One
The Road to Black-Figure
Black-figure is the name of a technique. By black-figure one means not simple silhouette, but silhouette elaborated and enlivened in two ways: first, by plenty of details engraved with a sharp point, incised, as it is called; secondly, by plentiful addition of dark red paint, and of white paint, one of the chief uses of white being for female flesh. This gives a sober scheme of four colours: the orange of the ground, which is the native colour of the clay vase; the lustrous black of the glaze paint; the white; the deep cherry or crimson, sometimes purplish, red. The black-figure technique may seem very unrealistic, and so it is; but so is outline drawing, only we are more accustomed to it. If the Greek vase-painter had painted in outline on his orange surface, the effect would have been meagre, and the strong colour of the background would have eaten up the thin line. The black-figure technique gave contrast and a proper balance of light and dark.
Black-figure is a vase -technique. It was not used by painters on wooden panel or on wall. It was used, however, for clay tablets or plaques, some of them complete in themselves and suitable for votive offerings, others decorating the outer walls of tombs. The material is the same as in vases, the black-figure technique is the same, the artists the same; and if we are studying vases we should not neglect the plaque.
Although black-figure in its prime was a four-colour technique, the name cannot be refused to vases in which either the red or the white, or both, are omitted: silhouette with incised details—that is enough to justify the term.
Black-figure seems to have been invented not in Athens but in Corinth, where the technique of silhouette with incised details appears soon after the beginning of the seventh century before Christ.[1] Red details were soon added at Corinth. White does not become common there for a long time; Corinthian clay was itself whitish, and white details would not have shown up plainly against a whitish background. At Athens, incision first appears not much later than at Corinth, but it is not plentiful until the middle of the seventh century. By that time white is popular. Red comes in in the third quarter of the seventh century. After a period of what might be called
[1] For numbered notes to chapter i see pages 93–94.
semi-black-figure—the term will be clear later,—black-figure attains its full development in the last decades of the seventh century. Its sway is undisputed until the invention of the red-figure technique nearly a hundred years later. In the new technique, red-figure, the figures, instead of being painted in lustrous black on the light background, are reserved, as it is called, that is, left in the natural colour of the clay, while the background is filled in with black. The two techniques competed, but the older, black-figure, was soon forced to give ground. After a single generation, by 500, it was reduced to a humble place. Yet it never died out, and by a curious fate even survived red-figure. By 300, no more red-figured vases were being painted, but there was still black-figure of a sort.
The quality of black-figured vases varies greatly, from the masterpiece to the paltry mass-product. The style also. Greek vases are important to us, not only because they are often beautiful, and because they shed all manner of light on the beliefs and customs of the Greeks in the springtime and summer of their civilisation, but also because, in an incomparable series, they enable us to trace the steps whereby a simple and even primitive kind of drawing gradually became freer, bolder, and more subtle—the rise, one might say, of Western drawing. Only the earlier phases of this process are revealed by black-figure, and red-figure is airier and more splendid; most of us, I think, prefer it at first. We may continue to do so, and yet recognise the excellence of much black-figure, and enjoy it.
At first sight black-figure vases may seem much alike in style—the technique is a little overpowering,—but presently, when one's eyes, as it were, get accustomed to the dark, one begins to notice differences of style and to distinguish the individualities of the several artists. The stylistic study of Attic black-figure has not advanced so far as that of Attic red-figure, and some tracts have been only imperfectly mapped. There are many reasons for this: the objects, as a whole, are less attractive to most of us; the conventional element is stronger; and for important periods, especially in the earlier reaches, the material, in spite of valuable accessions from recent excavation, is still very fragmentary.
In this opening chapter we shall give a brief account of the story of Attic vase-painting down to the appearance of the full black-figure style in the last decades of the seventh century.
