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Was it in that case a commemorative or votive statue, such as Pausanias found scattered throughout Greece? Was it, again, designed to be part only of some larger decorative scheme, as some have supposed of the Venus of Melos, or a work of genre as we say, a thing intended merely to interest, to gratify the taste, with no further purpose? In either case it may have represented some legendary quoit-player–Perseus at play with Acrisius fatally, as one has suggested; or Apollo with Hyacinthus, as Ovid describes him in a work of poetic genre.

And if the Discobolus is, after all, a work of genre–a work merely imitative of the detail of actual life–for the adornment of a room in a private house, it would be only one of many such produced in Myron’s day. It would be, in fact, one of the pristae directly attributed to him by Pliny, little congruous as they may seem with the grandiose motions of his more characteristic work. The pristae, the sawyers,–a celebrated creation of the kind,–is supposed to have given its name to the whole class of like things. No age, indeed, since the rudiments of art were mastered, can have been without such reproductions of the pedestrian incidents of every day, for the mere pleasant exercise at once of the curiosity of the spectator and the imitative instinct of the producer. The Terra- Cotta Rooms of the Louvre and the British Museum are a proof of it. One such work indeed there is, delightful in itself, technically exquisite, most interesting by its history, which properly finds its place beside the larger, the full-grown, physical perfection of the Discobolus, one of whose alert younger brethren he may be,–the Spinario namely, the boy drawing a thorn from his foot, preserved in the so rare, veritable antique bronze at Rome, in the Museum of the Capitol, and well known in a host of ancient and modern reproductions.

There, or elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in the general destruction of ancient sculpture–like the “Wolf of the Capitol,” allowed by way of heraldic sign, as in modern Siena, or like the equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius doing duty as Charlemagne,–like those, but like very few other works of the kind, the Spinario remained, well-known and in honour, throughout the Middle Age. Stories like that of Ladas the famous runner, who died as he reached the goal in a glorious foot- race of boys, the subject of a famous work by Myron himself, (the “last breath,” as you saw, was on the boy’s lips) were told of the half-grown bronze lad at the Capitol. Of necessity, but fatally, he must pause for a few moments in his course; or the course is at length over, or the breathless journey with some all-important tidings; and now, not till now, he thinks of resting to draw from the sole of his foot the cruel thorn, driven into it as he ran. In any case, there he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect naivete also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn hair of the boy, arching formally over the forehead and round the neck, there is something of archaism, of that archaism which survives, truly, in Myron’s own work, blending with the grace and power of well-nigh the maturity of Greek art. The blending of interests, of artistic alliances, is certainly delightful.

Polycleitus, the other famous name of this period, and with a fame justified by work we may still study, at least in its immediate derivatives, had also tried his hand with success in such subjects. In the Astragalizontes, for instance, well known to antiquity in countless reproductions, he had treated an incident of the every-day life of every age, which Plato sketches by the way.