‘There is no mother bore me for her child, I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage), Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.’ [Illustration: FIG. 83.] Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into a non-human, unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the art of the simple conservative vase-painter remembered humbler beginnings. The design in fig. 83 is from a Corinthian alabastron in the Museum at Breslau[789]. In the centre of the design, Herakles is engaged in slaying a Hydra with an unusually large number of heads. Iolaos comes up from the right to engage some of the heads, the charioteer of Iolaos, Lapythos, waits in the chariot. Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the beginning of the 6th century B.C. ‘Athena,’ the Maiden of Herakles, has also come up (to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just behind her, perched on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had there been no inscription we should at once have named it a ‘decorative Siren,’ but against the woman-headed bird is clearly written Ϝοῦς. At first sight the inscription does not seem to help much, but happily the lexicographers enable us to explain the word[790]. The _Etymologicon Magnum_ tells us that by πώυγγες are meant αἴθυιαι, and that another form of the word was βοῦγγες. Hesychius merely states that the πῶυξ is ‘a kind of bird,’ and refers us to Aristotle[791] ‘On Animals.’ Our text of Aristotle gives the form φῶυξ. It seems clear that the Ϝοῦς of the Corinthian vase is a variant form of a name given to the Diver-bird. The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth is not far remote from Megara. Pausanias[792], in discussing the genealogies of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandion fled to Megara. There he fell sick and died, and by the sea in the territory of Megara is his tomb, on a cliff which is called the cliff of Athene Aithuia, i.e. Athene the Diver-bird. Bird myths haunt the family of Pandion: Procne, Philomela, Itys and Tereus[793] all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a regular cult at his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared, and the story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting a grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird; he makes Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of Ajax and her own empty prayers[794]: ‘In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.’