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Socrates said, according to Xenophon: - "It is the business of the sculptor to represent in bodily form the energies of the spirit", (psyches erga).

2) And the more perfect an Athlete is as an individual, the more perfectly the Greek sculptor shows the finished and final form of an Athlete.  The real individual need not include his blemishes, and more than a tree needs to include its caterpillars.

Portraiture was never favored by the Greek sculptors, presumably because the distinction between blemishes and characteristics was & is, often, difficult to make.

But each figure - god, hero, symbol -, was an individual nonetheless, not an abstraction or a composite.  The artist did try to find the universal and the eternal, but not by the way of abstraction.  There is a difference between an abstraction and an integration.

1)+ It is a response to an infinite wish for perfection, - an undying faith in the redeeming power of beauty.

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Education, said Plato, is such a training as provides pleasure & pain at the right objects. - A moral act is one done willingly because of an inner harmony with the command, - not unwillingly from a sense of duty!