Good vases were made in Athens long before what is called the Protogeometric period, but it was then that Athenian potters first showed themselves superior to their contemporaries in other Greek lands. The shape of a "stamnoid amphora" in the Ceramicus Museum at Athens[2] is well considered, the technique skilful, and the decoration of concentric semicircles in lustrous black on the warm light-brown background is not ineffective in its simple way. The date may be the tenth century B.C. There is a long conflict in earlier Greek art between the curve and the straight line, and in the Geometric period that follows the Protogeometric the straight line and
sharp corner, both in shape and decoration, tend to prevail. The feeling for form is strong, and Geometric vases, especially in Athens, often have a kind of unpretending beauty that appeals to us more than it did to our forefathers. A group of small vases in Berlin[3] —bowls and boxes of various shapes, one like a hazel-nut, the other with a leg for handle,—ornamented with simple rectilinear patterns, belongs to the beginning of the Geometric period, probably in the latter half of the ninth century. Later Geometric vases, however large and elaborate, do not, as works of art, surpass these. There were one or two animals in Protogeometric, though no human beings; but many Geometric vases have figures on them, animal or human, and we can speak of a Geometric figure-style. No better example can be given than the picture, familiar though it is, on the best-known of the huge amphorae that stood as monuments on Attic graves in the ninth and eighth centuries (pl. 1).[4] The foot of the vase is modern, but restored after similar pieces. Ovoid body and long neck are covered evenly with many bands of pattern, a broad between narrower, all rectilinear and abstract, except the very formal leaves, as they must be, near the base. On the shoulder, and at two points on the neck, small figures take the place of the pattern-bands. On the neck, a long row of deer, grazing, and a long row of goats, resting but looking round. The shoulder-picture is firmly anchored between the handles by upright bands of pattern. The subject is the prothesis: the dead man lying in state, with the mourners about him, beating their heads. It is a real composition, and viewed as a rendering of life it is a solemn scene reduced to its barest terms, terms telling from their very bareness. Here is an artist who has not attempted more than he could exactly perform; an art not childish, but planned and austere. As to the technique, the figures, all small, are in pure silhouette; but the seats, the cover of the couch, and the awning over it are in outline, filled in with hatching, parallel zigzags or chequers. Geometric drawing avoids sharp contrasts, and so that the figures may not be too staring the background between is toned down with filling-patterns. The same strong, collected style appears in other subjects, above all in the naval battles on fragments in the Louvre and Athens,[5] with the galleys, the rowers, the captains, the dead on the deck and in the water. These, like the Athens prothesis vase, are exceptional pieces, but a huge krater in Sydney (pl. 2, 1),[6] though not equal to the vase in Athens, is close to it in style; and gives, besides the prothesis, an example of another subject, one which always remains a special favourite in vase-painting as elsewhere, the chariot or line of chariots. This will serve for comparison with chariots on later vases. Three horses are given; the helmeted driver and his fully armed passenger are shown, for clearness, as if they were standing on the car and not in it. For the same reason, most of the chariots show both wheels; in one only, the hither wheel alone is rendered. In this vase the glaze has somewhat suffered, producing a restless effect which was not intended by the artist.
These are specimens of the Geometric figure-style at its height. The exact dating of such early vases is disputed, but no one would place the Athens prothesis and its companions later than the middle of the eighth century. In the last quarter of the
eighth century a new spirit enters the Geometric style; new motives, too, make their appearance; soon there is a rush of them, and before long the Geometric style has given place to another, very different, what is called, although the name is rather misleading, the Proto-Attic.[7] In scores of vases one can watch the Geometric figures gradually rounding out, until the match-like look has disappeared. This is part of the transformation that came over Greek art, to some extent under the influence of Oriental models, at the end of the eighth century and in the first half of the seventh. Wild animals come in, especially lion, panther, and sphinx; plants, growing, or in pattern-bands. The human figures grow larger and more substantial, their stances firmer, movements bolder, proportions more just; and presently myth—the legends of gods and heroes—becomes, for choice pieces, one of the artist's favourite themes. The style is enterprising, unconstrained, and, especially perhaps in Attica, has a child-like gaiety and vigour. Sometimes one even seems to sense the wondering delight of the naïve artist who has never drawn a man before .
