This heightening of characteristic touches does not merely appear in battle scenes, but also the intimate touches in many Corinthian subjects are carried on. Even the Eurytios krater had succeeded in expressing the horror which seizes Odysseus and Diomede at the sight of the suicide of Aias. The feeling in this group is perhaps surpassed by an episode in a Chalkidian battle-scene; where the intent care, with which Sthenelos binds up the finger of the wounded Diomede, reminds one of the later kylix of Sosias (Fig. 114); and when a Paris amphora enlarges the march out to battle by a domestic scene of arming, early red-figured painting is again anticipated. The combination of this fresh and direct observation of nature with a marked decorative talent unites Chalkidian with the Ionic art of the islands. On Chalkidian soil, where a language with a strong Ionic element was spoken, a close contact with eastern neighbours must be assumed. It is not only the chain of buds on the vases that witnesses to this contact. The Satyr, a hairy fat fellow, with marked horse-ears and horse-tail, often with horse-hoofs, enters from the East in a form, which meets us on the Phineus vase (Fig. 74). And when the Chalkidian painter occasionally indicates the outline of the female back, where previously the drapery falling straight down entirely concealed it, when he furnishes his Geryon with wings and often equips Herakles with the lion’s skin, in this, as in much besides, one cannot fail to see Eastern influence. Whether the rendering of folds, the beginnings of which appear on Chalkidian vases as elsewhere, has the same origin, is doubtful. The fabric in the Ionic islands which was in close reciprocal relation with the Chalkidian, may be called the ‘Phineus’ fabric after its chief product, till accident betrays to us its home. From the remains of lettering on the Phineus kylix, it can only be said, that it was produced in a place where Ionic was spoken, which cannot have been near to Asia Minor. The style, more Eastern than Chalkidian, but different from East Ionic in much, _e.g._ the circular drawing of the male eye, and closely akin to Chalkidian, is probably of Cycladic origin. But a connection of this pottery with one of the old Cycladic manufactories (p. 52) is impossible. As little as the Chalkidian has it any previous history; the few amphorae and kylikes that remain belong exactly to the same short period of time, in which the Chalkidian vases were produced.