The history leading up to the origin of this style has become clear to us by quarrying in different localities. We saw the vases lose their peculiarly carpet-like appearance, the filling motives disappear, the bands of animals and ornaments forfeit their independence and become a subordinate member in the tectonic construction, we saw the world of figures win its way out of ornamental compulsion to greater freedom and extend over the vase. The 6th century, to the beginnings of which we pursued the history of vases, knows only occasionally inserted rosettes, or a lonely bud projecting into the field. Plant ornamentation becomes true Greek ornament, abstract, tectonic, and when occasion demands, full of life with its swing. Animal friezes retire to the foot or the shoulder, are often incidentally treated as mere decorative accessories or seized by quite unheraldic liveliness. The principal interest is devoted to depicting man, his doings and goings on. The vase painter is now more anxious than ever to narrate and depict; he finds ever less satisfaction in ornamental composition. He is never tired of describing hunting and warfare, wrestling and chariot-racing, the festal dance and procession, but with greatest preference, remembering the purpose of his vases, drinking and wild dancing. But also the heroes of past ages, their bold exploits and strange adventures, are his constant theme. The Homeric Epic, the tales of Herakles the mighty, the bold Perseus and Bellerophon, had evoked pictorial representations even in the 7th century; but now the full stream of the legendary treasury pours into painting and gives an infinitely rich material to the joy of narration. What the vase-painter makes of this material is never conceived in the historical or archæological spirit, but breathes entirely the air of his own time; often only the added names (which according to the new feeling for space assume smaller dimensions) raise a genre scene into one from myth. Moreover the Saga is only seldom re-shaped by inventive brains. Types once invented pass on, go from workshop to workshop, from one district to another, are abbreviated (p. 49), expanded, conventionally repeated or filled with new life. Types may also cross; there arise purely through art, contaminations of legend, which are foreign to poetry. When a Corinthian painter unites the Embassy to Achilles (Iliad IX) with the visit of Thetis, this has as little to do with poetry, as when on Attic vases the birth of Athena is coupled with the apotheosis of Herakles, or the slaying of Troilos is transferred to Astyanax, or the entombment of the dead Sarpedon to Memnon. But everything strange need not be misunderstanding on the artist’s part. The vases supply us with a multitude of legendary motives and variations, which we cannot find in literature, and are the faithful reflex of the fluidity of Greek mythology, which, devoid of canon and dogmatism, was in constant flux.