A fragmentary cauldron, with stand, in Athens (pl. 2, 2),[8] still belongs to the Geometric period, but is on the threshold of the new age. The ornament includes a curvilinear element, the spiral or tendril; and, more important, the whole character of the drawing has changed. The classic control of the prothesis vase in Athens has given way to a furious energy, seen in the eager march of the women in the chief picture, in their electric hair, in the straining necks of the chariot team, and in the bold figure of a horse jumping or rearing on one of the tall, narrow divisions of the fenestrated stand. Somewhat later, perhaps, than the Athens cauldron are a pair of Late Geometric neck-amphorae, by one painter, in Oxford and London. In the Oxford vase (pls. 2, 4 and 3, 2)[9] the principal picture represents a procession of chariots; below this, hounds pursue a fox; on the shoulder, hounds pursue a hare; on the neck, another chariot. There is more contrast than in earlier Geometric; the chief scene is larger in proportion to the vase; there is less filling-ornament, indeed one feels that what is left might soon blow away; there is more breathing-space in the pictures. The charioteer, in his long robe, now stands in the car, not on it. Not only has he an eye (a reserved circle, with dot), as already in some earlier Geometric, but he has a distinct face. Two horses are shown, but in one chariot one horse only—the off horse being thought of as completely concealed by the near one; it is a simplification that might not seem urgent if one looked at the Sydney vase only, but which many Geometric teams cry out for when the horses are a desperate tangle of legs and manes. The horses, with their large eyes and heavy hooves, have a strange, self-centred, spectral appearance. On the London vase by the same artist (pls. 2, 3 and 3, 1),[10] their pair is reduced to a single horse. The figures have a dramatic, almost histrionic air. The grazing deer on the shoulder are loosely built, and their lumbering, unlovely gait is very different from the quiet movement of those on the prothesis vase in Athens (pl. 1). Lastly, on each side of the neck, a large lion lays its paw triumphantly on a cowering deer. There are one or two Greek lions earlier than this, but the picture gives early examples of two subjects that soon become extremely popular in Greek art: first, the lion; second, the group of one animal attacking another.
The birds (vultures? or crows?) are loosely put together, like the beasts except the lion.
In both vases the subordinate decoration, the pattern-work, is neglected; the artist is interested in the pictures only. There are none of the new curvilinear elements, one of which was seen on the Athens cauldron. These Late Geometric vases stress now one of the new elements, now another. A few years later all the novelties may appear on a single vase, and the Proto-Attic period proper has begun.
The style of the Athens cauldron is continued by another vase in Athens, the hydria (water-pot) found at Analatos in Attica (pl. 3, 3).[11] The figures are now quite large. In the chief picture on the body two lions face one another with a plant between, one of those symmetrical, antithetic, one is inclined to say heraldic, designs which by this time have had a long history in the Orient but which appear only seldom in Geometric Greece. Below this, a narrow band of small, huddling water-birds; then, grazing fawns just like those of the Athens cauldron; then, two bands of careless pattern. More care has been bestowed on the new, floral pattern above the chief picture, the garland of leaves pointing downward which will henceforth be the regular decoration on the shoulder of a vase. On the neck, a dance of men and maidens, holding branches, each party hand in hand, the men headed by a lyre-player. On the back of the chief zone, a bold design of plants. Under each handle a long-necked water-bird pecks at one of the plants. The bird, and the small flower behind it—crocus one might think,—are drawn with free brush-strokes. The date is about 700 B.C.
An ovoid krater in the collection of George Ortiz in Geneva (pl. 4, 1–2) gives us our first view of a figure which barely appears in the Geometric period but which is very popular in the Proto-Attic, and remains so, woven into legend, throughout antiquity—the centaur.[12] Here he returns gaily from the chase, a branch, his usual weapon, in one hand, a deer in the other. Long thin barrel; bristly back, tail, and hind-legs; large head and eye; open mouth; long sharp nose and chin; wavy hair. The face is drawn in outline, with more detail than in any of the vases we have looked at so far. A plant is seen beside him, another between his legs; birds perch and float. It is tempting to guess that the other ingredients of the picture are not mere filling-ornament but represent real objects: rocks, stones, serpents or worms:
ceu duo nubigenae cum vertice montis ab alto
descendunt Centauri Homolen Othrymque nivalem
linquentes cursu rapido; dat euntibus ingens
silva locum, et magno cedunt virgulta fragore.[13]
Below, an old subject, horses grazing, but with a grand new swing from ear to rump. The vase is fragmentary; the missing parts of the body, and the lid, can be restored after a complete vase of the same shape and of very much the same style, but far inferior, in Cambridge.[14] The Cambridge horse looks like a broken-down version of the Geneva.
