The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

William Brown suggests that this passage is an example of the importation of lions from
Africa or Asia to fourth-century Greece. 168 Lawrence Bliquez, while acknowledging this
suggestion, does not rule out the possibility of Isocrates’ lions being trapped and trained
locally in northern Greece. 169 Whether imported from Africa, Asia, or captured in
northern Greece, these lions show that, in the fourth century, Greek artists did have living
models if they wished to employ them. As Bliquez has pointed out, this evidence
suggests that Vermeule was too quick to dismiss the availability of real lions to Greek
sculptors. 170
Taken together, the literary accounts reviewed so far indicate that lions were
present in Classical Greece and neighboring areas. As a result, Vermeule’s idea that
contemporary artists were forced to borrow from the anatomy of comparable dogs and
cats owing to lack of real lions appears not to be an adequate explanation of the non-
naturalistic elements of lions in contemporary sculpture.
So pervasive is, however, the idea of the lack of real lions in Classical Greece that
features also as an explanation of the non-naturalistic elements of colossal marble statues
of lions erected as commemorative monuments to the dead, such as the one found at the
west bank of the river Strymon at Amphipolis (Fig. 10), whose date has been placed in
the fourth century B.C., although a third-century date has also been proposed. 171
168 W. L. Brown, The Etruscan Lion (Oxford, 1960) 167.
169 L. J. Bliquez, “Lions and Greek Sculptors,” CW 68 (1975) 382 and 383.
170 Bliquez, “Lions and Greek Sculptors” 381.
171 For an account of the discovery of the lion of Amphipolis, its reconstruction, and fourth-century date,
see O. Broneer, The Lion Monument at Amphipolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1941) 48, who places it in the last
quarter of the fourth-century B.C.; see review of this study by G. M. A. Richter, in AJA 46 (1942) 294-295,
who agrees with this date; Vermeule, “Greek Funerary Animals” 100, dates it also to the fourth century
(340-330 B.C.); Ridgway, Fourth-Century Styles 144, does not specify its date, but mentions its use in
scholarship as fourth-century comparanda for assigning a similar date to the lion from the Lion Tomb at
Knidos, which she considers a post-mid-fourth-century work. For the assignment of a late fourth-century
date (325-300 B.C.) to the lion of Knidos, see Jenkins, Greek Architecture and Its Sculpture 228 and 231.
115