The cult worship of heroes included shrines in their honour and the dedication of statues in their likeness. This plaster cast reproduces a marble statue, known as ‘The Kritios Boy’, excavated from the Athenian Acropolis in 1866.
It may have been a representation of the Greek hero Theseus or – less likely, given the elaborate coiffure – a dedication in honour of a young victor in an Athenian sports competition. The sculpture was one of the first known to depict the contrapposto pose, and it marks a breakthrough in realistic rendering of the human body.
The cult of Theseus achieved dominance in early fifth-century BCE Athens, when he was turned into a hero of Athenian democracy following what was claimed to be the recovery of his bones from a grave; he briefly overtook Heracles as the most popular hero in Athenian art at the time. In mythology, Theseus had been credited with ridding the countryside of bandits and monsters.
