theatrical scene, which with its detailed rendering of the stage clearly demonstrates the influence of the drama on vase-painting. The activity of this painter, who from the stiff variety of the style and the localities of the finds must be localized in South Campania, belongs to a later phase, which does not concern us. For the more these Italo-Greek vases in shape, decoration and representation develop local peculiarities and depart from their purely Attic starting point, the less do they belong to our survey, which excludes provincial varieties. Out of the mass of Lower Italian vases of the 4th century, which in shape partly run parallel with the Attic, [Illustration: PLATE XCIV. Fig. 156. ORESTES AND THE FURIES: FROM A LUCANIAN BELL-KRATER. Fig. 157. COMEDY SCENE: LOWER-ITALIAN BELL-KRATER.] [Illustration: PLATE XCV. Fig. 158. ACHILLES AND THERSITES: APULIAN VOLUTE-KRATER.] partly develop noticeably baroque and locally limited peculiarities, which in their chiefly sepulchral representations, influenced by Orphic-Dionysiac cults, often fall into coarseness, stiffness, or effeminate insipidity, let us take only one example. The Boston volute krater, 1¼ metres high (Fig. 158) belongs to a group of Apulian grand vases, which elongate the shape of the Talos vase (Fig. 153) and add rich ornament in white colour. On the reverse bearers of offerings above one another in the favourite borrowed motives (sitting, standing, running, leaning on a pillar, drawing up one foot) surround a white-painted Heröon with the dead man: the obverse combines a similar building with a mythological scene, the slaying of Thersites by Achilles, and thus gives a mythical prototype to the dead man, for whose grave the vase is designed. The liberal use of white paint, the ‘black ground’ ornamentation of the neck and foot with branches and tendrils are progressive elements, which lead the way for Hellenistic products like the Apulian Gnathia vases; in the increased pathos of the faces is traced, though provincially coarsened, the stronger weight given to sentiment in the 4th century; and the perspective rendering of the building operating with light and shade, which often extends to the ornament, points to a period, which had won complete freedom in space, and certainly could distribute figures over the landscape more naturally than the vase-painter, who filled the tall space with them only in a superficially decorative way.