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

lifelikeness of the statue, in quite the opposite way: by treating the absence of a soul in it,
as the only trait that separates it from a living animal:
Alack! Myron, thou didst not have time to
complete thy casting, but the bronze hardened
before thou couldst put life (yuxh_n) into it.
(Anonymous, Anth. Pal. 9.736) [26]
In the second epigram by Euenos, which identifies the statue as a heifer, the
sense of extreme aliveness is contained in Myron’s hypothetical explanation that this is
not a real animal, but an image of it. Myron’s distinction between the living heifer
(subject) and its image is not consistent with fifth-century thought on images in art,
which is often marked by the absence of a distinction between representational subject
and image. 119 That he is hypothetically compelled to draw such a distinction, however,
presents his deviation from an ordinary approach to art as a technique to explain the
extraordinary lifelikeness of his statue. Both epigrams are typical examples of the
inconsistency regarding the identity of Myron’s statue and its oscillation between a cow
and a heifer; both establish the experience of lifelikeness and its equation with aliveness
as a fifth-century phenomenon in Greek animal art.
The Statue Acts Fantastically
As noted earlier and also seen in the poem of Philippus, some epigrams preserve
instances in which the statue acts fantastically by speaking directly to the viewer.
Epigrams of this type are explicit in their use of the first person and the presentation of
the statue as both a “speaking object” and a “speaking animal.” They address both
119 See discussion in the fourth chapter of this study with reference to examples from Herodotus, and the
building inscriptions of the Erechtheion; also Donohue, Xoana , for the absence of distinction between
image and subject, and 23, for the importance of the idea of image as an object; also R. L. Gordon, “The
Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World,” Art History 2 (1979) 9-10.
73