The quantity of pictures of ‘pure existence’ does much to determine the altered aspect presented by post-Persian vase-painting. On the slim ‘Nolan’ amphorae and those with twisted handles, on the calyx-kraters and the bell-kraters often decorated on the mouth with a branch, on the ‘stamnoi’ and other vases, which are decorated like the ‘Nolan,’ the slender restful figures heighten the impression of quiet elegance. Thus the grandeur of the new style at the same time gets a marked decorative value, a value not without danger for the living rendering of reality. Greatness is not every man’s affair, and the painters, who only took over externally the big forms and the lofty simplicity, and could not fill them with a life of their own, can only rank as decorative artists and should by the same right be called ‘affected’ as the refined masters of the Amasis period (p. 106). Even talented painters consciously gave up to decorative effect the reverses of their vases, which they adorn with quickly drawn motionless figures wrapped in cloaks. [Illustration: PLATE LXXIX. Fig. 131. THE DEATH OF AKTAION: FROM A RED-FIGURED KRATER. _From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._] The three Glaukon representations we have met with till now are pure pictures of ‘existence.’ The ‘horse’ master dedicated to the same boy Glaukon a second kylix, the fragments of which, found on the Acropolis, represent the death of Orpheus at the hands of the Thracian women. The scheme, if one may speak of such, is in so far old, as the victor moving to the right attacks an opponent in kneeling position also moving to the right and looking round; but an infinite nobility is poured over the old type, and the fight is carried through with dramatic weight, though in the faces of the fighters the inward excitement is not reflected, as on later works of the same hand. Yet, as on the Aphrodite kylix (Fig. 129) the living expression of the eye is already strengthened by the line of the upper lid.