A Greek twelfth century _Psalter_ in the Vatican library (No. 381) has one special picture which is obviously a careful copy of a miniature painting of the first century A.D. or even earlier: see fig. 2. The subject is Orpheus seated on a rock playing to a circle of listening beasts together with two nymphs and a youthful Faun or shepherd. These figures are arranged so as to form a very graceful composition in a landscape with hills and trees. The figures are extremely graceful both in outline and in pose, showing a considerable trace of Greek influence. The whole design closely resembles in style some of the wall paintings in the so-called "House of Livia" on the Palatine Hill in Rome, of which fig. 3 shows the scene of Io watched by Argus, and those in the now destroyed villa which was discovered by the Tiber bank in the Farnesina Gardens[25], and many of the better class of paintings on the walls of the houses of Pompeii. Of the latter a good example is shown in fig. 4, a painting the design of which has much fine Hellenic feeling in the grace of its form and the simplicity of the composition. [Illustration: Fig. 3. Painting in the "House of Livia" on the Palatine Hill in Rome.] _Orpheus made into David._ Returning now to the above mentioned _Psalter_ of the Vatican, the scribe, probably a Greek monk, who in the twelfth century painted this miniature[26], converted it into quite a different subject, that of David playing on the harp, by the simple device of ticketing each figure with a newly devised name. Orpheus is called "David," one of the Nymphs who sits affectionately close to Orpheus, probably meant for his wife Eurydice, is labelled "Sophia", "wisdom"; while the other two figures are converted into local personifications to indicate the locality of the scene. It is not often that a mediaeval copyist has thus preserved unaltered the composition of a whole subject of classical and pre-Christian date, but it is not uncommon to find single figures or parts of pictorial designs of equally early date among the illuminations of the ninth to the twelfth centuries. _Graeco-Roman personifications._ As an example of this we may mention one painting in a Greek _Psalter_ of the tenth century in the Paris library (_Bibl. Nat._ No. 139). This represents the Prophet Isaiah standing, gazing up to heaven, in a very beautiful landscape with trees growing from a richly flower-spangled sward. The somewhat stiff figure of the Prophet is Byzantine[27] rather than Classical in style, but the other two figures which are introduced are purely Graeco-Roman in design. On one side is a personification of Night ([Greek: NUX]), a very graceful standing female figure with part of her drapery floating in the wind, forming a sort of curved canopy over her head, such as is so often represented above the heads of goddesses or nymphs on the reliefs of fine Graeco-Roman sarcophagi.