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The ‘Sophocles’ Statue: A Reply
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
I trust I may be allowed to answer briefly the long criticism which Professor Fr. Studniczka has devoted, in the first part of this volume, to my essay ‘Poet or Lawgiver.’ The views expressed in that criticism are not new to me. As soon as my paper appeared, I sent a copy of it to Dr. Studniczka; he answered me by a long letter giving his reasons for dissenting from my theory. Indeed—to use a phrase of his own—my learned contradictor felt so ‘confident’ in the strength of his arguments, that he proposed I should make use of them to write myself, in this Journal, a recantation of my essay—a liberal offer which I was unable to accept, not out of any personal feeling, but simply because a careful study of Dr. Studniczka's case has utterly failed to shake my well-founded conviction.
At the beginning of his paper, Dr. Studniczka remarks that, of all the arguments brought forward by me, the only one which might have decided the question ‘turns out to be a worthless relic from the dead stock of E. Q. Visconti's Greek Iconography.’ This is not stating the case fairly. I never pretended to upset the traditional theory by any sensational revelation of unknown material. I simply contended—and contend—that the existing documents had been wrongly interpreted, and some of them badly published; therefore, to facilitate a more correct interpretation, I collected them once more and laid them before the eyes of the reader, in accurate reproductions; as, for instance, the Florence herm of Solon, hitherto only known to archaeologists by the untrustworthy print in Visconti.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1923
References
1 Of course I am grateful to the wide and accurate scholarship of Dr. Studniczka for correcting some minor slips which occurred in my essay. Thus I wrongly ascribed to Winter (p. 57) the theory that the Lateran type, instead of the (fanciful) ‘third Sophoclean type,’ was derived from a statue by Silanion. So also (p. 59) the name of Arndt is to be substituted for that of Bulle. In archaeology it is not true to say de minimis non curat—professor.
2 Kaibel certainly did not compare the original, a most regrettable negligence, the bust being so near at hand; of course, all later editors have blindly followed Kaibel.
3 I have again compared Visconti's Schedae, MS. 9697 at the Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds latin. The copy is written on a scrap of paper, pasted on p. 1, on which other legends of busts (Alcibiades, Zenon, Antisthenes, etc.) are noted.
4 M. Durry writes: ‘Le Helbig (French and German editions) se trompe lourdement en parlant de six lettres: on en voit trois et deux moitiés (O and C). Du Φ, si jamais il a existé, aucune trace: on ne peut supposer une fracture postérieure à la découverte, puisque ce buste semble être entré immédiatement dans les collections pontificales.’
5 Even if the supplement ΣοΦ]οκλῆς holds good, we must keep in mind that we have a notable example of a bust inscribed Zenon (Vatican, 519 = Hekler, 22) which is in reality a portrait of Plato, and vice versa a bust inscribed Platon (Uffizi, Bernoulli, ii. 20, a) which certainly does not represent Plato. In both cases there is no serious reason for suspecting the antiquity (comparative, of course) of the inscription.
6 
(Sophocles) 
The MSS. differ widely in detail from each other, as may be seen in referring to the apparatus of Westermann.
7 Etym. Magnum, s. v. 
8 Numa, iv. 9.
9 Koerte, , Ath. Mitt.; xxi. (1896), p. 299Google Scholar, No. 6 towards 325 B.C., p. 303, No. 7.
10 Cf. the Bios, p. 131, West.: 
11 I.G., Ins. i. 695.
12 Of course I object to this term, which is admissible in the case of Aeschines, but not of the Lateran statue, copy of an excellent original of, at latest, the middle of the fourth century.
13 Heuzey was too old and ill when I prepared my essay to allow me to submit it to his appreciation, but I knew (and stated, in a footnote, p. 52) that in his celebrated lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts he had never accepted the traditional denomination.
14 I ought to have remarked that the text of Pliny is, as usual, derived from a Greek source, and that, in translating the Greek sentence, Pliny was guilty of a slip: the original Greek certainly used the word χείρ in the sense of arm, and Pliny rendered it wrongly by manus; in statues of the Lateran type the right arm (which is surely in question) is wrapped up in the folds of the mantle, but the right hand just emerges from them.