The Arrotino (Italian - the "Blade-Sharpener"), or formerly the Scythian, thought to be a figure from a group representing the Flaying of Marsyas is a Hellenistic-Roman sculpture (Pergamene school) of a man crouching to sharpen a knife on a whetstone.

Later the sculpture formed part of the garden of sculptures and antiquities that Paolantonio Soderini inherited from his brother, Monsignor Francesco Soderini, who had arranged them in the Mausoleum of Augustus; Paolantonio noted in a letter of 1561 that il mio villano— "my peasant"— had gone away,[2] and it is known that a member of the Mignanelli family sold the Arrotino to Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici.

In the Medici collections the villano was reinterpreted as a Scythian, or divorced of its genre associations entirely by becoming a royal barber or butler overhearing treasonous plotting against the state, raising it to the level of moralised history, which ranked higher in the contemporary hierarchy of genres.

The identification with a Marsyas group was introduced in 1669, in a publication by Leonardo Agostini, who recognized the theme in antique engraved hardstones.

[5] However, the Arrotino is now recognised simply as a first-century BC copy from a Hellenistic original.