Library › Greek: Didactic & Technical › Testimonia
Testimonia gathers ancient testimonies about Polyclitus of Argos, the leading sculptor of the fifth century BC, and his treatise the Canon. Plato mentions him beside Phidias as a master who might be paid to teach and notes that his sons did not match him. Pliny the Elder, in Latin, describes his Diadumenos and Doryphoros and the statue called the Canon. Galen explains that the Canon was praised for the exact proportion of all its parts to one another.
These passages are the main evidence for what the Canon was and why it mattered. They show how ancient writers treated Polyclitus as the model of an artist who worked by rule and measure, and Galen's reports connect his ideas of symmetry to medicine and to philosophical definitions of beauty.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: DK 40 A 1–3). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).