But the young man has no attributes. Or, rather, he has no attributes that mark him as an individual. His
attributes – his youthful appearance, his powerful build, his conspicuous nakedness – mark him as the
abstract representation of virility, vitality, and vigor. There is a curious paradox here: Greek civilization,
particularly in the Archaic Period, has often been thought of as the birthplace of the Western concept of
the individual, and yet the Archaic kouros is far less individualized than the representations of specific
Egyptian pharaohs that inspired its creation. What seems to underlie this paradox is the difference
between the types of society that form the context for the Egyptian and the Greek sculptures. The statue of
an Egyptian king proclaims to his subjects the king’s identity – there is, after all, only one king – and his
authority. In the context of the Greek polis, however, to proclaim one’s individuality in so direct and
conspicuous a manner would (probably rightly) be regarded as dangerous and as threatening to the
stability of the community. So the individual who sets up a dedicatory offering to a deity or who wishes to
mark the grave of a deceased relative commissions a statue that is neither a portrait of himself nor of the
deceased. It is not a portrait at all, but rather a representation of a generic citizen, in the same way that the
figures on the eighth-century funerary amphora (figure 18) represent generic mourners.
“As far as the art of sculpture is concerned, Daedalus was so far superior to all others that the story
was later told of him that the statues that he created were just like living creatures. For they could
see and walk about and, in short, they reproduced the state of the body in its entirety, so that his
creations were indistinguishable from human beings. Since he was the first to furnish statues with
eyes and to separate their legs, and the first to give them outstretched arms, it is hardly surprising
that people were in awe of him. For in earlier times artisans used to make their statues with closed
eyes and with hands hanging down and attached to their sides.” (Diodorus of Sicily, The Library of
World History 4.76.2–3)There is one other signal that the kouros sends: It proclaims – paradoxically, for a piece of stone – that it
is alive. This vitality is conveyed by the figure’s youthfulness, by its uninhibited display of its organs of
procreation, and by its slightly advanced left leg, which is intended to give the impression that the figure
is in motion, walking toward the viewer. It is characteristic of all sculptural traditions (at least until the
twentieth century AD) that sculpture is concerned to represent animate figures, whether human or bestial
or monstrous, in contrast to decorations on ceramics or on fabrics, which often allow non-
representational patterns, like those on Greek vases of the Geometric Period. This animate quality of
sculpture is reflected in two Greek myths, both of which are connected with the regions of Greece that
have the closest connections with Egypt and western Asia, from which the Greeks adopted the practice of
creating large-scale sculpture and the tradition of figurative representation. The myth of Pygmalion,
recycled in George Bernard Shaw’s play of the same name, concerns a king of Cyprus who fell in love
with a statue of a beautiful woman. In response to Pygmalion’s prayers to the goddess Aphrodite, the
statue came to life and became Pygmalion’s wife. The other myth concerns Daedalus (after whom the hero
of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is named), who was himself a sculptor of such
skill that, according to Plato, his statues had to be tied down to prevent them from walking away.
Although Daedalus was claimed as an Athenian by Plato, who was himself from Athens, most of the myths
concerning Daedalus are connected with Crete, where he is supposed to have built a labyrinth for King
Minos (presumably a reminiscence of the labyrinthine Minoan palace at Cnossus: figure 6).
These myths suggest that it is reasonable to see the kouroi that we have been considering as, among other
things, powerful assertions of vitality. It may require a stretch of the imagination for us to think of these
rather stiff, stone statues in this way but, in fact, we are today not seeing them as they were intended to be
seen. Not only is our vision clouded by over two thousand years of what we regard as progress in the