The showcases of the antique-dealers in Odos Pandrosou are full of little lekythoi which were painted for the tombs of humble men of the people, and which to-day are destined for modest purchasers or for the Inspectors of the Archaeological Section of the Ministry of Education, while for more important purchasers there are hidden away somewhere else works of much greater value. It is seldom that we are stopped by the art or the subject of one of these lekythoi.In 1943 when I was making an inventory of the stock of one antique-dealer—that which was on show—I picked out one lekythos which the owner gladly presented to the National Museum (Plate IVa, Figs, 1 and 2). From the funeral pyre the surface of the vase has taken a brown-grey colour, and the many joins show that it had been thrown to be broken and burnt with the dead body.A curious male figure wrapped in a himation up to the top of the head, so that only the -eye and the upper part of the head remain free, walks rapidly to the left, raising one leg vigorously. He lifts his himation with his hand to help him move. High boots cover his legs to a point just below the knee. The hanging wreath does not appear to be related to the interpretation of the picture, but is taken from the commonplaces of funeral lekythoi, especially white ones.

The National Museum at Athens houses many fine vases of the late black-figure and early red-figure technique, as well as the Acropolis fragments, but the display cases which perhaps attract no less attention are those containing the small Attic black-figured lekythoi. The paintings on these vases, making no claim to artistic pretensions and produced in answer to local burial needs, often echo impressions the vase-painters received from the theatre or from figures in monumental painting. It is worth noting that they were inspired not only by well-known myths but also by stories of popular belief which the painters of large vases scorned to represent. The large vases were made and painted for the Italian and Etruscan markets and had to be decorated with impressive themes. On the small lekythos which concerns us here (Plate XVIII, 1–2), we meet a unique theme which raises a host of questions and leads to a wealth of conjectures.The picture is framed by two columns with Doric capitals. The right-hand column, which is the better drawn, spreads to a sort of base, and the painter must have imagined both columns to be of wood. Of the three female figures on either side of the weird figure in the middle, the one on the right, dressed in chiton and himation, turns her head to the left, whilst her feet point to the right. She extends her right arm imperiously, palm open, towards the central figure. The latter is distinguished from the others by the fact that her feet do not appear beneath her himation which hangs below them. Her coiffure differs from that of the others, as we shall see later.

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