These, however, are but isolated examples; the art which above all other was influenced by athletics was that of the vase painter. Athletic scenes are among the earliest on the vases. This may be partly due to the connexion of games with funeral rites, for which many of the painted vases were made. But there is another and more general reason for the vase painter’s preference. Athletic scenes were especially adapted for the spaces which he wished to fill, whether it were a long band running round the whole vase, or an oblong panel. In the former case, the foot-race or the horse-race, or a series of athletes engaged in various sports, offered an effective variation of the procession of men or animals so common on early vases, while nothing could be better adapted for a panel than a boxing or a wrestling match with umpires or friends looking on. So effective was the latter scheme found that it was applied to mythological subjects. The contests of Heracles with giants or with monsters become a wrestling match or pankration in which gods and goddesses take the place of umpires. So in the fifth century, on the red-figured cups the exploits of Theseus in ridding the world of monsters and bullies are depicted as events in the palaestra. To Theseus was ascribed the invention of scientific wrestling: he appears on the vases as a graceful youth triumphing by trained skill over the brute force of his opponents. The story of athletic types follows the same course on the vases as in sculpture, though, as the development of the simpler art was more rapid, the changes took place earlier. The bearded athletes of the black-figure vases disappear at the beginning of the fifth century, and on the red-figure vases, from the time of the Persian wars, the ephebos is ubiquitous. Moreover, it is not so much the actual competitions that we see as the daily life and training of the palaestra. Strigils, oil-flasks, and jumping-weights hang upon the walls; picks and javelins are planted in the ground. Trainers in their long mantles and naked assistants stand about and watch the practice of the youths. Sometimes with outstretched hands they instruct them; sometimes they correct them with their long forked rods. The youths themselves run, leap, wrestle, throw the diskos or the javelin; some look on and chat, others prepare for exercise, anointing their bodies with oil, binding on the boxing thongs, or fitting the cord to the javelin; others having finished their work scrape themselves with strigils, or standing round a basin empty vessels of water over each other. All the varied life of the palaestra is before us.