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An instance of the similar use of the same type of head is shown by the colossal statue of Apollo unearthed at Olympia.761 Here we see the same coiffure as in the heads discussed, but the presence of the remnants of a lyre indubitably shows that this copy was intended for Apollo, and so it has been rightly assigned by Treu, not to the fifth, but to a later century. When long hair was no longer the fashion for athletes, a later artist might mistakenly think that the earlier plaits were genuinely Apolline, though we know that they were common to all early athletic art. Another head in the British Museum has been ably discussed by Mrs. Strong,762 who shows that it comes from an Apollo and not from an athlete statue. It is similar to an Apollo pictured on a stater struck at Mytilene about 400 B.C.,763 and consequently, like the statue from Olympia, it is merely an instance of the process of converting an athlete statue into that of an Apollo.

The marble copy of the Diadoumenos of Polykleitos, found on the island of Delos in 1894, and now in the National Museum in Athens764 (Pl. 18), has a chlamys and a quiver introduced on the marble support against the right leg. Until recently these attributes were regarded as the arbitrary introductions of the Hellenistic copyist, who wished to convert the famous athlete statue into one of Apollo, but lately it has been suggested that they belonged to the original statue, which is assumed to have represented Apollo. Thus, Hauser has propounded the theory that the Diadoumenos was originally an Apollo.765 He does not believe that the Delian sculptor could have transformed a short-haired athlete into an Apollo, since the typical Apollo after the time of Praxiteles was never represented as athletic. He later supported his theory that the Diadoumenos was originally an Apollo by the evidence of a bronze statuette and a Delphian coin, and reasserted his view that so virile a short-haired Apollo did not originate with the later copyist, but in the fifth century B.C.766 Hauser’s argument that Apollo was the original of the Diadoumenos seems as unsuccessful as his contention that Polykleitos’ other great creation, the Doryphoros, is to be classed as an Achilles.767 Loewy has sufficiently opposed Hauser’s theory of the Diadoumenos, by showing that the palm-tree prop in all the marble replicas of that statue points to athletic victories.768 He rightly explains the Apolline attributes of the Delian copy as the perfectly natural additions of an artist who lived on the island reputed to be the birthplace of the god. His ascription of the Polykleitan statue to the pentathlete Pythokles, the base of whose statue at Olympia has been found,769 is doubtful. More recently Ada Maviglia has shown the literary grounds for regarding the Diadoumenos as an athlete, and not an Apollo.770