Phradmon[1] (Gr. Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: Φράδμων) was a little-known sculptor from Argos, whom Pliny places as the contemporary of Polykleitos, Myron, Pythagoras, Scopas, and Perelius, at Olympiad 90 in 420 BCE,[2] in giving an anecdotal description of a competition for a Wounded Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus: in Pliny's anecdote, the fifth place was won by Phradmon, whom Pliny admits was younger than any of the four who were preferred to him.[3] Trusting in Pliny's anecdote, scholars have often hopefully assigned the "Lansdowne" type of Wounded Amazon to Phradmon.
Adolf Furtwängler[4] identified the obscure Phradmon as a follower of Polykleitos, but Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway made a case for Phradmon's being a 4th-century BCE sculptor, in which case, for those who are convinced, "the possibility of contemporaneity collapses and with it the entire anecdote of the contest".[5]
Pausanias mentions his statue of the Olympic victor Amertas of Elis,[6] and there is an epigram attributed to Theodoridas of Syracuse, in the Greek Anthology,[7] on a group of twelve bronze cows, made by Phradmon and dedicated to Athena Itonia, that is, Athena as worshiped at Iton in Thessaly,[8] after an Illyrian campaign in 356 or 336 BCE. Phradmon is also mentioned by Columella.[9]
In 1969, three statue bases were discovered at Ostia Antica, one of which had supported a statue of a certain Charite, priestess at Delphi, made by Phradmon of Argos; the inscriptions' form dates them to the 1st century BCE, suggesting that the sculptures had been re-erected on new bases repeating their former inscription.[10]