ABSTRACT
The closing years of the fifth century witnessed jubilation such as had seldom if ever occurred among the Greeks. Sparta's naval victory over Athens at Aegospotami in 405 brought about the surrender, in the following year, of the ‘tyrant city’ which the victorious allies now voted to destroy. Through Spartan magnanimity and pragmatism, Athens was spared because of its past heroism against the Persians; the dismantling of its fortifications was believed to mark ‘the beginning of freedom for Greece’ (Xen. Hell. 2.2.23). The Spartan Lysander, who had commanded the allied fleet in 405 and presided over Athens' capitulation, commissioned a victory monument of appropriate size and novelty: not at Olympia, where the Panhellenic ideal had for some time discouraged displays of civic pride and especially of spoils taken by Greeks from other Greeks, but at Delphi (Paus. 10.9.7–11), where the confrontation with a mid-fifth-century Athenian monument commemorating Marathon could not be missed. 1 The Athenians had set up bronze statues by Phidias of Apollo and Athena, the general Miltiades, and the heroes of the ten Attic tribes. For Lysander a team of sculptors, mostly followers of Polyclitus from the Peloponnesus, executed at least thirty-seven figures, arranging them in two rows. 2 In front, presumably in the center, was Poseidon crowning Lysander: the first Greek general to receive divine honors during his lifetime. Previously, only athletes among living men had been likely to enjoy the honor of a commemorative statue and, much more rarely, cult status. The two-figure group was accompanied by statues of the Dioscuri, Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, and Lysander's soothsayer and helmsman. In the background stood a much longer row of admirals, representing twenty-two states in addition to Sparta. These were in varied stances which indicate interaction and probably contact (such as a hand on a neighbor‘s shoulder) symbolizing the friendly relations among the allies. Many were separated by representations of marine spoils and trophies and in some cases probably rested on these. The admirals formed a more pictorial composition than the foreground figures, and the influence of painting as well as architectural sculpture is a distinct possibility. Like these, and in contrast to earlier free-standing groups, the Lysander monument, accessible for viewing only from the front, occupied the illusionistic space of the artistic composition rather than the actual space it shared with the beholder.
