwaengler and Urlichs assume that they were “fast ausschliesslich aus Bronze”.