Herakles the Archer from the East Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia

Of all the figures from the east gable, this is the one nobody has to guess at. The kneeling archer wears the head of a lion as a cap, pulled over a round leather helmet, and the lion skin is the sign of Herakles, the trophy of the beast he killed with his bare hands. It is this figure that lets the whole gable be read as his war against Troy.

In Homer, Herakles is an archer. When Odysseus meets his ghost in the underworld, Herakles stands like dark night, his bow bare and an arrow on the string, always about to shoot. The sculptor gave him a cuirass as well and set him down on one knee, braced to loose the arrow. Scholars have pointed out that this crouch is closer to the way a real archer kneels than the pose of the archer in the west room.

He has lost his nose, his lower left leg and the fingers of his left hand. The tip of his right foot is a modern copy, made after the original fragment, which stayed behind on Aegina.