Boethus

Boethus , fl. 1st half of 2d cent. BC, Greek sculptor of genre subjects and worker in silver. He was born in Chalcedon and seems to have worked mainly at Rhodes. In the writings of Pliny and Pausanias he is mentioned as having made a bronze figure of a boy struggling with a goose and a statue of a seated boy. The figure of a boy with a goose in the Louvre may be one of many marble copies of this work. Based on circumstantial evidence, Pliny and Pausanias also attribute to Boethus a bronze representing Agon, god of contests, as a winged boy (Tunis), which was found in the remains of a ship of the 1st cent. BC wrecked off Tunis.

Boethus. Greek sculptor and metalworker active in the 2nd century bc. Pliny singles out a bronze sculpture by him representing ‘a child hugging a goose until he throttles it’, though he adds that Boethus was more famous for his work in silver. Several Roman copies of the sculpture are known and adaptations or echoes of it appear in Renaissance art. There seem to have been several Greek sculptors called Boethus (it was a fairly common name) and the evidence concerning them is tangled.