The fabric in the Ionic islands which was in close reciprocal relation with the Chalkidian, may be called the ‘Phineus’ fabric after its chief product, till accident betrays to us its home. From the remains of lettering on the Phineus kylix, it can only be said, that it was produced in a place where Ionic was spoken, which cannot have been near to Asia Minor. The style, more Eastern than Chalkidian, but different from East Ionic in much, e.g. the circular drawing of the male eye, and closely akin to Chalkidian, is probably of Cycladic origin. But a connection of this pottery with one of the old Cycladic manufactories ([p. 52]) is impossible. As little as the Chalkidian has it any previous history; the few amphorae and kylikes that remain belong exactly to the same short period of time, in which the Chalkidian vases were produced.
The amphorae are rather earlier than the Phineus vase, and often very like the decorative earlier Chalkidian specimens. Chalkis seems to have supplied to them the western technique, the vase-shape, the foot-ring, and also to have supplied the patterns in many specimens for animal and rider decoration. But the less severe construction of the vases, the irregular division of the fields for figures, the preference for a dark covering of the ground above the rays, the liberties in decoration, lead us to more Eastern soil. The very chain of buds, luxuriant and hardly stylized, which often covers the neck, shows the unpedantic and concrete Ionic style, and the same playful carelessness appears, when the painter is lavish with filling rosettes and buds, when he inserts into a heraldic frieze of animals a complex of creatures furiously biting each other, or puts
PLATE XXXVII.
[Fig. 72]. IONIC EYE KYLIX.
HEAD OF ATHENA, BETWEEN THE EYES OF AN IONIC KYLIX.