It is likely that all these Apulian vase-paintings go back to some original of a great painter which was known throughout the Greek world. An original by Polygnotus it cannot be; the composition is quite unlike his, and the Oriental garments worn by some of the personages indicate a different and a later school than his. We know that Nicias, a contemporary of Praxiteles, made a great picture of the under-world; but as we know nothing of its details, the inquiry whether this was the original copied in Italy has no certain basis. Singularly instructive and suggestive is the comparison of these Hellenic pictures of the under-world with those which our ancestors of the Middle Ages painted on the walls and in the windows of their churches. There we see the ecstatic bliss of the saved, conducted by angels to the abode of God and the saints, and the fearful tortures inflicted upon the damned by hosts of hideous and malignant demons, who bind, burn, tear, and outrage them with fiendish ingenuity. In the Christian paintings there is no mean, everything is extreme. The destiny to eternal life or eternal torment seems to hang upon a decision by no means easy: angels and devils dispute the possession of souls, and the latter are at least as successful as the former in their raids. Our ancestors can scarcely have taken these representations as seriously as we are disposed to take them, or life shadowed by such a terrific future would have been unendurable. But still they embodied the teaching of the Church, which few dared dispute, at all events openly. They give us a glimpse at the terrible moral pressure necessary in order that the realities of the moral and spiritual life should be burned into the heart of the European peoples. In the Greek pictures, on the other hand, nothing is extreme, but everything is in moderation. Setting aside the torments of a few legendary heroes, like Tityus and Tantalus, which had little relation to actual life, there was no torture, as there was certainly no bliss, in Hades. Between the punishment of the uninitiated and the reward of the initiated there is not very much difference. Whether Megara and her children belong to the class of the happy or the wretched we do not know. They bear the marks of suffering, but as one of the boys carries the oil-flask and strigil of the athlete, he would seem to pass his time in Hades as suitably as the little boy of the initiated pair who trundles his toy. The only unpleasant feeling which is roused by our vase-painting or the more exquisite Hades of Polygnotus is that its tenants must suffer from infinite ennui, and the same reproach has been brought sometimes against the heaven of the Middle Ages. But probably only highly civilized people learn to realize that ennui may become a torment.