It would be hard for a modern critic to rate Polyclitus so high: the reason is that balance, rhythm and the minute perfection of bodily form, which were the great merits of this sculptor, do not appeal to us as they did to the Greeks of the 5th century. He worked mainly in bronze.
As regards his chronology we have data in a papyrus published by Grenfell and Hunt containing lists of athletic victors. From this it appears that he made a statue of Cyniscus, a victorious athlete of 464 or 460 B.C., of Pythocles (452) and Aristion (452). He thus can scarcely have been born as late as 480 B.C. His statue of Hera is dated by Pliny to 420 B.C. His artistic activity must thus have been long and prolific. Copies of his spearman (doryphorus) (see Greek Art, Plate VI. fig. 80), and his victor winding a ribbon round his head (diadumenus) have long been recognized in our galleries. We see their excellence, but they inspire no enthusiasm, because they are more fleshy than modern figures of athletes, and want charm. They are chiefly valuable as showing us the square forms of body affected by Polyclitus, and the scheme he adopted, throwing the weight of the body (as Pliny says of him) on one leg. We must not, however, judge of a great Greek sculptor by Roman copies of his works. This has been enforced by the discovery at Delos, by the French excavators, of a diadumenus of far more pleasing type and greater finish, which also goes back to Polyclitus. The excavations at Olympia have also greatly widened our knowledge of the sculptor. Among the bases of statues found on that site were three signed by Polyclitus, still bearing on their surface the marks of attachment of the feet of the statues. This at once gives us their pose; and following up the clue, A. Furtwangler has identified several extant statues as copies of figures of boy athletes victorious at Olympia set up by Polyclitus. Among these the Westmacott athlete in the British Museum is conspicuous. And it is certain that these boys, although the anatomy of their bodies seems to be too mature, yet have a real charm, combining beauty of form with modesty and unaffected simplicity. They enable us better to understand the merit of the sculptor.
The Amazon of Polyclitus survives in several copies, among the best of which is one in the British Museum (for its type see Greek Art, fig. 40). Here again we find a certain heaviness; and the womanly character of the Amazon scarcely appears through her robust limbs. But the Amazon of Pheidias, if rightly identified, is no better. The masterpiece of Polyclitus, his Hera of gold and ivory, has of course totally disappeared. The coins of Argos give us only the general type. Many archaeologists have tried to find a copy of the head. The most defensible of all these identifications is that of C. Waldstein, who shows that a head of a girl in the British Museum (labelled as Polyclitan) corresponds so nearly with that of Hera on 5th century coins of Argos that We must regard it as a reflex of the head of the great statue. It seems very hard and cold beside such noble heads of the goddess as those in the Ludovisi Gallery (Terme Museum) Rome. American archaeologists have in recent years conducted excavations on the site of the Argive temple of Hera (Argos and Greek Art, fig. 39); but the sculptural fragments, heads and torsos, which seem to belong to the temple erected in the time of Polyclitus, have no close stylistic resemblance to other statues recognized as his; and at present their position in the history of art is matter of dispute.
The want of variety in the works of Polyclitus was brought as a reproach against him by ancient critics. Varro says that his statues were square and almost of one pattern. We have already observed that there was small variety in their attitudes. Except for the statue of Hera, which was the work of his old age, he produced scarcely any notable statue of a deity. His field was narrowly limited; but in that field he was unsurpassed.
2. The younger Polyclitus was of the same family as the elder, and the works of the two are not easily to be distinguished. Some existing bases, however, bearing the name are inscribed in characters of the 4th century, at which time the elder sculptor cannot have been alive. The most noted work of the younger artist was a statue in marble of Zeus Milichius (the Merciful) set up by the people of Argos after a shameful massacre which took place in 370 B.C. The elder artist is not known to have worked in marble.
POLYCRATES, tyrant of Samos (c. 535-515 B.C.). Having won popularity by donations to poorer citizens, he took advantage of a festival of Hera, which was being celebrated outside the walls, to make himself master of the city (about 535 B.C.).
After getting rid of his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, who had at first shared his power, he established a despotism which is of great importance in the history of the island. Realizing clearly the value of sea-power for a Greek state, he equipped a fleet of 100 ships, and so became master of the Aegean basin.
This ascendancy he abused by numerous acts of piracy which made him notorious throughout Greece; but his real purpose in building his navy was to become lord of all the islands of the archipelago and the mainland towns of Ionia. The details of his conquests are uncertain, but it is known that in the Cyclades he maintained an alliance with the tyrant Lygdamis of Naxos, and curried favour with the Delian, Apollo by dedicating to him the island of Rheneia. He also encountered and heavily defeated a coalition of two great naval powers of the
Asiatic coast, Miletus and Lesbos. Doubtless with the object of expanding the flourishing foreign trade of Samos, he entered into alliance with Amasis, king of Egypt, who, according to Herodotus, renounced his ally because he feared that the gods, in envy of Polycrates' excessive good fortune, would bring ruin upon him and his allies. It is more probable that the breach of the compact was due to Polycrates, for when Cambyses of Persia invaded Egypt (525) the Samian tyrant offered to support him with a naval contingent. This squadron never reached Egypt, for the crews, composed as they were of Polycrates political enemies, suspecting that Cambyses was under
agreement to slay them, put back to Samos and attacked their
master. After a defeat by sea, Polycrates repelled an assault
upon the walls, and subsequently withstood a siege by a joint
armament of Spartans and Corinthians assembled to aid the
rebels. He maintained his ascendancy until about 515, when Oroetes, the Persian governor of Lydia, who had been reproached for his failure to reduce Samos by force, lured him to the mainland by false promises of gain and put him to death by crucifixion.
Beside the political and commercial pre-eminence which he conferred upon Samos, Polycrates adorned the city with public works on a large scale-an aqueduct, a mole and a temple of Hera (see Samos; Aqueducts). The splendour of his palace is attested by the proposal of the Roman emperor Caligula to rebuild it. Foreign artists worked for him at high wages; from Athens he brought Democedes, the greatest physician of the age, at an exceptional salary. He was also a patron of letters: he collected a library and lived on terms of intimate friendship with the poet Anacreon, whose verses were full of references to his patron. The philosopher Pythagoras, however, quitted Samos in order to escape his tyranny.
POLYCRATES, Athenian sophist and rhetorician, flourished in the 4th century B.C. He taught at Athens, and afterwards in Cyprus. He composed declamations on paradoxical themes an Encomium on Clytaemnestra, an Accusation of Socrates, an Emomium on Busiris (a mythical king of Egypt, notorious for his inhumanity); also declamations on mice, pots and counters. His Enoomium on Busiris was sharply criticized by Isocrates, in a work still extant, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterizes his style as frigid, vulgar and inelegant.
POLYGAMY, (Gr. πολύς, many, and γάμος, marriage), or as it is sometimes termed, Polygyny (γυνή, woman), the system under which a man is married to several women at the same time. Derivatively it includes the practice of polyandry, but it has become definitely restricted to expressing what has been, and still is, far the commonest type of relations between the sexes (see Family and Marriage). Among Oriental nations plurality of legal wives is customary. Mahommedans are allowed four. A Hindu can have as many as he pleases: the high-caste sometimes having as many as a hundred. Polygamy is the rule among
