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

useful insight into the conventional nature of the praise of lifelike works of art in
antiquity.
The Epigrams of Euenos of Paros
As mentioned above, two epigrams by Euenos of Paros, very probably dating to
the fifth century B.C., are important because they are the only almost contemporary
evidence for the reception of Myron’s bronze statue. The epigrams praise the sense of
aliveness associated with the statue, which is identified as a cow and a heifer
respectively:
Either a complete hide of bronze clothes here a
real cow (boi6), or the bronze has a soul inside it
(yuxh_n e1ndon). (Euenos, Anth. Pal. 9.717) [92]
Perhaps Myron himself will say this: “I did not
mould this heifer (ta_n da&malin), but its image."
(Euenos, Anth. Pal. 9.718) [93]
In the first epigram, Myron is not mentioned, but it is made explicit that the lifelikeness
of the bronze cow described is astonishing. The viewer or the reader is told that the
bronze is only a cover that hides the real animal underneath, implying, therefore, the
perception of the statue as if it were alive. Similarly, the reference to bronze as a material
with a soul invites the perception of the statue as fully animated, and thus as if it were
alive, again. 118 It is interesting to see that another epigram, an anonymous, advertises the
118 This line of thought accords well with Plato’s assertion, in the Cratylus (400a), that the soul is a power,
which when present in the body, it causes it to live and gives it power to breathe the air and be revitalized.
For a discussion of animated images in ancient Greece, see also A. Schnapp, “Are Images Animated: The
Psychology of the Statues in Ancient Greece,” in C. Renfrew and E. B. W. Zubrow, eds., The Ancient
Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology (Cambridge, 1994) 40-44. Also, for a discussion of the notion of
a)yuxi/a (“absence of soul”) and inanimate images in antiquity, and as a topos of iconoclastic polemic, see
Donohue, Xoana 40-41, 135, 138n, 155, 161.
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