. At first, in the archaic period, they stand
firmly planted with equal weight on either foot, the feet close
together. Then one foot is advanced, but the weight still equally
divided, an almost impossible position. Next, the weight is thrown on
the right foot; and the left knee is bent. This is of all positions the
loveliest for the human body. We allow it to women, forbid it to men
save to "aesthetes." If the back numbers of _Punch_ be examined for the
figure of "Postlethwaite" it will be seen that he always stands in this
characteristic relaxed pose.

When the sculptor has mastered the possible he bethinks him of the
impossible. He will render the human body flying. It may have been the
accident of a mythological subject that first suggested the motive.
Leochares, a famous artist of the fourth century B.C., made a group of
Zeus in the form of an eagle carrying off Ganymede. A replica of the
group is preserved in the Vatican, and should stand for comparison near
the Apollo. We have the same tiptoe poise, the figure just about to
leave the earth. Again, it is not a dance, but a flight. This poise is
suggestive to us because it marks an art cut loose, as far as may be,
from earth and its realities, even its rituals.

What is it that Apollo is doing? The question and suggested answers have
occupied many treatises. There is only one answer: We do not know. It
was at first thought that the Apollo had just drawn his bow and shot an
arrow. This suggestion was made to account for the pose; but that, as we
have seen, is sufficiently explained by the flight-motive. Another
possible solution is that Apollo brandishes in his uplifted hand the
aegis, or goatskin shield, of Zeus. Another suggestion is that he holds
as often a lustral, or laurel bough, that he is figured as Daphnephoros,
"Laurel-Bearer."

We do not know if the Belvedere Apollo carried a laurel, but we _do_
know that it was of the very essence of the god to be a Laurel-Bearer.
That, as we shall see in a moment, he, like Dionysos, arose in part out
of a rite, a rite of Laurel-Bearing--a _Daphnephoria_. We have not got
clear of ritual yet. When Pausanias,[45] the ancient traveller, whose
notebook is our chief source about these early festivals, came to Thebes
he saw a hill sacred to Apollo, and after describing the temple on the
hill he says:

"The following custom is still, I know, observed at Thebes. A boy
of distinguished family and himself well-lookin