A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

(Βαθυκλῆς), a celebrated artist of Magnesia on the Maeander (Heyne, Antiq. A fs. i. p. 108), the head of a band of artists of the same town, who constructed for the Lacedaemonians the colossal throne of the Amyclaean Apollo, covered with a great number of bas-reliefs, and supported and surmounted by statues. This throne, the most considerable work of art of the period, was destined for a statue of Apollo, which was of a much earlier date, and consisted of a brazen pillar, thirty cubits high, to which a head, arms, and the extremities of the feet were affixed. Accordingly this statue was standing on the throne, and not sitting like that of Zeus at Olympia, however strange the combination of a chair and a man standing on it must have looked. Pausanias (3.18.6) gives a minute description of the throne, or rather of the sculptures upon it, according to which Quatremère de Quincy undertook to restore it, and gave a picture of it in his "Jupiter Olympien," on the accuracy of which we cannot of course rely at all, considering the indistinctness with which Pausanias speaks of the shape of the throne. It is not even certain whether the throne was constructed of wood, and covered with golden and ivory plates to receive the bas-reliefs, or wrought in any other material. (K. O. Müller, Handb. d. Archäol. § 85.) The same doubts exist as to its height, which Quatremere fixes at thirty cubits, Welcker at fifty. (Welcker, Zeitschrift für Gesch. d. alt. Kunst, i. p. 279, &c.) Of the age of Bathycles we have no definite statements of the ancient writers. However, all modern scholars (Winckelmann, Böttiger, Voss, Quatremere, Welcker, Sillig) except Thiersch agree, that he must have flourished about the time of Solon, or a little later. Thiersch was evidently wrong (Epochen, p. 34, Anm. p. 53) when he placed Bathycles as early as Ol. 29, relying mostly on a passage of Pausanias (3.18.6), which however is far from being decisive. (Voss, Myth. Briefe, ii. p. 188; Sillig, Catal. Artiff. s. v,)

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