Finally, not only are the innumerable statuettes and small bronzes surviving from antiquity of great value in any attempt to reconstruct the pose of a given athlete statue, but also the representations of various athlete figures on every sort of sculptured and painted work—vase-paintings, wall-paintings, reliefs, gems, coins, etc.
By using all such sources of information, it is possible to attain tolerable certainty in reconstructing the various types and poses of these lost monuments, and in identifying schools of athletic sculpture, masters, and even individual statues. But it must be stated at the outset that such identifications, from the very nature of the problem, are at best tentative in character. The attempt to see in Roman copies certain statues of athletes has often been made by archæologists. However probable such identifications may seem, we must not forget the simple fact that up to the present time not a single Roman copy has been conclusively _proved_ to be that of an Olympic victor statue. Only as our knowledge of Greek sculpture is gradually extended by discoveries of additional works of art, and by future researches, will it be possible to attain an ever greater degree of probability. The further identification of these important monuments, as that of masterpieces of Greek sculpture generally, will thus remain one of the chief problems for the future archæologist. In the present book, where the body of material drawn upon is so immense and the scientific writings involved are so voluminous, manifestly the author can lay no claim to an exhaustive treatment. With due consciousness of the defects and shortcomings of the work, he can claim only to have made a small selection of such works of art as will best illustrate the various types of monuments under discussion.
The plan of the book is easily seen by a glance at the table of contents. After a preliminary chapter on the origin and development of Greek athletic games in general and on the custom of conferring athletic prizes on victors, the more specific subject of the work is introduced in Chapter II by brief discussions of the more general characteristics common to Olympic victor statues—their size, nudity, and hair-fashion, their portrait or non-portrait features, and the standard of beauty reached by some of them at least, as shown by the æsthetic judgments of certain ancient writers and by the fragmentary originals which have survived. The enumeration of these characteristics is followed by a brief account of the various canons of proportion assumed to have been used and taught by different schools of sculptors. The chapter ends with a more extended account of the little-known but important subject of the assimilation of this class of monuments to athlete types of gods and heroes.