Six
Exekias

The name of Exekias is found on fourteen vases,^[1] usually followed by the word epoiesen , indicating that Exekias was the potter, but twice by the two verbs egrapse kapoiese . The iambic trimeter 'ExhkiaV egayekapoihse me indicates that Exekias not only fashioned the vase but also decorated it. We must now ask whether the twelve vases which the inscriptions state to have been made by Exekias were also painted by him. In seven of them the decoration is so slight that one can scarcely be sure; the two best are in the same style as those with the double signature, and must have been painted, as well as fashioned, by Exekias. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth vases, an amphora in the Louvre (pl. 61, 1, 3–6), one in Toledo and fragments of one in Taranto, are earlier than the rest and hardly by the same hand.^[2] They belong to the large group of vases, mostly amphorae, called "Group E."^[3] The pictures on the Louvre amphora might conceivably be early work by Exekias, painted before his characteristic style was formed, but it is better kept apart. Group E, however, to which it belongs, is the soil from which the art of Exekias rose, the tradition which he absorbs and transcends.

The vases of Group E were made in the middle of the sixth century and the earlier part of the third quarter. The same subjects are repeated again and again with minor variations: the Birth of Athena; Theseus and the Minotaur; Herakles and the Lion; Herakles and the three-bodied Geryon. The Geryonomachy on the Louvre amphora with the signature of Exekias as potter is more careful than the ten other Geryonomachies of Group E, for instance those in London (pl. 61, 2) or in the Ros^[*] collection at Baden in Switzerland,^[4] but the composition is the same, and the difference in quality is insignificant. Contrast the same subject on the early hydria by Lydos in the Villa Giulia.^[*] It might perhaps be maintained that the picture on the Exekias vase was more natural in one point. In Lydos, Herakles was shown close to Geryon, yet drawing his bow as if he were a good way off. In the Exekias vase, being at close quarters, he uses the sword, but this is a matter of no importance; the

[1] For numbered notes to chapter vi see pages 102–104.

[*] See pp. 44–45 and pl. 40, 1.

Execian picture is in every way inferior (pl. 61, 1, 3–4). One or two particulars may be noted. The farthest of Geryon's heads is one of the repainted parts. The shield-device is a very stiff gorgoneion. Eurytion draws his cutlass, but an arrow has pierced him through the eye and brought him down. Lastly, besides the potter's signature, and the names of the persons, there is a third kind of inscription, Stesias^[*]kalos , "Stesias is fair." These kalos-inscriptions begin in the middle of the sixth century and persist through the fifth. The other picture on the vase is a chariot-scene (pl. 61, 5–6). The hero Anchippos—the name occurs on another vase,^[5] but nothing is known about him—stands with his driver in the car. A human-headed bird is seen in the air, doubtless a good omen. The horses, all named, Kalliphora, Kallikome, Pyrrhokome, and Semos, are the best part of the picture. In general type they differ little from those of Lydos. The off trace-horse sinks its head, tugging at the reins. The lid belongs.^[6]

An early work by Exekias himself is the vase in Berlin which bears the double signature "Exekias painted and made me" (pls. 62, 1 and 63, 1–3).^[7] It is a neckamphora of the broad-shouldered, short-necked, precise, and powerful shape that succeeds the slenderer ovoid neck-amphora of the second quarter of the sixth century. Herakles wrestles with the Nemean Lion.^[8] To the right is Athena, shield on arm; to the left Iolaos, one hand laid on the other in a gesture of suspense. The composition does not differ much from some of those in Group E, but the figures are more compact and substantial, the incised detail finer and surer. The style is bare and rigid. Meagre, the picture on the back of the vase: two warriors leading their horses, shouldering spears, their shields hung behind them. The horses are named, Phalios and Kalliphora, and so are the horsemen; they are Attic heroes, Demophon and Akamas, the sons of Theseus. There is some restoration, especially the muzzle of Phalios, part of his breast and of the rump of Kalliphora, parts of the helmets. The kalos-name is Onetorides. The floral ornament is as hard and metallic as the figures.

