The design in fig. 62 from a painted Boeotian amphora[695], also in the Museum at Athens, shows a similar and even more complete conception of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Her two lions still keep heraldic guard, above her outstretched arms are two birds[696], her gown is decorated with the figure of a great fish. We are reminded of the Eurynome of Phigalia with her fish-tailed body. The interesting thing about these early representations, these and countless others, is that we can give the goddess no proper name. We call her rightly the Great Mother and the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but farther we cannot go. She has been named Artemis and Cybele, but for neither name is there a particle of evidence. [Illustration: FIG. 63.] The Great Mother is mother of the dead as well as the living. The design in fig. 63 is from the interior of a rock-hewn tomb in Phrygia[697]. The great figure of the Mother and her lions occupies the whole height of the back wall of the tomb. ‘All things,’ as Cicero[698] says, ‘go back to earth and rise out of the earth.’ ‘Dust we are, and unto dust we shall return,’ and more tenderly Aeschylus[699]: ‘Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life And rears and takes again into her womb.’ And so the Mother herself keeps ward in the _metro_polis of the dead, and therefore ‘the Athenians of old called the dead “Demeter’s people”[700].’ On the festival day of the dead, the _Nekusia_ at Athens, they sacrificed to Earth. To a people who practised inhumation, such ritual and such symbolism were almost inevitable. When the Earth-Mother developed into the Corn-Mother, such symbolism gained new life and force from the processes of agriculture. Cicero[701] records that in his day it was still the custom to sow the graves of the dead with corn: ‘that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die[702].’ Out of the symbolism of the corn sown the Greeks did _not_ develope a doctrine of immortality, but, when that doctrine came to them from without, the symbolism of the seed lay ready to hand. THE MOTHER AS KOUROTROPHOS. Early art figures the Mother in quaint instructive fashion as _Kourotrophos_, the Child-Rearer. As such she appears in the design in fig. 64 taken from an early black-figured amphora of the 6th century B.C. in the British Museum[703]. This figure of the Mother is usually explained as Leto with the twins Apollo and Artemis, but such an interpretation is, I think, over-bold, and really misleading. The artist knows that there is a Mother-Goddess; one child would be sufficient as an attribute of motherhood, but in his quaint primitive fashion he wishes to emphasise her motherhood, he gives her all the children she can conveniently hold, one on each shoulder. [Illustration: FIG. 64.]