Ancient Greek Civilization

the altar and the frieze. For one thing, the frieze is much more conspicuous and more readily visible than,
say, the frieze of the Parthenon: There is no roof above the frieze to cast a dark shadow over it, and the
frieze is only slightly above eye-level. Further, as one mounts the stairway, one finds oneself on the same
level as the action. Indeed, some of the action of the frieze is taking place on the stairway, encroaching
upon the very space occupied by the viewer (figure 77). This encroachment of the work of sculpture into
the viewer’s space was cultivated by Hellenistic artists as a means of engaging the viewer’s attention and
emotional involvement, but like many features of the Hellenistic Period we find its roots already in the
fourth century. Unfortunately, the originals of large-scale fourth-century sculptures have mostly perished,
but copies were made during the Roman period of many of the most famous works and some of these
copies have survived. Roman copies can only give a general impression of what the original looked like,
particularly since in many instances the originals were hollow-cast in bronze while the copies were
carved in marble. Still, they provide valuable evidence of the statue’s original pose, as well as evidence
of the influence of Greek art in Rome and of the taste of Roman collectors. Figure 78 shows a Roman
copy of a lost bronze original by Lysippus, a sculptor who held an important place in the period of
transition between Classical and Hellenistic art and whom Alexander the Great appointed as his court
sculptor. The statue is of a young athlete using a scraper to remove sand, sweat, and olive oil from his
body after exercising and was known in antiquity as the Apoxyomenos, or “The Man Using a Scraper.” It
was a famous statue that the emperor Tiberius himself appropriated for his palace in Rome in the first
century after Christ. The sculpture does not depict a subject from the remote mythical past, but something
that would have been a common, everyday sight for a Greek man who spent time (as most leisured Greek
men did) in the gymnasium. The familiar character of the subject was further enhanced by the
revolutionary pose of the statue, with its languorously outstretched arms abruptly dismantling the barrier
between the viewer’s space and that of the statue.