Myron in Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)

(Μύρων). One of the most celebrated Greek artists of Eleutherae, in Attica, an older contemporary of Phidias and Polyclitus, and, like them, a pupil of Ageladas. His works, chiefly in bronze, were numerous and very varied in subject-gods, heroes, and especially athletes and representations of animals, which were admired by the ancients for their life-like truth to nature. Most famous among these were his statue of the Argive runner Ladas; of Marsyas, of which a marble copy is now in the Lateran at Rome; his "Discobolus," or quoit-thrower (see Discus), which we are enabled to appreciate in several copies in marble, the best being that in the Palazzo Massimi and one in bronze in the Palazzo Lancelotti in Rome; and his "Cow on the Market-place at Athens," which received the very highest praise among the ancients, was celebrated in thirty-six extant epigrams in the Greek anthology, all quoted in Overbeck's Schriftquellen. 550-588, and may be regarded as his masterpiece. He was also the first to represent what is really a genre portrait in his "Drunken Old Woman" (Pliny , N. H. xxxvi. 32); but this is now attributed to another artist, one Socrates (Overbeck. 2092). See Collignon, Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque (Paris, 1892).

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