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[1] The statue of a competitor in the pankration was made by Lysippos. The athlete was the first to win the pankration not only from Stratos itself but from the whole of Acarnania, and his name was Xenarkes, the son of Philandrides. Now, after the Persian invasion, the Lacedaemonians became keener breeders of horses than any other Greeks. For beside those I have already mentioned, the following horse-breeders from Sparta have their statues set up after that of the Acarnanian athlete Xenarkes,
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Lykinos, Arkesilaos, and Lichas, his son.
[2] Xenarkes succeeded in winning other victories, at Delphi, at Argos and at Corinth. Lykinos brought foals to Olympia, and when one of them was disqualified, entered his foals for the race for full-grown horses, winning with them. He also dedicated two statues at Olympia, works of Myron
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the Athenian. As for Arkesilaos and his son Lichas, the father won two Olympic victories; his son, because in his time the Lacedaemonians were excluded from the Games, entered his chariot in the name of the Theban people, and with his own hands bound the victorious charioteer with a ribbon. For this offense, he was scourged by the umpires,
Next to them is set up a statue of Eukles, son of Kallianax, a native of Rhodes and of the lineage of the Diagoridai. For he was the son of the daughter of Diagoras, and won an Olympic victory in the boxing match for men. His statue is by Naukydes. Polycleitus of Argos, not the artist who made the image of Hērā, but a pupil of Naukydes, made the statue of a boy wrestler, Agenor of Thebes. The statue was dedicated by the Commonwealth of Phokis, for Theopompos, the father of Agenor, was a state friend
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of their nation.
[3] and on account of this Lichas, the Lacedaemonians invaded Elis in the reign of King Agis, when a battle took place within the Altis. When the war was over, Lichas set up the statue in this place, but the Eleian records of Olympic victors give as the name of the victor, not Lichas, but the Theban people.
[4] Near Lichas stands an Eleian diviner, Thrasyboulos, son of Aeneas of the Iamid family, who divined for the Mantineians in their struggle against the Lacedaemonians under Agis, son of Eudamidas, their king. I shall have more to say about this in my account of the Arcadians.
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On the statue of Thrasyboulos is a spotted lizard crawling towards his right shoulder, and by his side lies a dog, obviously a sacrificial victim, cut open and with his liver exposed.
[5] Divination by kids, lambs, or calves has, we all know, been established among men from ancient times, and the Cyprians have even discovered how to practice the art by means of pigs; but no peoples are accustomed to make any use of dogs in divining. So Thrasyboulos apparently established a method of divination peculiar to himself, by means of the entrails of dogs. The diviners called Iamidai are descended from Iamos, who, Pindar says in an ode,
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was a son of Apollo and received the gift of divination from him.
[6] By the statue of Thrasyboulos stands Tīmosthenes of Elis, winner of the foot-race for boys, and Antipatros of Miletus, son of Kleinopater, conqueror of the boy boxers. Men of Syracuse, who were bringing a sacrifice from Dionysius to Olympia, tried to bribe the father of Antipatros to have his son proclaimed as a Syracusan. But Antipatros, thinking nothing of the tyrant’s gifts, proclaimed himself a Milesian and wrote upon his statue that he was of Milesian descent and the first Ionian to dedicate his statue at Olympia.
[7] The artist who made this statue was Polycleitus, while that of Tīmosthenes was made by Eutykhides of Sikyon, a pupil of Lysippos. This Eutykhides made for the Syrians on the Orontes an image of Fortune, which is highly valued by the natives.
[8] In the Altis by the side of Tīmosthenes are statues of Timon and of his son Aesypus, who is represented as a child seated on a horse. In fact, the boy won the horserace, while Timon was proclaimed victor in the chariotrace. The statues of Timon and of his son were made by Daidalos of Sikyon, who also made for the Eleians the trophy in the Altis commemorating the victory over the Spartans.
[9] The inscription on the Samian boxer says that his trainer Mycon dedicated the statue and that the Samians are best among the Ionians for athletes and at naval warfare; this is what the inscription says, but it tells us nothing at all about the boxer himself.
[10] Beside this is the Messenian Damiskos, who won an Olympic victory at the age of twelve. I was exceedingly surprised to learn that while the Messenians were in exile from the Peloponnesus, their luck at the Olympic Games failed. For with the exception of Leontiskos and Symmakhos, who came from Messene on the Strait, we know of no Messenian, either from Sicily or from Naupaktos, who won a victory at Olympia. Even these two are said by the Sicilians to have been not Messenians but of old Zanclean blood.
[11] However, when the Messenians came back to the Peloponnesus, their luck in the Olympic Games came with them. For at the festival celebrated by the Eleians in the year after the settlement of Messene, the foot-race for boys was won by this Damiskos, who afterwards won in the pentathlon both at Nemeā and at the Isthmus.
Description of Greece. Pausanias. ed. W. H. S. Jones, ed. H. A. Ormerod, ed. Gregory Nagy. . .