To display these relationships a statue was necessarily nude, and in fifth-century Greece,male. It could also have cosmic significance,man the measure of all thing' in the often quoted word of the Stoic philosopher Protagoras. Polyclitus declared that perfection arises from the minute calculation of many numbers which suggest the influence of sixth-century before century Pythagorean philosophers who developed a theory of cosmic proportions derived from the discovery of the relationship between the measurable lengths of the chords of a lyre and audible harmony