he accepted commissions for athlete statues; five such are mentioned by Pausanias as existing at Olympia.  An allegorical figure by him of Cairos (Opportunity) receives lavish praise from a late rhetorician.  Finally, he is credited with a statue of a tipsy female flute-player.  This deserves especial notice as the first well-assured example of a work of Greek sculpture ignoble in its subject and obviously unfit for any of the purposes for which sculpture had chiefly existed (cf. page 124).

It is Pliny who puts us in the way of a more direct acquaintance with this artist than the above facts can give.  He makes the general statement that Lysippus departed from the canon of proportions previously followed (i.e., probably, by Polyclitus and his immediate followers), making the head smaller and the body slenderer and “dryer,” and he mentions a statue by him in Rome called an Apoxyomenos, i.e., an athlete scraping himself with a strigil.  A copy of such a statue was found in Rome in 1849 (Fig. 166).  The fingers of the right hand with the inappropriate die are modern, as are also some additional bits here and there.  Now the coincidence in subject between this statue and that mentioned by Pliny would not alone be decisive.  Polyclitus also made an Apoxyomenos, and, for all we know, other sculptors may have used the same motive.  But the statue in question is certainly later than Polyclitus, and its agreement with what Pliny tells us of the proportions adopted by Lysippus is as close as could be desired (contrast Fig. 137).  We therefore need not scruple to accept it as Lysippian.

Our young athlete, before beginning his exercise, had rubbed his body with oil and, if he was to wrestle, had sprinkled himself with sand.  Now, his exercise over, he is removing oil and sweat and dirt with the instrument regularly used for that purpose.  His slender figure suggests elasticity and agility rather than brute strength.  The face (Fig. 167) has not the radiant charm which Praxiteles would have given it, but it is both fine and alert.  The eyes are deeply set; the division of the upper from the lower forehead is marked by a groove; the hair lies in expressive disorder.  In the bronze original the tree-trunk behind the left leg was doubtless absent, as also the disagreeable support (now broken) which extended from the right leg to the right fore-arm.

The best authenticated likeness of Alexander the Great is a bust in the Louvre (Fig. 168) inscribed with his name:  “Alexander of Macedon, son of Philip.”  The surface has been badly corroded and the nose is restored.  The work, which is only a copy, may go back to an original by Lysippus, though the evidence for that belief, a certain resemblance to the head of the Apoxyomenos, is hardly as convincing as one could desire.  The king is here represented, one would guess, at the age of thirty or thereabouts.  Now as he was absent from Europe from the age of twenty-two until his death at Babylon at the age of thirty-three