ABSTRACT
It does not take a second glance at Lysippos’ ‘Farnese’ Herakles (Plate 1) to register that masculinity is at issue here. 1 It is not simply that this body is obviously male; what it is to be a man is under scrutiny. The massive corporeality is not just a product of scale or proportions, although in this copy the statue is ten feet tall and the shoulders and torso give little hint of the bone structure beneath the generous development of muscle. What gives this statue its bodily presence, even in the copies from which alone we must judge, is not least the treatment of the surface: the lines of veins which stand out through the thin and ageing flesh make this a portrait not of a man who has achieved a single great act, but of a man whose life and whose body have been spent in achieving great acts. Here is a man who can still tease – Herakles keeps the apples of the Hesperides concealed behind his back – but a man whose abundant possession of physical strength has imposed upon him obligations which have taken their physical and personal toll. 2