A neck-amphora in the Louvre takes us back to the Analatos vase (pl. 4, 3–4), and is probably a later work by the Analatos Painter, as he is called, himself.[15] Chari-
ots on the body; on the neck a dance, and sphinxes. Many curvilinear and floral motives. There is much use of outline, not only for the faces, but for the garments—chitons—of the girls, and the sphinxes' wings. In the horses, the first step is taken towards the black-figure technique: the hither horse is outlined by means of incision, and so are the long wavy locks of the manes.
This is the earliest extant picture of a dance in which men alternate with maids. The next picture is much later, on the François vase (pl. 27, 1–3): and it has been thought that the subject might be the same here as there, the famous dance of the fourteen young Athenians to celebrate their deliverance from the Minotaur by Theseus. This is very unlikely; for one thing, the music here is the flute, whereas an essential feature of the famous dance was that it was led by Theseus playing the lyre. The scene on the Louvre vase is doubtless taken from contemporary life.
A mythological scene, however—the story of Herakles, the centaur Nessos, and Deianeira,—is certainly represented on a fragmentary stand in Athens, found in the Argive Heraion,[16] Attic work from the second quarter of the seventh century, poor in quality but important to us. Nessos looks round, giving tongue, towards Herakles, who has wounded him with an arrow and is about to despatch him with the sword; Deianeira raises her arm towards her deliverer. Other pictures on the stand represent a battle, a war-chariot ready to depart, and groups of wild animals, one of them a fairly compact composition of two lions attacking a bull, which heralds the great interlocked animal-groups that play an important role in the art of the late seventh century, and the sixth. The drawing is muddled, but the artist uses all the technical devices of his time: much of the figure-work is in outline; there is a good deal of white; incision appears in the lions; and the human part of Nessos is painted a brown flesh-colour, rare in Attica though not uncommon elsewhere. It has been said of the Nessos scene that it is "the earliest definitely recognisable mythological scene on an Attic, almost the earliest in any archaic Greek, work of art."[17] There are, however, a few mythological scenes earlier than this, in the Geometric period itself, and the relief on a bronze tripod-leg recently found at Olympia, which represents Herakles and Apollo struggling for the tripod, cannot be later than 700 B.C. [18]
Another and better picture of Herakles in conflict with a centaur appears on a large neck-amphora in New York (pl. 5).[19] Not much of the Geometric tradition persisted in the vase from the Argive Heraion; on the New York vase, which may be somewhat later, one has to look hard to find any trace at all. The figures, both men and animals, are large, thickset, and fully rounded. Rich curves prevail everywhere, and the effect is exuberant and excited. The centaur has dropped his branch and stumbles forward, hands open; Herakles, sword in hand, seizes the centaur by the forelock. His chariot waits, facing outward, and the driver, holding reins and goad, looks round. Below, concealing part of Herakles' leg, is what seems to be a long chiton. A piece of the vase is missing here, and there is a difficulty; I cannot see that the chiton can belong to the person holding the reins, and wonder if there may not be two figures, but cannot restore them. The horses, with their short legs and thick
barrel, are very un-Geometric; the long dank manes and rocking-horse heads are common all over Greece in seventh-century art. An owl flies near the centaur, a bird of good omen, for Herakles: the target-like head is meant for a side-view. On the right of the picture a small man runs up as if he were in danger of not getting into the picture. This small man has the appearance of an afterthought; at least he seems to have been drawn without meditation, on the spur of the moment. Horses with long silky manes graze on the shoulder of the vase. On the neck a lion, with round frontal face, attacks a deer from behind. In all three pictures plants grow and hang, large rosettes are prominent among the filling-ornaments, and tiny shivering water-birds seek their food in the nooks and crannies of the design. A great part of the drawing is in outline; there is much white, in particular for the flesh of Herakles and his sword; much incision too, for the animals, including the centaur, except the heads; here one might really speak of semi-black-figure. The reverse of the vase is given up to curvilinear motives, mostly floral, treated broadly and with gusto.
