APPENDIX, 21 465

In vase pictures we have occasionally an attempt to represent water naturally. On a vase in the British Museum (No. 785),¹ of which the subject is Ulysses and the Sirens, the sea is rendered by wavy lines drawn in black on a red ground, and something like the effect of light playing on the surface of the water is given. On each side of the ship are shapeless masses of rock on which the Sirens stand.

One of the most beautiful of the figurative representations of the sea is the well-known type of Scylla. She has a beautiful body, terminating in two barking dogs and two serpent tails. Sometimes drowning men, the rari nantes in gurgite vasto,² appear caught up in the coils of these tails. Below are dolphins. Scylla generally brandishes a rudder, to show the manner in which she twists the course of ships. For varieties of her type see Monum. dell’ Inst. Archeol. Rom., iii., Tavv. 52-3.

The representations of fresh water may be arranged under the following heads-rivers, lakes, fountains.

There are several figurative modes of representing rivers very frequently employed in ancient mythography.

In the type which occurs earliest we have the human form combined with that of the bull in several ways. On an archaic coin of Metapontum in Lucania (see frontispiece to Millingen, Ancient Coins of Greek Cities and Kings), the river Archelous is represented with the figure of a man with a shaggy beard and bull’s horns and ears. On a vase of the best period of Greek art (Brit. Mus. No. 789:³ Birch, Trans. Roy. Soc. of Lit., New Series, Lond. 1843, i. p. 100) the same river is represented with a satyr’s head and long bull’s horns on the forehead; his form, human to the waist, terminates in a fish’s tail; his hair falls down his back: his beard is long and shaggy. In this type we see a combination of the three forms separately enumerated by Sophocles, in the commencement of the Trachiniæ:

’Acelwon legw,

oV m en trisin morfaisin exhtei patroV

foitwn enarghV tanroV , allot aioloV

drakwn eliktoV, allot andreiw kntei

bonprwroV, ek de daskion geneiadoV

krounoi dierrainonto krhnaion poton.⁴

In a third variety of this type the human-headed body is united at the waist with the shoulders of a bull’s body, in which it terminates. This occurs on an early vase. (Brit. Mus., No. 452.⁵) On the coins of Œniadæ in Acarnania, and on those of Ambracia, all of the period after Alexander the Great, the Achelous has a bull’s body and head with a human face. In this variety of the type the human element is almost absorbed, as in the first variety cited above, the coin of Metapontum, the bull portion of the type is

¹ [Now numbered E 440; it is in the Third Vase Room.]

² [Virgil, Æn., i. 118.]

³ [Now E 437; in the Third Vase Room.]

⁴ [“I mean Achelous, who often asked me of my sire, appearing visibly in three shapes; now as a bull he would come; now as a writhing speckled snake; and other whiles with human trunk and forehead of an ox, with streams of his fountain’s water gushing from his shaggy beard on every side.”]

⁵ [Now B 313; in the Second Vase Room.]

IX.. 2 G

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