Formerly called the the Mantinea Base. Picture shows one slab, the right hand one.
Three slabs from the base of a monument showing in relief Apollo and Artemis with their mother, Leto, on the right, the Muses on the left, and Marsyas the satyr playing his pipes in the middle. In this version of the myth, Marsyas must die for challenging Apollo to a music contest. To the left of Marsyas waits the Scythian slave with his knife, soon to be Marsyas’s executioner. Leto was a female Titan, not a goddess, but had a cult following in a number of places in ancient Greece.
This is thought to be an original late work by Praxiteles. It shows Praxitelean characteristics in the elaborate hairstyles and complex drapery of the Muses
Athens, National Museum 215-7
Purchased 1895-6
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 238
Papaspiridi: Guide du Musée Nationale d’Athènes (1927), 69-
Richter: Sculpture & Sculptors of the Greeks (1950), figs.679-681
Fougères: Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique XII (1888), 105-, pls. I-III
Found in the French excavations at Mantinea in 1887
