The first period of the transitional style betrays little of this influence. The reproduction of living beings is dominated by the decorative figures of the East, especially monsters and fabulous beings, which now make their entry into Greek art, and exercise a powerful attraction not only on plastic art, but on poetic and mythopœic fancy. Thus the Geometric silhouette is superseded. If even the preceding age had felt the need of leaving void a hole to indicate the eye, now the head is completely rendered by an outline and made lifelike by interior drawing (Fig. 30). The next stage is that the whole body also is rendered in contour. To make the transition plain, we show here a vase-fragment, the Cretan origin of which is not established, but which must be in close connection with Cretan art, the Ram jug from Aegina (Fig. 28). The animal frieze, with its hook spirals, dot rosettes, rhombi and triangles to fill the space, is characteristic of older Oriental art; the drawing of the rams is far beyond Geometric technique; in the body too the silhouette is given up, and indication of the hide is attempted. This animal frieze is no longer an end in itself: by the men clinging to them the ornamental rams become mythical rams, the rams of the Odyssey. The fugitives are not very closely connected with their saviours, and the giant must have been more than blind not to notice them. But on the other hand the artist has drawn them very clearly, has put both arms and both legs in view of the spectator, and even, where a small detail would not otherwise have shown well, made a small nick in the belly of the ram. This shows how the artist of the period could with difficulty do without a clear outline. These attempts are perfected in the outlined figure of a plate from Praisos, which is certainly Cretan (Fig. 29). The childishly disproportioned structure has now become a clear organism of genuine Greek stamp, full of excellent observation of nature; the ornamentally constrained picture becomes now a free version of a legend, which however cannot be interpreted with certainty, till the white object under the sea-monster has been explained. It is most likely that we may see in it the foot of a female figure filling the left half of the plate, perhaps Thetis, who escapes from the attacks of Peleus by changing into a fish. The interior incised lines in the body of the sea-monster are a novelty, which the ceramic art has developed [Illustration: PLATE XV. Fig. 29. HERAKLES AND SEA-MONSTER (?) FROM A CRETAN PLATE. Fig. 30. ARGIVE KRATER WITH THE SIGNATURE OF ARISTONOTHOS: SEVENTH CENTURY.]