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The rhythm of a delineative hermeneutic is to always start again because its aim is to become increasingly familiar with its inexhaustible territory and to do so by repeatedly reentering it with a set of chiasmi- cally related routes. We shall begin with a mid-Archaic sculpture from the island of Melos which we shall call "Melos", as it has no known name. It was done about 550 B.C., at the time of Anaximander when the Archaic age was in full flower. Although it is earlier than Peploforos, it is very close to her gentle, still and deep ethos (and of course the gender difference is very intriguing). Of the four male sculptures called kouroi by modern classicists, to be considered in this cluster, it will give us the fullest sense of the prehistorical. These four sculptures, which are approximately twenty years apart, follow remarkably the movement from Archaic to Classical. We shall then do a similarly close hermeneu- tic of the sculpture named Kroisos done about 520 B.C., and compare it briefly to another, Aristodikos, done approximately 500 B.C. These last two belong to the times of Pythagoras, Anaximenes and Heraclitus. We shall see in these later male statues, how the prehistoric world, body and sensibility are in the process of transition out of the Archaic and into the Classical, that is, into the Western sense of being that is familiar to us.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-1594-7_2

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