Hegias or Hegesias of Athens was a famous sculptor of Athens, a member of the Late Archaic school of the generation before Pheidias

Phidias

Phidias or the great Pheidias , was a Greek sculptor, painter and architect, who lived in the 5th century BC, and is commonly regarded as one of the greatest of all sculptors of Classical Greece: Phidias' Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World...

. No surviving work can be securely identified as his, though Pliny mentions a Pyrrhus Supported by Pallas Athena.

Pausanias

Pausanias (geographer)

Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...

 (8.42.4 and 8.42.10) mentions Hegias as the contemporary of Onatas

Onatas

Onatas was an ancient Greek sculptor of the time of the Persian Wars and a member of the flourishing school of Aegina. Many of his works are mentioned by Pausanias; they included a Hermes carrying the ram, and a strange image of the Black Demeter made for the people of Phigalia; also some elaborate...

 and of Agelatus of Argos. Lucian of Samosata mentions Hegesias, in common with Kritios

Kritios

Kritios was an Athenian sculptor, probably a pupil of Antenor, working in the early 5th century BCE, whose manner is on the cusp of the Late Archaic and the Severe style of Early Classicism in Attica. He was the teacher of Myron...

 and Nesiotes

Kritios

Kritios was an Athenian sculptor, probably a pupil of Antenor, working in the early 5th century BCE, whose manner is on the cusp of the Late Archaic and the Severe style of Early Classicism in Attica. He was the teacher of Myron...

, as belonging to the Archaic school, whose productions were constrained, harsh, stiff and rigid, though accurate in the outline. Quintilian

Quintilian

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing...

 says of Hegesias and Callon that their works were harsh and resembled the Etruscan

Etruscan civilization

Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding roughly to Tuscany. The ancient Romans called its creators the Tusci or Etrusci...

 style. (Smith). Pliny's Natural History (vol. xxxiv.8.19) places Hegias among the rivals of Phidias.