Chapter IV

.) ancient literature contains scarcely any allusions to the painted vases, we have many descriptions of similar subjects depicted on other works of art, such as vases of wood and metal, from Homer downwards. The cup of Nestor (Vol. I. pp. 148, 172) was ornamented with figures of doves[1], and there is the famous description in the first Idyll of Theocritus[2] of the wooden cup (κισσύβιον) which represented a fisherman casting his net, and a boy guarding vines and weaving a trap for grasshoppers, while two foxes steal the grapes and the contents of his dinner-basket; the whole being surrounded, like the designs on some painted vases, with borders of ivy and acanthus. The so-called cup of Nestor (νεστορίς) at Capua[3] was inscribed with Homeric verses, and the σκύφος or cup of Herakles with the taking of Troy[4]. Anakreon describes cups ornamented with figures of Dionysos, Aphrodite and Eros, and the Graces[5]; and Pliny mentions others with figures of Centaurs, hunts and battles, and Dionysiac subjects[6]. Or, again, mythological subjects are described, such as the rape of the Palladion[7], Phrixos on the ram[8], a Gorgon and Ganymede[9], or Orpheus[10]; and other “storied” cups are described as being used by the later Roman emperors. But the nearest parallels to the vases described in classical literature are probably to be sought in the chased metal vases of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.[11] We read of _scyphi Homerici_, or beakers with Homeric scenes, used by the Emperor Nero, which were probably of chased silver[12]; and we have described in