Acrolithi
ἀκρόλιθοι
Acrolithi (ἀκρόλιθοι), statues of which the extremities (face, feet, and hands, or toes and fingers only) were of marble, and the remaining part of the body either gilt or, what seems to have been more used, covered with drapery. The word occurs only in the Greek Anthology (Brunck, Anal. iii. p. 155, No. 20; Anth. Pal. 12.40), and in Vitruvius (2.8.11); but statues of the kind are frequently mentioned by Pausanias (2.4.1; 6.25.4; 7.21.4 or 10; 7.23.5; 8.25.4 or 6; 8.31.1 or 2, and § 3 or 6; 9.4.1). It is a mistake to suppose that all the statues of this kind belonged to an earlier period. They continued to be made at least down to the time of Praxiteles. (Comp. Jacobs, Comment. in Anthol. Graec. vol. iii. pt. 1, p. 298; Winckelmann, Gesch. der Kunst, P. 1.100.2.13; Müller, Archäol. § 69.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.