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He worked almost exclusively in bronze: and though he made some statues of gods and heroes, his fame rested principally upon his representations of athletes, in which he made a revolution, by introducing greater boldness of pose and a more perfect rhythm.

His most famous works according to Pliny (Nat. Hist., 34, 57) were a cow, Ladas the runner, who fell dead at the moment of victory, and Discobolus, a discus thrower. The cow seems to have earned its fame mainly by serving as a peg on which to hang epigrams, which tell us nothing about the pose of the animal. Of the Ladas there is no known copy.

Several copies of the Discobolus exist, of which the best is in the Massimi palace at Rome. The example in the British Museum has the head put on wrongly. The athlete is represented at the moment when he has swung back the discus with the full stretch of his arm, and is about to hurl it with the full weight of his body. The head should be turned back toward the discus.

A marble figure in the Lateran Museum , which is now restored as a dancing satyr, is almost certainly a copy of a work of Myron, a Marsyas desirous of picking up the aulos which Athena had thrown away ( PausaniasPausanias was Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century A. who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations,, 1. 24, I). The full group is copied on coins of AthensAcropolis in central Athens is home to ancient monuments of Athens — a mainstay of its thriving tourism industry Athens ( Greek: Athina is the capital of Greece, and also the capital of the Attica region of Greece. A cosmopolitan modern city, Athens is al, on a vase and in a relief which represent Marsyas as oscillating between curiosity and the fear of the displeasure of Athena.

The ancient critics say of Myron that, while he succeeded admirably in giving life and motion to his figures, he did not succeed in rendering the emotions of the mind. This agrees with the extant evidence, in a certain degree, though not perfectly. The bodies of his men are of far greater excellence than the heads. The face of the Marsyas is almost a mask; but from the attitude we gain a vivid impression of the passions which sway him. The face of the discus-thrower is calm and unruffled; but all the muscles of his body are concentrated in an effort.

A considerable number of other extant works are ascribed to the school or the influence of Myron by A. Furtwangler in his suggestive Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (pp. 168—2 19). These attributions, however, are anything but certain, nor do the arguments by which Furtwangler supports his attributions bear abridgment.

A recently discovered papyrusPapyrus is an early form of paper made from the stems of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus a wetland sedge that grows to 5 meters (15 ft) in height and was once abundant in the Nile River delta. Papyrus was first used in Ancient Egypt around 3000 BC, but from Egypt informs us that Myron made statues of the athlete Timanthes, victorious at Olympia in 456 BCCenturies: 4th century BC 5th century BC 6th century BC Decades: 500s BC 490s BC 480s BC 470s BC 460s BC 450s BC 440s BC 430s BC 420s BC 410s BC 400s BC Years: 461 BC 460 BC 459 BC 458 BC 457 BC 456 BC 455 BC 454 BC 453 BC 452 BC 451 BC Births Deaths Aesc, and of Lycinus, victorious in 448 and 444. This helps us to fix his date. He was a contemporary, but a somewhat older contemporary, of Pheidias and Polyclitus.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

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