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

intimate knowledge of a real cow, therefore twice as difficult to fool, speaks volumes of
the exceptional lifelikeness of his statue of a cow. This impression is further
strengthened by an anonymous epigram, in which, Myron himself comes close to being
fooled by the statue:
Myron was looking for his own cow among the
others, and found it with difficulty by driving the
rest away. (Anonymous, Anth. Pal. 9.725) [19]
The evidence from these epigrams indicates the conception of Myron’s cow as an
exceptionally lifelike statue capable of making even herdsmen, who know very well how
a real cow looks like, perceive it as if it were alive. In this way, lifelikeness again
emerges as a valued quality of works of art, which in its extreme form was perceived as
aliveness, and one in whose expression Myron’s statue played an important role.
The Deception of a Calf
Herdsmen and a gadfly are not the only viewers whose deception the poems note.
A set of three epigrams, one by Antipater of Sidon, and two other, anonymous, note that a
calf was also deceived into thinking that Myron’s statue was alive. In the first epigram,
the statue asks the calf:
Calf, why dost thou approach my flanks, and why
doast thou low? The artist put no milk in my udder.
(Antipater of Sidon, Anth. Pal. 9.721) [31]
Through the voice of the viewer or the reader, the statue addresses a calf in the vocative.
The statue asks the calf, a younger fellow animal, why it responds to it as if it were alive:
why it approaches its flanks, and lows. The calf remains silent, and the statue proceeds to
explain its status as a work of art and its lack of milk. The calf, therefore, appears to have
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