Greek Texts & Translations

It is said that when Hysmon was still a boy he was attacked by a flux in his muscles, and it was in order that by hard exercise he might be a healthy man free from disease that he practised the pentathlum. So his training was also to make him win famous victories in the games. His statue is the work of Cleon, and he holds jumping-weights of old pattern.

After Hysmon comes the statue of a boy wrestler from Heraea in Arcadia, Nicostratus the son of Xenocleides. Pantias was the artist, and if you count the teachers you will find five between him and Aristocles of Sicyon.

Dicon, the son of Callibrotus, won five footraces at Pytho, three at the Isthmian games, four at Nemea, one at Olympia in the race for boys besides two in the men's race. Statues of him have been set up at Olympia equal in number to the races he won. When he was a boy he was proclaimed a native of Caulonia, as in fact he was. But afterwards he was bribed to proclaim himself a Syracusan.

Caulonia was a colony in Italy founded by Achaeans, and its founder was Typhon of Aegium. When Pyrrhus son of Aeacides and the Tarentines were at war with the Romans, several cities in Italy were destroyed, either by the Romans or by the Epeirots, and these included Caulonia, whose fate it was to be utterly laid waste, having been taken by the Campanians, who formed the largest contingent of allies on the Roman side.

Close to Dicon is a statue of Xenophon, the son of Menephylus, a pancratiast of Aegium in Achaia, and likewise one of Pyrilampes of Ephesus after winning the long foot-race. Olympus made the statue of Xenophon; that of Pyrilampes was made by a sculptor of the same name, a native, not of Sicyon, but of Messene beneath Ithome.

A statue of Lysander, son of Aristocritus, a Spartan, was dedicated in Olympia by the Samians, and the first of their inscriptions runs: In the much-seen precinct of Zeus, ruler on high,
I stand, dedicated at public expense by the Samians.
So this inscription informs us who dedicated the statue; the next is in praise of Lysander himself: Deathless glory by thy achievements, for fatherland and for Aristocritus,
Lysander, hast thou won, and art famed for valour.

So plainly “the Samians and the rest of the Ionians,” as the Ionians themselves phrase it, painted both the walls. For when Alcibiades had a strong fleet of Athenian triremes along the coast of Ionia, most of the Ionians paid court to him, and there is a bronze statue of Alcibiades dedicated by the Samians in the temple of Hera. But when the Attic ships were captured at Aegospotami ^note, the Samians set up a statue of Lysander at Olympia, and the Ephesians set up in the sanctuary of Artemis not only a statue of Lysander himself but also statues of Eteonicus, Pharax and other Spartans quite unknown to the Greek world generally.

But when fortune changed again, and Conon had won the naval action off Cnidus and the mountain called Dorium ^note, the Ionians likewise changed their views, and there are to be seen statues in bronze of Conon and of Timotheus both in the sanctuary of Hera in Samos and also in the sanctuary of the Ephesian goddess at Ephesus. It is always the same; the Ionians merely follow the example of all the world in paying court to strength.