Lysippus of Sicyon is said by Duris not to have  been the pupil of anybody, but to have been originaily a coppersmith and to bave first got the idea of venturing on sculpture from the reply given by the painter Eupompus when asked which of  his predecessors he took for his model; he pointed to a crowd of people and said that it was Nature herseif, not an artist, whom one ought to imitate. Lysippus as we have said was a most prolificartist and made more  statues than any other sculptor, among them the Man using a Body-scraper  which Marcus Agrippa gave to be set up in front of bis Warm Baths and of which the emperor Tiberius (A.D. 14-37) was remarkably fond. Tiberius, although at the beginning of his principate he kept some control of himself, in this case could not resist the temptation, and had the statue removed to his bedchamber, putting another one in its place at the baths; but the public were so obstinately opposed to this that they raised an out-cry at the theatre, shouting (.. ut theatri clamoribus reponi Apoxyomenon flagitaverit principesque ...) "Give us back the  Apoxomenos' "-Man using a Body-scraper and the Emperor, although he had fallen quite in love with the statue, had to restore it. Lysippus is also famous for his Tipsy Girl playing the Flute, and his Hounds and Huntsmen in Pursuit of Game, but most of all for his Chariot with the Sun (Quadriga cum Sole) belonging to Rhodes. He also executed a series of statues of Alexander the Great, beginning with one in Alexander's boyhood. The emperor Nero (AD. 54-68) was  so delighted by this statue of the young Alexander that he ordered it to be gilt; but this addition to its money value so diminished its artistic attraction that afterwards the gold was removed, and in that condition the statue was considered yet more valuable, even though stili retaining scars from the work done on it and incisions in which the gold bad been fastened. The same sculptor did Alexander the Great's friend Hephaestion, a statue which some people ascribe to Polycieitus, although his date is about a hundred years earlier; and also Alexander's Hunt, dedicated at Delphi, a Satyr now at Athens, and Alexander's Squadron of Horse, in which the sculptor introduced portraits of Alexander's friends consummately lifelike in every case. After the conquest of Macedonia this was removed to Rome  by  Metellus (148 BC.); he also executed Four-horse Chariots of various kinds (Quadriga multorum generum). Lysippus is said to have contributed greatly to the art of bronze statuary by representing the details of the hair and by making his heads smaller than the old sculptors used to do, and his bodies more slender and firm, to give his statues the appearance of greater height.

He scrupulously preserved the quality of symmetry  (for which there is no word in Latin) by the new and hitherto untried method of modifying the squareness of the figure of the old sculptors, and he used commonly to say that whereas his predecessors had made men as they really were, he made them as they appeared to be. A peculiarity of this sculptor's work seems to be the minute finish maintained in even the smallest details.
Lysippus left three sons who were his pupils, the celebrated artists Laippus,a Boeadas and Euthycrates, the last pre-eminent, although he copied the harmony rather than the eleganee of his father, preferring to win favour in the severely correct more than in the agreeable style. Aceordingly his Heracles, at Delphi, and his Alexander Hunting, at Thespiae, his group of  Thespiades,  and his Cavalry in Action are works of extreme finish, and so are his statue of Trophonius at the oracular shrine of that deity, a number of Four-horse Chariots, a Horse with Baskets  and a Pack of Hounds. Moreover Tisicrates, another ritrates, native of Sicyon, was a pupil of Euthycrates, but closer to the school of Lysippus - indeed many of his statues cannot be distinguished from Lysippus's work, for instance his old Man of Thebes, his King Demetrius (Poliorcetes), and his Peucestes, the man who saved the life of Alexander the Great and so deserved the honour of this commemoration.