The opening of Preface
The purpose of the present work is to study what is known of one of the most important genres of Greek sculpture—the monuments erected at Olympia and elsewhere in the Greek world in honor of victorious athletes at the Olympic games. Since only meagre remnants of these monuments have survived, the work is in the main concerned with the attempt to reconstruct their various types and poses.
The source-material on which the attempt is based has been indicated fully in the text; it is of two kinds, literary and archæological. To the former belong the explanatory inscriptions on the bases of victor statues found at Olympia and elsewhere, many of which agree verbally with epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthologies; the incidental statements of various kinds and value found in the classical writers and their scholiasts; and, above all, the detailed works of the two imperial writers, the elder Pliny and Pausanias.