The neck-amphora in the British Museum^[9] is distinctly freer (pl. 62, 2), both in shape and in drawing. It is also better preserved, and one can enjoy, undisturbed by restorations, the warm polished clay and the lustrous deep-black glaze. Only the white has suffered; it was repainted, but has now been cleaned. Exekias here signs as potter only, but the drawing is evidently his as well as the potter-work. The subject on one side is the death of the Amazon Penthesilea (pl. 63, 4). Achilles thrusts his spear into her throat, and she falls. There have been many pictures of Amazonomachies before this: in Attica from the second quarter of the sixth century onwards; many groups, also, of a warrior turning to flee, too late; but here the group has attained a classic form—black-figure can hardly go beyond this. The word akribeia comes into one's mind, the "accuracy" commended, in their simple, matter-of-fact way, by ancient critics of art; and one cannot help thinking of bronze statues. There is much fine detail, especially in the chiton, panther-skin, and helmet of the Amazon, but it does not detract from the simple rightness of the total effect. On the other side of the vase stands Dionysos holding sprigs of ivy, and a kantharos which a boy, his son Oinopion, offers to fill (pl. 62, 2); it is a restrained picture, and the figure of the

god is without the daemonic quality which it has in Kleitias and Lydos. The floral bands below the pictures, compared with those on the Berlin vase, are unobtrusive; the floral design at the handles has been stripped of leaves and reduced to a wintry, almost mathematical, design of large and slowly winding spirals.

The most famous of Exekias' vases is the large amphora in the Vatican (pls. 64–66).^[10] It bears the double signature, "painted and made," in a verse on the rim, and the potter-signature is repeated on the front of the body. We have already mentioned the shape known as "amphora type A," ^[*] a somewhat more elaborate variety of the traditional amphora: the handles, instead of being round and plain, are flanged and adorned with ivy, the foot is in two degrees, and a fillet is added between foot and base. The neck and shoulder of the vase are longer than before, the belly less tense, and the picture begins lower down. The story figured on the front of the vase is not recorded in extant literature, and our knowledge of it is gathered from works of art alone, chiefly vases, some of which are more circumstantial than this.^[11] The ingenious hero Palamedes (this we do know from the poets) invented various games to while away the long hours at Aulis; one day at Troy the two chief champions of the Greeks, Achilles and Ajax, became so absorbed in their board-game that they did not hear the alarm, and before they looked up the Trojans were in the Achaean camp. Exekias gives the two principal figures only. The names are added, in the genetive. Achilles and Ajax sit on block-seats at a third block. The game was a sort of backgammon, combining skill with chance. Dice were first thrown, and the cast entitled the player to make certain moves; the skill consisted in making the best possible use of the cast, whether it was high or low. Achilles here says tessara , four: that is, he has thrown a three and a one, or a pair of twos, and proceeds to make his move accordingly. Ajax says tria , three: that is, he has thrown a two and a one. Euripides may have been referring to this episode in the line quoted by Dionysos in the Frogs : "Achilles has thrown two pips and a four."^[12] Both heroes are on duty, ready-armed, holding a pair of spears, dressed in short chiton, leather corslet, greaves, and richly ornamented cloak. A small piece of realism is the bulge made by the stiff flaps of the corslet through the cloak below the waist.^[13] Their shields lean behind them; Achilles wears his Corinthian helmet, Ajax's is laid on top of his shield. Another realistic touch is the crest swaling over on this side of the helmet. Achilles bends a little less than Ajax, and his helmet forms the apex of the triangular design: he is a little the grander (gerawteroV ) of the two. Both wear the old-fashioned thigh-guards, but Achilles has a rarer piece of armour as well, the rerebrace.^[14] The shields, too, are of the old-fashioned Boeotian type, and have magnificent devices; Achilles bears a satyr-head in high relief, between a snake and a panther, Ajax a gorgoneion between two snakes. Ajax has a longer beard than the younger Achilles. In this picture, with its profusion of minute incised detail in hair, armour, and mantles, the black-figure technique reaches its acme, or even passes it; the other side of the vase, with more moderation, is more pleasant as a work of art (pl. 65). A young man, Castor, stands

[*] See p. 54.

in the middle, dressed in a chlamys, carrying a spear over his shoulder, and holding his horse Kyllaros. He looks round at his mother Leda, who offers him a flower with one hand and holds a pair of sprigs in the other. His father, Tyndareos^[*] , stands at the horse's head and strokes its face. A small boy carries a seat on his head, with a folded garment laid on it; a small aryballos, oil-bottle, is tied round his forearm. At the other end of the picture Polydeukes, naked, bends to caress the dog which leaps up towards him. It is sometimes thought that Castor is setting out, while his brother Polydeukes has returned from an outing.^[15] It is perhaps rather more likely that both are returning home, but Polydeukes arrived first, put his horse in the stable, and stripped, while Castor, arriving a little later, is welcomed by his father and his mother, who offers him a flower to smell, and fragrant sprigs of fresh myrtle. In either case the seat, the change of clothes, and the oil for anointing are intended for Polydeukes.

