Beside the pictures from daily life comes mythology with pot-bellied dancers, who have not yet, so far as we know, been superseded by Ionic Satyrs, with Erotes crowning riders and drinkers, and various legendary scenes. None of these kylix-pictures breathes the Spartan spirit, the spirit of the lyric poetry of Sparta, so well as the Berlin vase with the carrying home of fallen warriors, which is perhaps taken over from a continuous frieze without any attempt to fit it into the circular field; but even in this shape has the effect upon us of a funeral march of Kallinos or Tyrtaios (Fig. 84). But in humorous descriptiveness the Arkesilas vase (Fig. 85) takes the palm. It is a genre scene, but not this time from the life of a Spartan citizen, but a travel reminiscence of a painter, who once in African Cyrene looked on, while the silphion was weighed under [Illustration: PLATE XLV. Fig. 84. RETURNING FROM BATTLE: FROM A SPARTAN KYLIX.] [Illustration: PLATE XLVI. Fig. 85. ARKESILAS OF CYRENE WATCHING THE LADING OF SILPHION: FROM A SPARTAN KYLIX.] the stern eye of Arkesilas, and stowed in the hold of a sailing ship to be exported. The monkey too, which the painter puts on the yard, he became acquainted with in Africa; the birds are not meaningless but fly round the ship; only the lizard is an external addition, and we already know it to be Corinthian. The life-like picture, which before the decisive excavations in Sparta was regarded as chief proof of Cyrenaic origin for this pottery, confirms the result of digging in the shape of the chair legs, which agree with Spartan reliefs, and in the inscription, only possible in Sparta. There is an approximate date given too; for the king, whose portrait we have, reigned about the middle of the 6th century. With this it agrees that his mantle is divided into black and red stripes, which, as we saw in the Phineus kylix, comes before the rendering of folds. This conservative style does not show the same keenness as its contemporaries in rendering folds and developing the knowledge of anatomy; nor is the need felt for a long time of freeing the field from filling ornaments or the base segment from animal decoration. The group of vases which belongs to the second half of the century is especially marked by the return of the white slip and of polychromy in the ornamentation. It is only late that the Spartan painters turn to the rendering of folds and richer body details, really only in a time of decadence, which diminishes the foot, no longer colours the ornament, and often avoids the base-segment. The occasional use of pale red figures painted on a black ground with incised details can only be explained as a provincial imitation of Attic red-figured technique, with the superiority of which Sparta cannot even remotely compete. Similar vases without any figures show the last output of the fabric.