The Sophocles Statues

In the last volume of this Journal (pp. 50–69) Monsieur Théodore Reinach tried to prove that the Lateran statue, named Sophocles by nearly all competent writers ever since its discovery, in reality represents Solon, being most probably a copy of the lawgiver's Salaminian statue as described by Aeschines (pp. 59, 62). But of all the arguments brought forward the only one that might decide the question turns out to be a worthless relic from the dead stock of E. Q. Visconti's Greek Iconography. It is a replica of the head of the Lateran statue in the Uffizi put upon the herm-shaft with the inscription Σόλων ὁ νομοθέτης. Both are genuine, indeed, but do not belong together, as has been shown by Dütschke in his catalogue of 1878, and plainly confirmed by Th. Reinach (p. 65), whose illustration I repeat as Fig. 2. Every archaeologist trained in the criticism of ancient marbles will fail to understand why the latter writer ‘really sees no other explanation of the present combination’ than somebody's knowledge, drawn ‘from other sources, that this was really the traditional head of Solon.’ How often in the long period of careless restorations ‘pepererunt desideria non traditos voltus,’ just by means of such arbitrary combination? A grave error of this kind, into which the world was talked for more than half a century by the same Visconti, was his Aristotle portrait: the seated Spada statue inscribed (most probably) Άρίστι[ππο]ς and restored with the head of a beardless Roman (Heibig, Führer II., No. 1819). Of herms so enriched let me mention the four inscribed shafts of Aristophanes, Heraclitus, Isocrates and Carneades, found headless near Tivoli, but published in 1569 by Achilles Statius with antique heads, which a year later Fulvius Ursinus, evidently with good reason, declared not to belong, the Carneades head, e.g., having since been proved to represent Antisthenes (Ch. Hülsen, ‘Hermeninschriften,’ in Röm. Mitt., xvi. (1901), p. 157 sq., Nos. 7, 13, 19, 20). The Aristophanes shaft is still preserved, in the Uffizi, and now bears a different head, no more belonging to it than the other.