Una famiglia di scultori cretesi attivi a Rodi

By collecting and putting the surviving signatures in the right chronological order, this work aims to reconstruct the careers of three artists, Timocharis, Pythokritos and Simias, whose origins are certainly from the Cretan city of Eleutherna and who worked mainly in Rhodes between the end of the 3rd century B.C. and the first half of the 2nd century B.C. Numerous signatures by Timocharis, who moved to Rhodes from his birth place Eleutherna, bear the ethnic mark of the Cretan city, while only one signature – the earliest known to us – has survived in which his son Pythokritos terms himself Eleuthernaios.
Also known to us through literary sources and himself the artificer of a famous prow carved in stone and now preserved in the acropolis in Lindo, Pythokritos rapidly obtained Rhodian citizenship – as his son Simias, the least prolific of the three, did later –, and is attested as Rhodios in nearly all of the many surviving signatures.