Another mythological scene is depicted on a stand in Berlin (pl. 6).[20] The figures are still larger than before, about thirteen inches high. Five men in long chiton and himation, holding spears. The foremost of them is inscribed, Menelas , and the subject must be Menelaos leading the Achaean princes, who had sworn to join him in taking vengeance if he should be deprived of Helen, to his brother Agamemnon, their overlord. Without the name we should not have been able to divine the subject. This is our first inscription. There are a few others, fragmentary, on Attic vases of about the same period: one gives the name of the owner (pl. 7, 1);[21] in another the verb is missing, and Antenor might be either the dedicator, or the owner, or the potter (pl. 7, 2).[22] The earliest certain signature of an artist on an Attic vase is much later, Sophilos , about 575 B.C.[*] Outside of Attica, the potter Aristonothos signs on a krater of uncertain fabric (pl. 7, 3),[23] a hundred years before Sophilos; Kallikleas signs on a vase from Ithaca of about the same period as Aristonothos;[24] and another seventh-century potter on a Melian vase found at Selinus.[25] It may be by chance that no signature of an early Attic potter has been preserved. All these inscriptions, painted on the vase before firing, must of course be distinguished from incised inscriptions, added after the completion of the vase: these include the oldest of all Greek inscriptions, that which begins oVnunorchstwn , on an Attic Geometric oinochoë (wine-pitcher) in Athens which cannot have been made later than the end of the third quarter of the eighth century (pl. 7, 4).[26]
The smaller pictures above the Menelaos are, first, a cavalcade; above that, a row of sphinxes; and on the flaring top of the stand, two animal groups, each of two lions attacking a deer (the upper half missing). The men and the sphinxes are in outline, but the wings of the sphinxes, the faces, arms, chitons of the men are filled in with white, and there are white spots on the himatia. There is no incision in the main picture, but much in the horses and lions.
[*] See pp. 16–18 and pl. 15,3.
The Menelaos stand has been attributed to one of the principal Proto-Attic artists, the Painter of the Ram Jug;[27] and it is at least close to his work. The Aegisthus vase in Berlin (pls. 7, 5 and 8)[28] is certainly by the Painter of the Ram Jug, but earlier than the name-piece, to which we shall come presently. It is an ovoid krater, the same shape as the Centaur vase in the Ortiz collection in Geneva (pl. 4, 1–2). There are four pictures in the main zone, and below it a file of grazing horses. The Death of Aegisthus is the earliest representation in art, by a century, of one of the chief episodes in the tale of Pelops' line.[29] Orestes, sword in hand, marches Aegisthus forward, holding him by the long hair; Clytaemestra precedes Aegisthus, beating her head (pl. 8, 1–2). Of the fourth figure, behind Orestes, only the fingers remain: it may have been his sister, Elektra or Laodike, urging him on. The names are not inscribed, but there can be no doubt of the interpretation: this is certainly not, as has been suggested, the Death of Agamemnon; it is the death of a coward. There is a singular fascination in this picture, so rude and yet so forcible and so felt. As to the technique, Orestes is black, with the face in outline; incision for fingers, wrists, toes, the patterns of his chitoniskos, and for the ornaments—painting, perhaps, rather than tattooing—on his thighs.[30] The other figures are white, with much detail in brown or black lines. Male figures, and not only female, are often white in early archaic art; the Herakles of the New York centaur vase was white. Often, too, there is no reason why one male in a picture should be white or black rather than another; it is for variety, or to mark one figure well off from the next. Here it is plain that the artist has wished to distinguish Orestes as the chief actor from the women and the effeminate man.
The scene on the other side of the vase is unfortunately fragmentary. The righthand figure is Artemis,[31] the left probably Apollo (pl. 8, 3–5); a fragment with part of a cithara may belong. Who the two persons in the middle were one cannot tell. In the space under each handle there is a black-figure picture (pl. 8, 4–5). Under one handle it is a hairy creature, throwing stones. He looks round, retreating—or is it simply the follow-through of the swing as he throws? To make it quite clear that this is a picture by itself, and has nothing to do with the tragic scene to left of it, the artist drew a thick vertical line from the handle downward. Then it occurred to him to enliven the line by planting two grasshoppers on it (pl. 7, 5). Under the other handle two men are fighting, with stones. The empty hand claws the rump with a gesture often used by dancers in later pictures. Who are these handle-figures? The couple are human, and may be simply a slice of low life; one remembers also that mischievous pair of brothers, the Kerkopes. The stone-thrower under the other handle, though hairy, has the same ornament on the rump and cable-pattern on the thigh as the couple and the heroes, and is human apart from the mouth. He is not an ape, but perhaps a wild man of the woods, a Pilosus, a kind of proto-satyr or proto-Silenos, solitary, uncompanionable, repelling intruders with stones; but one cannot be sure. Early Greek art is full of surprises, and Proto-Attic above all: this vase really takes one's breath away.