Comparing this vase with those in Berlin and London, one becomes aware that the artist has found his way into a freer world. Where there was rigidity, there is now a blend of austerity and charm. Exekias is less interested in violent action than his predecessors, more in quiet unhurried movements and small though not insignificant activities that last for some time. His persons, more than others, are felt to have breeding and character, hqoV . The scene in the house of Tyndareos^[*] is not so much a scene from everyday life, to which the artist has added heroic names, as a scene from heroic life when at its simple everyday level. All Greece is in Homer; and the tone of Exekias' picture is the same as in many parts of epic, in the Telemachy for example, or in that part of the Iliad where Nestor and Odysseus come to the house of Peleus, find him sacrificing in his courtyard, with the assistance of Menoitios and Patroklos, and are invited in by Achilles.^[16] Exekias, with the limited means of an art hardly out of its childhood, has achieved something of the same simple grace as Homer with his incomparable resources.

The physique and bearing of these men and women bring them into line with the kouroi and korai of sixth-century sculpture, and with the figures in low relief on the sepulchral stelai of archaic Attica. The horse in the middle is already of late archaic type, far more sensitively drawn in all its parts, from head to hooves, than in the Berlin Exekias. Another small touch of realism is the ruffled tail. The thick peplos of Leda is foldless, but the chlamys of Castor and the himation of Tyndareos^[*] have many folds, and a three-dimensional lower edge; they are late archaic drapery at an early stage. The modern draughtsman^[17] has miscopied the lower part of the chlamys, which is really red like the upper; this is of some importance as binding the central figure together. On the other hand, the surface of the vase is not well preserved and the white has faded; the modern drawing gives the white as it originally was.

Cups came from the workshop of Exekias as well as pots.^[18] Of the six cups signed by him as potter, the four Little-Master cups, and a sort of belated variation on the Siana cup, are insignificant. It is not clear, of course, that they were decorated by him, but in any case Exekias may have required, like Lydos, a larger field to work on; in spite of his minute detail, he is not really a miniaturist. The sixth cup, in

Munich, is important (pls. 67–68, 1–2).^[19] It is an early example of the shape of cup, known as type A, which, near the end of the third quarter of the sixth century, began to displace the Little-Master cup.^[20] Type A is a massive model, with lipless bowl and short stout stem well marked off from the bowl by a thick fillet. This was the new kind of cup in vogue when the red-figure technique was invented, and most of the earliest red-figured cups are of type A. Cup A is regularly an "eye-cup"; on each half of the exterior it bears a pair of large eyes, which were apotropaic in origin and were sometimes thought of as gorgon's eyes. The interior of cup A is often decorated with a small round gorgoneion. Outside, a vine may fill the space at the handles; between the eyes there is often, as here, a nose. There are many variants of this decoration. A figure or figures may take the place of the nose, and there may be figures at the handles instead of vine. The decoration of the Munich Exekias cup is unusual in several respects. Eyes and nose are normal, but figure-work at the handles is not very common; still less common, that a large picture should occupy the whole of the interior. The technique, too, is abnormal: the exterior pictures are ordinary blackfigure, but the black-figure design inside is painted not on the surface of the vase itself but on a fine lustrous coral-red slip with which the whole picture-space was coated before the figures were begun.^{20 bis} This coral-red is of the same nature as the black glaze, and was obtained either by protecting the colour from reoxidization in firing, or by the addition of some ingredient. Later artists, both black-figure and red-figure, used it on occasion. The exterior of Exekias' cup is quadripartite: two eye-areas, two handle-areas. The centre of interest, which is usually in the eye-area, has been shifted to the handle-areas with their figure-scenes. The subject in both is a fight over the dead body of a warrior. The body fills the space under the handle; in one picture the dead man, lying on his back, is already stripped; three warriors fight for the body on each side of the handle; one of them bends to take hold of it. This might possibly be the struggle for the body of Patroklos. At the other handle, the warrior, fallen prone, is still armed, but without spear, sword, or shield. The drawing of the "bronze men" is less detailed than in the larger vases. The chief picture is inside the cup. It is an unusual scene: Dionysos, holding a drinking-horn, sails over the sea; the water is not rendered, but indicated by the dolphins that play about the vessel. (The face of Dionysos has flaked off.) The vessel is of the same kind as in the François vase: the prow in the form of a boar's head much stylized; the stern ending in the head of a swan; rail, ladder, and steersman's hutch all given. A tall vine grows beside the mast.

