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The ancient Greeks and Romans had a long history of making statuary in bronze. Literally, thousands of images of gods and heroes, victorious athletes, statesmen, and philosophers filled temples and sanctuaries and stood in the public areas of major cities. Over the course of more than a thousand years, Greek and Roman artists created hundreds of statue types whose influence on large-scale statuary from western Europe (and beyond) continues to the present day.
During the third millennium B.C., ancient foundry workers recognized through trial and error that bronze had distinct advantages over pure copper for making statuary. Bronze is an alloy typically composed of 90 percent copper and 10 percent tin, and, because it has a lower melting point than pure copper, it will stay liquid longer when filling a mould. It also produces a better casting than pure copper and has superior tensile strength. While there were many sources for copper around the Mediterranean basin in Greek and Roman antiquity, the island of Cyprus, whose very name derives from the Greek word for copper, was among the most important. Tin, on the other hand, was imported from places as far as southwest Turkey, Afghanistan, and Cornwall, England.
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