Presently we come to the central part of the picture. It is occupied by the grove of Persephone, represented in the sparing fashion of Greek painting by a single tree, under which sits Orpheus, his lyre in his hands. No doubt we have here the key to the picture. Orpheus is the central figure of the whole. To Polygnotus he is not merely a departed hero, but priest and hierophant. The song which he sings is the mystic song of immortality. About him there cluster the heroes who fought at Troy: on the one side Agamemnon, Protesilaus, Achilles, Patroclus; on the other, Hector, Paris, Memnon, Sarpedon, and Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons. Paris makes love to Penthesileia, who looks back at him with contempt. The Greek and Trojan heroes may fight again their battles in memory; but peace has fallen on them, and they no longer wish to wield the lance. We need not dwell on other groups: Palamedes and Thersites busy with the dice; Thamyris, who had once challenged the Muses, seated in dejection over his broken lyre; the strange apparition of Marsyas, who teaches the boy Olympus to play the flute; and many others. Towards the right end of the painting we again find punishments of a kind going forward. Sisyphus heaves his rock up the hill. Tantalus stands up to the chest in water which he may not drink, and clutches at fruit which eludes his grasp. These punishments had already been mentioned in the _Odyssey_; Polygnotus adds a rock, which hangs over the head of the sufferer, ever threatening to fall, but never falling. There appears also a great cask set in the earth, which it is the fate of an approaching train ever to try to fill with water from broken water-vessels. This was, according to tradition, the allotted task of the fifty daughters of Danaus, who had all save one in one night slain their husbands. But Polygnotus followed a different account: he calls the approaching men and women merely ἀμύητοι, uninitiated. Pausanias observes that they must be those who held in contempt the sacred mysteries of Eleusis; but this does not seem to be the meaning. They are ordinary persons, men and women who did not necessarily sin overtly against the Mysteries, but merely neglected to avail themselves of the ‘means of grace’ offered them by the hierophants of Eleusis, and suffer in the next world for their carelessness or obstinacy.