The general tone of the painting of Polygnotus bears a close resemblance to that of the sepulchral reliefs which we shall describe in this book. This is the less curious, when we consider that the sculptors of the reliefs were of that Attic school of sculpture which took so much of its character from Polygnotus. In spirit also the painting is like the Homeric poems, when they deal with the future life. The cultivated Greek mind looked for little bliss in the world to come, except such as could come from the reunion of friends and families, and the memory of past deeds. Still less did it look for future punishments. These were ordinarily reserved for the noted criminals of legend. The only classes which Polygnotus seems to have thought in any peril were the parricides, the temple-robbers, and the uninitiated. He seems to have thought that spirits were of the stuff of which dreams are made, and passed an existence of quiet and gentle melancholy, of which the worst feature was its exposure to tedium. There do not appear in the picture of Polygnotus, as in some paintings which we must presently consider, any malignant beings to act as the police of the under-world. Not even Cerberus appears. The only spirit of inauspicious type who is seen is Eurynomus. Pausanias says[37]: ‘The interpreters at Delphi say that Eurynomus is one of the spirits that dwell in Hades, and that his office is to devour the bodies of the dead, leaving only their bones.’ Eurynomus does not appear, adds Pausanias, in Homer nor in the Cyclic poets. The daemon shows his teeth, and is seated on the skin of a vulture. Probably it was from the facts just mentioned that the interpreters at Delphi deduced the function of Eurynomus. But their opinion goes for little, and the name Eurynomus has nothing to do with the decay of the flesh. In the time of Polygnotus it was usually fire rather than decay which made away with the bodies of the dead. This daemon, who was possibly an archaic form of Hades himself, remains then unexplained. At any rate, we have no right to regard him as a punisher of souls. The punishments of Hades, according to Polygnotus, seem to go on by some law, without present enforcement. With the Hades of Polygnotus we must compare that which is depicted on a class of large amphorae which come to us from Apulia in Italy. I have engraved (Fig. 13) a fair specimen of these vase-paintings, which are all closely alike, from a vase of Canusium[38].