Polycles was an ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 sculptor, flourished about the 156th Olympiad (155 BC), mentioned in Pliny's Natural History. In Pliny's list, the name of this Polycles is followed by Athenaeus, either to be taken as the name of another sculptor or as Polycles's birthplace. A Juno by him stood in the Portico of Octavia

Porticus Octaviae

The Porticus Octaviae is an ancient structure in Rome.Built by Augustus in the name of his sister, Octavia Minor, at some time after 27 BC, in place of the Porticus Metelli, the porticus enclosed within its colonnaded walks the temples of Jupiter Stator and Juno Regina, next to the Theater of...

 at Rome. The sculpture principally associated with this sculptor is a Hermaphroditus

Hermaphroditus

In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus or Hermaphroditos was the child of Aphrodite and Hermes. He was a minor deity of bisexuality and effeminacy. According to Ovid, born a remarkably handsome boy, he was transformed into an androgynous being by union with the water nymph Salmacis...

, of which there are no clues in Pliny as to whether it was standing or reclining, but which the surviving Roman copies are taken to be replicas of Polycles' bronze original. The Borghese Hermaphroditus

Borghese Hermaphroditus

The Borghese Hermaphroditus is a type of marble sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus life size, reclining on a couch, with a form that is partly derived from ancient portrayals of Venus and other female nudes, and partly from contemporaneous feminised Hellenistic portrayals of Dionysus/Bacchus...

is said to be one of these copies.