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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > May/June 2001

Debunking the Copy Myth

Roman sculptors did not just imitate Greek masters; they produced beautiful, original works in their own right.

By Miranda Marvin

Who would think that a marble statue weighing more than a ton could be invisible? Yet that is the fate of hundreds of Roman statues in museums all over the world. Huge, white and shiny, they line galleries of classical art, but no one ever sees them. Their labels make them invisible. Each is identified as a “Roman copy of a Greek original.” The labels usually give the date, too: “Roman copy of a fourth-century [or fifth-century] Greek work.” Sometimes they even name the Greek artist: “Roman copy of a work by Praxiteles”—or Phidias, or Scopas, or Lysippus. Rarely […]

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Footnotes

1.

No works of the late-fifth-century B.C.E. sculptor Polyclitus have survived; in Roman times, however, he was famous as the sculptor of the Doryphorus (the spear-bearer), much imitated by Roman sculptors. The fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian sculptor Praxiteles’s works include the Aphrodite of Knidos and the altar of the Artemision in Ephesus (neither work has survived). Scopas, a fourth-century B.C.E. sculptor from the island of Paros, designed the Temple of Athena at Tegea, not far from Sparta.

Endnotes

1.

See Bettina Bergmann, “Greek Masterpieces and Recreative Fictions,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 97, Greece in Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 104.

2.

Pliny, Natural History 36.20.