Cup A held more than the Little-Master cup and was less flimsy. In decoration, it must be said, black-figure cups of this type are not very successful. The reason for this does not lie in the intractability of the big eyes, which break the surface and dwarf the rest of the design, for Chalcidian potters contrived to harmonize them with the rest of the decoration and with the cup as a whole, and in Attica itself the red-figure cup of type A is a success.

We now pass to some of the vases that are seen from the style to have been painted by Exekias, although they bear no signature; we begin with amphorae. Four frag-

ments in Leipsic come from an amphora which had the same two subjects as the Vatican vase, but less elaborately executed.^[21] The surface is beautifully preserved. One sees the shanks of Achilles, his block-seat, the tip of his cloak, part of his shield, with the tail of the feline emblazoned on it, and the shield of Ajax, with a gorgoneion between a snake and a lion or panther. From the other picture the fingers of Polydeukes remain, with part of the white hound, held on a leash. An amphora-fragment by Exekias in the University of Lund (pl. 68, 3)^[22] might seem at a hasty glance to come from the same vase and to give the head of Tyndareos^[*] , but the name is inscribed, and it is Theseus. What can the scene be at which Theseus is present, bearded and fully dressed? Perhaps his sons Demophon and Akamas were leading their horses, as on the neck-amphora by Exekias in Berlin. A fine amphora in Philadelphia,^[23] a late work of Exekias, has a battle-scene, taken from the epic Aithiopis (pl. 69, 1–2). After the burial of Hector, with which the Iliad concludes, two champions came to help the Trojans. First, Penthesilea the Amazon, daughter of Ares, and after her death at the hands of Achilles, Memnon, son of Eos, goddess of the Dawn. Memnon slew Antilochos, who died to save his father Nestor. Then Achilles slew Memnon. Soon after, Achilles himself was slain by Paris. On the Philadelphia vase, Ajax drops his spear, bends, and lifts the dead body of Achilles; on the left of this group, Menelaos slays one of Memnon's negro henchmen, here named Amasos, who is armed with club and wicker targe (pelta ). On the other side of the vase, Antilochos lies, slain by Memnon; and three Greeks, two in hoplite armour, the third an archer, chase two naked men, doubtless negroes, away from the body, which they may have been attempting to despoil. There may be a mistake in the naming; one of the Greeks is called Euphorbos, and the Euphorbos known to us was a Trojan. But it is possible that there was a second Euphorbos in the epic, a Greek.^[24] In another point, however, Exekias has made a confusion, or at least has made it possible for us to make a confusion. The negro followers of Memnon can hardly have remained on the battlefield after the death of their master; Menelaos is not driving them away from the body of Achilles, but from the body of Antilochos while their master is still alive. Two episodes, of one day, but not simultaneous, have been divided unequally between the two sides of the vase, the Antilochos episode occupying one side and half of the other, the Achilles episode the remaining half. Both subjects are unusual: Memnon's negroes are figured elsewhere, but seldom in battle; and while there are many pictures of Ajax carrying the body of Achilles, there is only one other in which Ajax is hoisting the body from the ground.^[25] Exekias has chosen the moment preceding the usual one. Achilles wears a cloak of the same kind as in the Vatican vase, thigh-armour, and a leather corslet; Ajax's corslet is of bronze. His device is a group of a panther attacking a deer; the other devices are a raven, and a dog gnawing a haunch. A pleasant detail is the gorgoneion in relief on the knee of the greave; bronze greaves with this decoration have been preserved.^[26] The club is the traditional weapon of the negro; according to Herodotus, the Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes were armed with clubs.^[27]

Fragments of another amphora by Exekias, of the same period, also in Phila-

delphia,^[28] give the greater part of the designs on both sides of the vase (pl. 69, 3–4). The general theme recalls the old "horseman" amphorae, but the subject is new, and unique in archaic art. The horseman has dismounted to graze his horse. On one side he is in hoplite armour with crested helmet, shield (the device again a raven), cloak, and spear. The cheekpieces of the helmet are adorned with a ram's head in relief. On the other side of the vase he is an archer, in Oriental costume (sleeves, trousers, hat with long flaps, bow and quiver). Both of them let the lead out and wait, again an action that takes quite a while.

