We begin our description of the vases of the Greeks with an account of the large vases of rough manufacture calculated to hold great quantities of wine, water, or food. The chief vase of this class is the =Pithos= or cask (Lat. _dolium_), a vase of gigantic size, found both in Italy and Greece.[510] They are shaped like enormous barrels, with bulging bodies and wide mouths, and answer to the modern hogshead or pipe. When full, the casks were closed with a circular stone, or with a cover of clay. They were used to hold honey, wine, and figs, and were usually kept half-buried in the earth.[511] They were sufficiently capacious to hold a man, and the famous “tub” of Diogenes was of this form. On a lamp in the British Museum and other monuments[512] he is represented appearing from one, presumably on the occasion of his interview with Alexander. In the vase-paintings Eurystheus takes refuge in a pithos from Herakles when he brings the Erymanthian boar,[513] and the same shape of vase is represented as holding the wine of the Centaurs and the water drawn by the Danaids.[514] The “box” of Pandora was in reality a large jar of this kind, as we learn from Hesiod.[515] It required great skill to make these vases, whence a Greek proverb characterised an ambitious but inexperienced man as “one who began with a cask” (ἐν πίθῳ τὴν κεραμείαν μανθάνειν).[516] They were not made on the wheel but by a peculiar process, which is described as plastering the clay round a framework of wood, called κάνναβος[517]; it appears to have been made of vertical boards ranged in a circle, like a tub. [Illustration: FIG. 21. PITHOS FROM KNOSSOS.] The British Museum possesses two or three πίθοι of exceptional size, ornamented with bands of geometrical patterns in relief, which were obtained from Mr. (now Sir A.) Biliotti’s excavations at Ialysos in Rhodes, and belong to the Mycenaean period. In 1900 Mr. Arthur Evans, among the remains of the Minoan palace at Knossos in Crete, came upon a courtyard round which stood a number of similar πίθοι, with decorations of a Mycenaean character (see Fig. 21).[518] These may be considered to belong to the middle of the second millennium B.C., and it is therefore evident that the πίθος may claim an antiquity second to none among forms of Greek vases.