The National Museum at Athens houses many fine vases of the late black-figure and early red-figure technique, as well as the Acropolis fragments, but the display cases which perhaps attract no less attention are those containing the small Attic black-figured lekythoi. The paintings on these vases, making no claim to artistic pretensions and produced in answer to local burial needs, often echo impressions the vase-painters received from the theatre or from figures in monumental painting. It is worth noting that they were inspired not only by well-known myths but also by stories of popular belief which the painters of large vases scorned to represent. The large vases were made and painted for the Italian and Etruscan markets and had to be decorated with impressive themes. On the small lekythos which concerns us here (Plate XVIII, 1–2), we meet a unique theme which raises a host of questions and leads to a wealth of conjectures.
The picture is framed by two columns with Doric capitals. The right-hand column, which is the better drawn, spreads to a sort of base, and the painter must have imagined both columns to be of wood. Of the three female figures on either side of the weird figure in the middle, the one on the right, dressed in chiton and himation, turns her head to the left, whilst her feet point to the right. She extends her right arm imperiously, palm open, towards the central figure. The latter is distinguished from the others by the fact that her feet do not appear beneath her himation which hangs below them. Her coiffure differs from that of the others, as we shall see later.