So also in the Boulogne amphora with the Death of Ajax (pl. 70).^[29] The theme is well known from the Sophoclean tragedy, which is nearly a hundred years later, and it was often treated in archaic art from Protocorinthian times onwards—Ajax either riving himself on his sword, or fallen about it. Exekias is alone in showing not the dead hero, or the moment of his death, but the slow preparation for the final act—Ajax, his resolution taken, methodically fixing his sword in the ground. Behind him, a palm-tree; in front of him his spears, helmet, and the famous shield. The face—and this is rare in black-figure—is furrowed with grief. The other picture on the vase is a very conventional chariot-scene; the artist has put all his power into the Ajax.

Of the unsigned neck-amphorae, the most interesting, though not the best, is perhaps that in Boston with the harnessing of a chariot (pl. 71).^[30] The shape is the same as in the signed neck-amphorae, but above and below the chief pictures there are small ones: above, cock-fighting; below, lions, boars, and a bull. The treatment of the harnessing-scene is rare. The subject is divided between the two sides of the vase. Usually, as in Nearchos, the pole-horses have been harnessed and one of the trace-horses is being led up. Here one pole-horse is harnessed, a man holds the reins and goad, and a naked man stands at the horse's head holding it by topknot and muzzle to keep it quiet. The second pole-horse is being put into place, but resists and rears; the man leading it has been pulled off his feet and now comes down with knees bent. Two women watch unmoved. The trace-horses are on the other side of the vase; one of them is held by a fully armed warrior who recalls the Demophon and Akamas of the Berlin Exekias, while a man who recalls the Theseus of the Lund fragment stands at the horse's head and cautiously pats its nose. A woman holds the warrior's spear. The second trace-horse is seen from the front,^[31] and a man takes it by the nose. The execution of the pictures is not equal to the conception—is hardly worthy, indeed, of Exekias. One feels that the painter must have treated the subject in the same manner, but with more care, in a work that has not survived.

We now come to a vase that shows Exekias in a better light, the great calyx-krater in Athens (pls. 72–73), found in the American excavations on the north slope of the Acropolis.^[32] This is the earliest and an exceptionally solid and massive example of what soon became one of the leading shapes in Attic vase-painting; many masterpieces of red-figure are calyx-kraters. It is possible that Exekias invented the shape. The handles are missing, except the stumps, and parts of the picture. The kalos-

name Onetorides is the same as in the Berlin neck-amphora and the Vatican vase. On the front, a chariot-scene. The occupants of the car are missing, but the end of Herakles' name is preserved, and the spear of Athena; it is her chariot, in which she is conducting the hero to Olympus. Five deities attend her: Apollo playing the cithara; Artemis; Poseidon; a goddess who is not named or whose name has not been preserved—perhaps Aphrodite, or Amphitrite; and Hermes. The picture on the other side of the vase is the fight for the body of Patroklos. One might have expected this to be a common subject, considering how important it is in the Iliad, but there is only one other certain example of it on a vase, on the early red-figured cup by Oltos in Berlin. The body, stripped, lies on the ground, with three warriors contending for it on each side: on the Greek side, two heroes whose names are missing, perhaps Ajax and Menelaos, and a third, Diomed; on the Trojan side, Hector and two others, perhaps Glaukos and Aeneas. Diomed is joining his companions, and so, it may be, was the corresponding figure at the other edge of the picture. The areas of the handles are treated separately: at each, a vine, and a seated maenad. The lower part of the vase is decorated on each half with an animal group, two lions attacking a bull, but the stretches of this zone that lie between the handle-roots go in subject with the handle-areas; a small satyr runs, looking back.