The Ram Jug itself (pl. 9, 1–2), after which "the Painter of the Ram Jug" is
named, has long been known.[32] The fragmentary picture decorates the almost flat shoulder of a low-bodied jug, and is on a smaller scale than those we have just left. The subject is taken from the Odyssey: the Escape from the Cave of Polyphemos. Two rams are seen advancing, each with a naked youth clinging under it and holding on to the horns; part of a third ram is preserved, the leader, doubtless with a similar burden. The animals are in outline, except legs and tail, which are black. The youths are filled in with white. There is no incision. The heads of the youths have suffered, and the drawing looks less firm now than it did once. The episode in the Odyssey has been simplified: in Homer, Odysseus fastens the rams three abreast, and ties a man under the middle ram only of each three. Even much later artists avoid the difficulty of rendering this complicated arrangement, and no wonder. Our painter does not even indicate the attachment, for the rings round the waists of the youths are belts, and those round wrist and ankle, as in the Aegisthus vase, either bracelets and anklets, or more probably only the divisions between hand and arm, and foot and leg.
The masterpiece of Proto-Attic art is also by the Painter of the Ram Jug: the Berlin neck-amphora with Peleus bringing Achilles to Chiron (pl. 9, 3–4).[33] It is fragmentary, but no essential part of the design is missing. On the neck of the vase a handsome plant. The subject on the body is divided between the two sides of the amphora: on one side, Peleus; on the other, Chiron—an early example of a type of decoration used in many masterpieces of later vase-painting, one large figure on each side of the vase. Here we seem to breathe mountain air. This is far the earliest representation of a subject which was popular with Attic painters, both black-figure and red, in the later archaic period. Ancient commentators on Homer observed that according to him Achilles was brought up by his mother Thetis, not by Chiron as what they call "more modern writers" (oi netroi ) said. The story that the wise centaur Chiron was Achilles' foster-father, for which Pindar is the earliest authority in extant literature, had already been traced back to the middle of the sixth century, for it is depicted, as will be seen, on black-figured cups by the Heidelberg Painter;[*] the publication of the Berlin vase showed that the story is at least as old as the middle of the seventh. Peleus holds the infant Achilles out in his hands. Not much of the large figure is preserved, but the head is almost intact; a good head with large low eye, roomy aquiline nose, shapely lips and chin. The long hair is bound with a fillet which has a floral ornament, a palmette, in front. One would expect that Peleus, a father, would be given a beard, as in most of the early pictures, but fortunately he is beardless here; it is perhaps an example of the preference for smooth cheeks which is characteristic of the "Daedalic" style in contemporary sculpture. The infant Achilles wears a spotted chiton with plain short sleeves. His neck is in outline, like the neck and face of Peleus; his arm is in black, and the arm of Peleus is also in black. There is hardly any white on the vase, only a few lines at the wrist of Peleus and to mark the horizontal grooves on the back-hair of Peleus and Achilles. On the other side of the vase, Chi-
[*] See p. 47 and pl. 43, 2.
ron: body black, with plenty of incised detail, face reserved. He extends his right hand to receive the child, and with his left hand holds over his shoulder the long branch which is the usual staff and weapon of centaurs. In most of the other pictures, Chiron, as a hunter, carries his quarry slung from the branch: a hare and a fox, a hare, or a brace of hares. On the Berlin vase the animals are not the ordinary fox or hare, but three small young creatures, the first of which is a lion, the second a boar, and the third, I believe, a wolf.[34] Now the mythographer known as Apollodorus, about the first century after Christ, tells us that Chiron fed the infant Achilles on the inwards of lions and the marrow of wild boars and bears;[35] and in the Achilleis of Statius, "My food," says Achilles, "is said to have been the compact inwards of lions, and the marrow of the half-living she-wolf":
dicor
non ullos ex more cibos hausisse, nec almis
uberibus satiasse famem, sed spissa leonum
viscera, semianimisque lupae traxisse medullas.[36]
These descriptions of the young Achilles' diet had been supposed to be a late addition to the legend: the Proto-Attic vase now shows that they are at least as old as the middle of the seventh century B.C. , and a characteristic part of an ancient epic story, probably related in the Cypria .
