In Athens this surprised no one. We have, however, classified our artists, and confined them to their specialities. We do not admit that a “serious” artist could cause laughter, and we have our professional caricaturists. Leonardo da Vinci, it is true, did not disdain to draw the grotesque. Neither ancient painting nor sculpture feared the ugly or the comic; but they gave to each a meaning. They did not cause laughter for the sake of laughing. They did not cause fear for the sake of frightening. These important elements in real life have a symbolic and allegoric meaning. The head of Medusa appears as a survival of vanished monsters, which terrified man when he sought to establish his dominion on earth. The Learnæan hydra is, on the most ancient vases, a gigantic octopus gripping Herakles and Iolaos, as the octopus clasps Gilliatt in _Les travailleurs de la mer_. The grimacing mask of the satyr is the inheritance of a very early conception transformed by art. It would not be difficult to prove, documents in hand, that the large anthropoid apes met by the Phœnicians in their explorations in Africa, and drawn by them on their metal cups of the seventh century, furnished the Ionian artists, when combined with the Bes of the Egyptians, with the prototype of the hairy and shaggy Silenus, with the flat-nosed face, that one sees on certain sarcophagi of Klazomenai. This is what we admire in the Sileni of Douris. The skilful, dry point of the artist knew how to preserve, when he sketched them on clay, all their simian agility, their droll, gorilla-like features, the relaxed, sinewy and flexible limbs, wherein we recognize the vigorous beast in semblance of a man. We only know of one other artist who has rendered this bounding animal gait of the Sileni with equal success--the painter of a kylix from the workshop of the potter Brygos, which is undoubtedly inspired by a satyric drama; here the goddess Hera and her companion Iris are in great distress through falling into the midst of such a wild band. Fortunately Hermes with fair words, and Herakles with his club, arrive in time to restrain these rash and disrespectful fellows (Fig. 15). [Illustration: Fig. 17. ULYSSES RESTORING THE ARMS OF ACHILLES TO NEOPTOLEMOS. Interior of preceding Cup.]