Exekias, like Sophilos and Lydos, has left other works besides vases. Fragments in Berlin (pls. 74–76), with some scraps in Athens,^[33] come from a set of clay plaques, each about 37 cm. high by 43, which decorated a sepulchral monument, probably of sun-dried brick, and, ranged side by side, formed a kind of frieze; the plaques seem not to have been continuous, but to have stood a little away from each other; they are thus very like what is commonly understood by a "picture." Each picture is complete in itself, but they are all concerned with the funeral and the mourning for the dead. Two of the fragments are from a representation of the prothesis (pl. 74, 1–2), the lying in state, a favourite theme in sepulchral art, as we saw, from the Geometric period onwards.^[*] The dead woman, clothed and wreathed, lies on a couch which stands on a platform; a woman with one foot on the platform and the other on a stool, bends, and adjusts the cushion under the head. Another woman stands on the extreme right. Part of a name is preserved, ending in . . . cariV —Timocharis or the like. A table stands beside the couch. A column marks the scene as taking place indoors; it is painted in a yellow or light-brown colour obtained by mixing diluted glaze with white. The middle of the plaque is missing; on the left, one sees the top of a second column like the first, a woman with loose hair beating her head, and an old man, named Aresias, lamenting. The yellowish-brown pigment reappears on a fragment, probably not of the same plaque, in which one mourning woman is darker than the other; the use of "two whites" or "a white and a yellow" occurs on vases, but is rare. Other plaques represent the funeral procession—men, youths, young boys, women, walking; men and youths riding and driving in chariots. In a group of

[*] See p. 3.

walking figures the leader turns his head full-face towards us (pl. 74, 3). A young boy in a dark-red himation raises his hand, probably in the gesture of greeting and farewell which appears in many other funerary pictures. An almost complete plaque shows a man standing in a chariot; a woman stands facing the horses, and bordering the design off on the right; three girls accompany the chariot, two of them beating their heads (pl. 75, 1). There were several chariot plaques, and on one of them the names of two horses are preserved, Semos and Kalliphora, both familiar from vases; here again a woman stands facing the horses (pl. 75, 2). On another plaque a cart drawn by a fine pair of mules is making ready; a small servant has just finished harnessing, and is withdrawing the pole on which the heavy mule-collar has rested during the process (pl. 74, 4). Once more a woman stands facing the animals at the end of the picture; her name is Sime. Another woman stands on the far side of them, holding branches: her name ends in . . . is . The mules are Phalios—the name of a horse on Exekias' Berlin vase and elsewhere—and Mylios. Another fragment probably gives the occupant of the mule-cart, a woman sitting with a wand in her hand: the mule-cart also formed part of the funeral procession. Lastly, the rarest of the plaques (pl. 76). The scene is laid in the women's quarters. The woman sitting with loose hair and her head veiled by her mantle is the chief of these mourners. She raises her left hand so that the chin rests on it lightly. It is the first hint of those many pensive or sorrowful attitudes, in which the chin is propped on the hand while the arm rests on the knee or on the other arm, which reach their full development in the second quarter of the fifth century and are familiar from many tombstones of the fifth century and the fourth. Two women sit beside her, one laying an arm upon her; two others sit facing her; one of these, whose feet are on a stool, bends her head in sympathy; the right arm is raised, and the chin must have rested on the hand much as in the chief mourner. This is the foreground; in the background, three women stand and pass the infant son, the orphan, from one to another. It is a well-planned three-figure group; the woman in the middle takes him from the arm of the woman on the right, and the woman on the left prepares to receive him in her mantle. The boy is tiny, but his features are already formed, with shapely chin and aquiline nose. The drapery is the same as in the Vatican amphora, foldless peploi of thick material, many folds in the softer himatia. The drawing of the different kinds of chair is attractive. We have used the phrase "chief mourner"; if the picture were alone we should probably call her the widow, but unless the building which the plaques adorned was intended for more than one person, which is always possible, the dead was the woman with whose prothesis we began. This is Exekias at his most characteristic: measured composition, gestures and attitudes potent from their very restraint.