Quoting the lines of Statius some time ago, I had surmised that the gruesome touch "half-living"—"the marrow of the half-living she-wolf"—might be due to the Roman poet. Recently Donald Robertson has restudied the question in an article entitled "The Food of Achilles."[37] He quotes evidence, from many times and places, for the belief that by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of strong and fearless animals—lion, wolf, dragon—a man becomes more fearless and stronger; and he adds that the fresher the food or drink, the more potent; best of all, perhaps, to take them from a living body. Semianimis , then, is probably an original stroke. Robertson also shows that a word in Pindar's revised account of the education of Achilles may be owing to the same trait in the traditional version;[38] in Pindar the infant Achilles is said to have killed lions and boars and dragged their bodies while they were still panting, asqmaiinonta , to Chiron's cave. Pindar, here as often, substitutes a story of his own for the epic legend which offends his moral notions, but retains a detail, while carefully excluding its original significance: "in the epic the beasts were still breathing because the small Achilles wished to suck the living marrow in the cave."
The epilogue to this section shall be from three poets. First, Shakespeare:
Now could I drink hot blood . . .
Again, seeing what a bloodthirsty writer Nonnus is, it is not surprising that he speaks of drinking the hot blood fresh from the veins of a lioness as a suitable preparation for battle.[39] But there is another poet from whom one might not at first expect a reference to diet, or to the lapping of the blood of lions and bears; Racine, in his Iphigénie ,[40] borrows from Apollodorus, and makes Eriphyle describe Achilles as:
Ce héros si terrible au reste des humains,
Qui ne connoist de pleurs que ceux qu'il fait répandre,
Qui s'endurcit contr' eux dès l'âge le plus tendre;
Et qui, si l'on nous fait un fidelle discours,
Suça mesme le sang des lions et des ours.
The phase of Proto-Attic that immediately follows the work of the Painter of the Ram Jug is less attractive: at least the principal piece, the very fragmentary neckamphora, from Kynosarges, in Athens,[41] is not of the same quality. We look at the restoration first, and then at details from photographs. On the body, a man and a young driver stand in a chariot drawn by winged horses. Both turn the head, and the man his whole body, towards a person of whom not much is preserved. The subject is unexplained. Horses graze on the shoulder of the vase, and the neck has a wellplanned group of two wrestlers. There was a third figure to left of the pair, but part of the hand is all that remains. These are less probably ordinary athletes—although athletic scenes are found occasionally even on Geometric vases—than persons from heroic legend, and very possibly Argonauts. The technique is in one respect novel: besides much incision (in the animals, in the chariot-car, and for some details of the human figures) and much white (for flesh, garments, and so forth), there is also much red. This colour, not used hitherto on Attic pottery, now becomes a regular component of the decorative scheme. As to the figure-drawing, it is less lively than in the New York centaur vase or the works of the Ram Jug Painter, but somewhat more compact and controlled. The filling-ornament, on the other hand, is more obtrusive. The wrestlers are good; in physique and complexion they are quite like wrestlers. It is worth noting that the men at last have proper foreheads, and that the eye is better set in the face than it was before; the pupil, too, is indicated, by a red dot, and the artist has even suggested the eye-socket by leaving it in the colour of the clay instead of painting it white with the rest of the face.
Up to now there have been quarter-black-figure vases, and even semi-blackfigure. We now reach, in the last decades of the seventh century, full Attic blackfigure in its earliest stage. This phase of Attic vase-painting has been called "Late Proto-Attic," and there is something to be said for the term; but it is better called "Early (or "Earliest") Black-figure."[42] It is the period of the Piraeus vase, and the Nessos vase, both in Athens;[*] a classic period in one sense, the first since the high Geometric style of the prothesis vase. Imagination no longer tends to outrun skill of hand and grasp of form. In our next chapter we shall find the vase-painter in possession of a settled technique and a settled style. Henceforward we shall sometimes miss the freshness and spontaneity of the very early work we have just been considering, but shall often be compensated by other qualities.
[*] See pp. 12–14 and pl. 10.