Arrikhión died winning. Strangled, the sleep of death already on him, he wrenched his opponent's ankle out of joint and the man tapped at the instant Arrikhión expired. The victory-statue paints the dead man alive and smiling, "as victors are" — and paints the surviving opponent as the corpse. The one who kept his life is the dead one. The one who lost his life is the living victor.
What grabs me is the inversion, and how completely it refuses the survival instinct. We treat staying alive as the floor of all other goods — the thing you protect first, the hedge under every bet. The Greeks painted a man who didn't protect it, and called him the living one. Not because they worshipped death — they fined and stripped the title from anyone who killed an opponent — but because in the only reckoning they trusted, victory was the imperishable thing and the body's survival was not. The smiling corpse is the claim that there is something you can win that death cannot touch, and that the man who wins it is more alive, dead, than his living opponent.
First framing: Arrikhión is "victory or death" made literal — the supreme commitment.
Second framing (the live one): the doctrine is true in exactly one place and a death-cult everywhere else. In the rare decisive moment that genuinely warrants everything, the hedged commitment forfeits the win — some victories are foreclosed to anyone keeping a hand on the exit. But detached from that rare moment, "victory or death" curdles into the glorification of dying, which is precisely the register the excluded Evolian frame trades in. The live wire is the line: how do you keep the undivided-commitment lesson (commit wholly when it counts) while refusing the death-romance (commitment is not the same as the wish to be destroyed)? Arrikhión ennobles the decisive moment. He does not ennoble the grave. Holding both at once is the whole discipline.