previous next
[3] Between the feet of the throne are four rods, each one stretching from foot to foot. The rod straight opposite the entrance has on it seven images; how the eighth of them disappeared nobody knows. These must be intended to be copies of obsolete contests, since in the time of Pheidias contests for boys had not yet been introduced.1 The figure of one binding his own head with a ribbon is said to resemble in appearance Pantarces, a stripling of Elis said to have been the love of Pheidias. Pantarces too won the wrestling-bout for boys at the eighty-sixth Festival.

1 This statement is certainly incorrect; Pausanias himself says that contests for the boys were introduced at the thirty-seventh Festival, i.e. in 632 B.C. Several suggestions have been made for correcting the text. One of the most attractive is that of C. Robert （see Hermes XXIII. 1888, p. 451）, who would read ἀγωνιστῶν for ἀγωνισμάτων and transpose οὐ γάρ (for which he reads ἄρα) πω . . . τῆς Φειδίου to after ὀγδοήκοντα. This would mean: “So P. had not reached the age of boys at the time of Pheidias.”

Pausanias. Pausanias Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Elis (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
632 BC (1)
hide References (2 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: