[816]. Cf. B.M. Cat. of Sculpt. i. 599; Ross-Meier, Demen von Attika, p. 122, No. 67. The persons here mentioned were not necessarily potters.
[817]. Boeckh, C.I.G. ii. 3485.
[818]. Hes. Op. et Di. 25: καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει; quoted by Aristotle, Rhet. ii. 4, 21, and Plat. Lys. 215 C. Euthymides on one of his vases places the boast, “Euphronios never did anything like this.” See for these two artists, Chapter [X].
[819]. Cf. the vase at Athens described above (p. [218]), and the others with representations of potteries.
PART II
HISTORY OF GREEK VASE-PAINTING
CHAPTER VI
PRIMITIVE FABRICS
Introductory—Cypriote Bronze-Age pottery—Classification—Mycenaean pottery in Cyprus—Graeco-Phoenician fabrics—Shapes and decoration—Hellenic and later vases—Primitive pottery in Greece—Troy—Thera and Cyclades—Crete—Recent discoveries—Mycenaean pottery—Classification and distribution—Centres of fabric—Ethnography and chronology.
In the preceding chapters we have given a general résumé of the subject of Greek pottery; we have discussed the sites on which Greek vases have been found, the methods employed in their manufacture, the shapes which they assume, and the uses to which they were put both on earth and in the tombs; and we have now reached perhaps the most important part of the subject, at any rate in the eyes of archaeologists, namely, the history of the rise, development and decadence of painting on Greek vases.
It has already been noted (in Chapter [I].) that this branch of the study of Greek vases is one that has only been called into existence in comparatively recent times, and that up to the year 1854 or thereabouts all attempts at dating the vases (chiefly of course owing to the poverty of material) were purely empirical and tentative. They were moreover largely combined with fantastic interpretations of the painted designs.
During the last forty years, and especially during the last twenty, the steady growth of archaeological study and increased attention to excavations have enormously increased both the material at command and the power of utilising it with scientific method. The extensive finds of pottery in Greece, Asia Minor, Northern Africa, Italy, and elsewhere, including more especially products of the earlier periods, have enabled the students of the subject to trace the sequence of fabrics from the rude wares of Troy and the Greek Islands up to the graceful and finished products of the Athenian ateliers, and onward to the overgrown luxuriousness of the gigantic Apulian wares. The subjects of the paintings, once of all-absorbing, are now only of subordinate interest, except so far as they illustrate certain phases of development, and the chief interest of the vases is the question of their origin, their maker, or their place in relation to others.