Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 24).djvu/541

f an athlete in action the statue, perhaps, most admired in both ancient and modern tinies is the Discobolus, or discus-thrower, of Myron. The original was in bronze, but we know only copies in marble. Myron's most successful human figures represented purely physical qualities; he did not express the feelings of the mind. He delighted to seize for representation "the moment when the whole breath was held back for a final effort of strength—that moment, in fact, when the human figure is most truly statuesque; when the body is lifeless, so to speak, like the statue itself, and the spectator suspends breathing in sympathy." Of another famous athletic statue of his, for instance, that representing the Spartan Ladas, who, in winning a long-distance race at Olympia, fell dead at the goal, we read that the figure seemed about to leap from its base to seize the victor's wreath, the last breath leaving his lips. An ancient art-critic described Myron as the first maker of statues "to multiply truth," and as being, compared with Polycletus, another famous sculptor of athletes, able to work more points into his figures and "more careful in symmetry." By multiplying truth was meant, it has been suggested, an exaggeration of Nature, in order to give effect to the momentary attitude of the figure; and by symmetry, "the manner in which every member and part of the body was made to work together for the expression of the moment of action." In the Discobolus Myron seems indeed to have been most suceessfully careful of symmetry in this sense, but not to have exaggerated truth so much as to have scized and portrayed all its points.

It is a marvellous and a beautiful statue. The thrower is caught at the moment when the right arm, discus in hand and flat against the forearm, is at the extremity of its backward swing, and when also the right leg has been advanced, the foot turned outwards and firmly gripping the ground in anticipation of the forward swing; the left arm has swung loosely across to the right, the left leg is loose for the imminent forward lunge, dragging the toes; the whole body stoops for the effort, half-turned for the circular sweep.

The details of how the discus was thrown in the old Olympic games are not known. But in the Olympic games held at Athens in 1896 the method used is thus described by Mr. G. S. Robertson, the Oxford hammer-thrower, who competed unsuccessfully in "the disc," but won first prize with his Greek Pindaric ode: "The discus is a sort of girdle-cake of wood, about 8½in. in diameter, with a brass core, and weighs about 4½lb. The thrower stands in a square of two mètres (about 6½ft.) and holds the discus in both hands above the left shoulder. The fingers of the right hand grip it tightly by the upper edge; those of the