Exekias and Amasis have long been regarded as the two chief names in the blackfigure of the mid-sixth century and the years succeeding. Lydos, older than they, must be added to make a third. A fourth name has often been bracketed with Amasis

and Exekias: Nikosthenes.^[34] This is partly due to the great number of vases that bear the signature, and largely to a lack of discrimination. Nikosthenes always signs as potter, never as painter. The name, followed by the word epoisen , "made," occurs on more than 120 black-figured vases, and on nine red-figured. The red-figured vases, which were decorated by several painters, are outside our present province; a word may be said about the others. Among the earliest of them is a small neckamphora in the British Museum (pl. 77, 1–2);^[35] it is an accomplished piece of pottery, and the drawing is neat and lively. Of the four pictures on body and neck, two are of wrestlers and two of boxers. The athletes are not youths, but portly men, and the wrestlers are either getting bald or have cropped the hair of the forehead. The boxers, as in most Greek pictures of boxing, stand foot to foot and hammer at each other's heads; not unnaturally some blood flows. This is the most impressive side of boxing to the simple mind, and that might account for its popularity with the more unsophisticated among the painters of vases, but it appears from ancient descriptions of boxing matches that the Greeks did not fully appreciate the value of the body-blow.^[36] These are pleasant enough little pictures, with some bite. Unfortunately none of the other vases with the signature of Nikosthenes are certainly by the same hand.^36bis It can be traced, however, in a good many unsigned vases, both pots and Little-Master cups; a lip-cup with Theseus and the Minotaur, in the British Museum (pl. 77, 3–4), and a band-cup with a battle-scene, in Berlin (pl. 77, 5), will serve as examples.^[37] The artist may be called the BMN Painter, short for "the Painter of the neck-amphora with the signature of Nikosthenes, number B 295 in the British Museum." The great majority of the vases signed Nikosthenes were decorated by another man, who may be named "Painter N." Most of them are neck-amphorae of a very odd shape which is peculiar to Nikosthenes. It has a long neck, a thin flaring mouth, a high foot, thin band-like handles, and two raised fillets, about an inch and a half apart, round the middle. Sometimes the midband—the zone between the two fillets—is decorated with a floral pattern, or even with small figures; but Painter N admired the overlap type of decoration which was by this time dying out in cups, and often runs his picture right over the raised fillets. The style of drawing in all these Nikosthenic neck-amphorae is slovenly and dissolute, but it is worst in those that have overlap decoration. More could be said about Nikosthenes, but it would probably be in the same strain.

Able painters of the second rank were active in the middle and the third quarter of the sixth century. Their work equals or surpasses most of the vases in Group E, although it does not reach the level of Exekias at his best. We glance at two of them only. The Painter of Berlin 1686^[38] is named after an amphora with a picture of a procession in honour of Athena, a humble forerunner of the frieze of the Parthenon.^[39] The goddess herself stands at her altar, armed, and raising her spear. Her priestess stands in front of the altar, holding a bunch of sprigs; a man and a youth approach, and a youth leading a cow to be sacrificed. The musicians on the other side of the vase, two flute-players and two citharodes, also belong to the procession. All these

figures have a remote and hieratic air. The Minotaur amphora by the same painter in Oxford is less careful (pl. 78, 1), but the photograph shows the shape better than the reproductions of the Berlin vase, and the quality is equal to the average of Group E.^[40] One of the artist's best works is a large amphora of type A in the Faina collection at Orvieto (pl. 78, 2–3), which has a good harnessing-scene on one side, and on the other Herakles struggling with Triton in the presence of Nereus and two Nereids.^[41] Of the slighter pieces, we must be particularly grateful to the artist for his small amphora in Berlin (pl. 78, 4), with its well-known picture of a chorus of Knights,^[42] a valuable record of the masquerades which contributed, when the time came, to the rise of Attic comedy.

The picture with which we conclude this chapter is on an amphora in the Vatican (pl. 78, 5–6).^[43] In a wooded place a woman mourns for a dead warrior, her husband or her son. The body lies naked on a bed of branches. Fir-trees and planes, and on one of the firs a bird. The hero's armour, greaves, helmet, and shield. The artist had intended to draw the usual floral border above the picture and had ruled the lower line of it, but thought better. The woman has been taken to be the goddess Eos, mourning for her son Memnon, but one cannot be sure. The other side of the vase is disappointing, a trifling picture of Menelaos threatening Helen after the fall of Troy.^[44] The mourning scene is worthy of Exekias. It is easy to say that the artist must be copying a work by someone else; it may be so, but there is no evidence for it. One would wish to find other vases by this painter; he is not very far from Group E, but cannot be counted as belonging to it. I see a resemblance to the prothesis on a fragment of which part is in Bonn, the other part lost.^[45] The lesson is that fine work may be found on vases which cannot be assigned to any of the noted artists.^[46]