Their public display in Florence and Rome was the cultural event of that year in Italy, providing the cover story for numerous magazines.

[6] The bronzes and the story of their discovery were featured in the first episode of the 2005 BBC television documentary series How Art Made the World, which included an interview with Stefano Mariottini.

In summer 2019, the Italian TV show Le Iene started an enquiry in relation to the mystery of the missing archaeological finds at the Riace site, and interviewed Mariottini asking clarifications about his declarations at the time of discovery.

[7] At the time the sculptures were made, much of Calabria (especially the coastal cities) was inhabited by Greek-speaking peoples as part of Magna Graecia ("Greater Greece"), as the "overseas" Greek territories came to be called.

They belong to a transitional period from archaic Greek sculpture to the early Classical style, disguising their idealized geometry and impossible anatomy[10] under a distracting and alluring "realistic" surface.

Further explorations undertaken in 2004 by a joint Italian-American team of archaeologists identified the foundations of an Ionic temple on this slowly subsiding coast.

Undersea explorations by robotic vehicles along the submerged coastline from Locri to Soverato are providing a more detailed picture of this coast in Antiquity, although no further bronzes comparable to those of Riace have been found.

[citation needed] Attributions of such spectacular works of art to famous sculptors have followed traditional lines: "all the 'big' names of Classical times have been proposed in this connection", Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway writes, noting that she finds it encouraging that at least a few scholars are willing to consider a non-Attic, even a 'colonial' workshop of origin, as contrasted with "the dominant Athenocentrism of previous years.

"[14] While it is certain that the bronzes are original works of the highest quality, it has also been argued that their torsos have been produced from a single model, which was then altered with direct modifications to the wax before casting, so that they may be seen as types.

It is conjectured that the bronze sculptures may represent Tydeus and Amphiaraus respectively, two of the warriors from the Seven against Thebes monumental group in the polis of Argos, as Pausanias noted.

Argos, Delphi and Olympia were three prominent Greek sites for dedicated sculpture of the highest quality, and all three were vulnerable to official plundering following the Roman occupation.

Perhaps the bronzes were being transported, long after they were created, to Italy as part of one of the waves of large-scale plundering of Greek art that occurred at various dates after the Roman conquest of Greece.