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TALOS 100.00%

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Nephew of Daedalus. His ingenuity and skill excited the envy of Daedalus, who threw him headlong from the Acropolis at Athens. (See DAeDALUS.)
 
DAEDALUS 100.00%
The mythical Greek representative of all handi-work, especially of Attic and Cretan art. As such he was worshipped by the artists' guilds, especially in Attica. He was said to be the son of the Athenian Metion, son of Eupalamus (the ready-handed) and grandson of Erechtheus. He was supposed to have been the first artist who represented the human figure with open eyes, and feet and arms in motion. Besides being an excellent architect, he was said to have invented many implements, the axe for instance, the awl, and the bevel. His nephew and pupil (son of his sister Perdix) appeared likely to surpass him in readiness and originality. The invention of the saw, which he copied from the chinbone of a snake, of the potter's wheel, of the turning lathe, and of other things of the kind, was attributed to him. Daedalus was so jealous of him that he threw him from the Acropolis; and being detected in the act of burying the body, was condemned by the Areopagus, and fled to Crete to king Minos. Here, among other things, he made the labyrinth at Gnosus for the Minotaur. He and his son Icarus were themselves confined in it, because he had given Ariadne the clue with which she guided Theseus through the maze. But the father and son succeeded in escaping, and fled over the sea upon wings of wax feathers made by Daedalus. Icarus, however, approached too near to the sun, so that the wax melted, and he fell into the sea and was drowned. The sea was called after him the Icarian, and the island on which his body was thrown up and buried by Heracles, was called Icaria. Daedalus came to Camicus in Sicily, to king Cocalus, whose daughter loved him for his art, and slew Minos who came in pursuit of him. He was supposed to have died in Sicily, where buildings attributed to him were shown in many places, as also in Sardinia, Egypt and Italy, particularly at Cumae. In Greece a number of ancient woodtn images were supposed to be his work, in particular a statue of Heracles at Thebes, which Daedalus was said to have made in gratitude for the burial of Icarus.
 
ICARUS 28.58%
Son of Daedalus. While he and his father were flying away from Crete by means of waxen wings, in spite of his father's warnings, he flew too near the sun, so that the wax melted and he sank into the sea and was drowned. After him the island where his body was washed ashore and buried by Heracles was called <Icaria, and the surrounding sea, the "Icarian Sea."
 
PILLEUS 23.82%
A round felt cap with little or no brim lying close to the temples. It was the mark of fishermen, sailors, and artisans; hence Castor and Pollux, Odysseus, Charon, Hephaestus, and Daedalus are representedwith it. The upper classes wore it only in the country or when travelling; but it was worn in Rome by the whole people at the Saturnalia, and by freedmen as a sign of their new position. It was placed on the head of slaves when sold, as a sign that the vender undertook no responsibility. (See cuts, and cp.ODYSSEUS, fig. 1, and coin under BRUTUS.)
 
ERECHTHEUS 11.19%

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A mythical king of Athens. According to Homer he was the son of Earth by Hephaestus, and brought up by Athene. Like that of Cecrops, half of his form was that of a snake-a sign that he was one of the aborigines. Athene put the child in a chest which she gave to the daughters of Cecrops, Agraulos, Herse, and Pandrosos, to take care of; forbidding them at the same time to open it. The two eldest disobeyed, and in terror at the serpent-shaped child (or according to another version, the snake that surrounded the child), they went mad, and threw themselves from the rocks of the Acropolis. Another account made the serpent kill them. Erechtheus drove out Amphictyon, and got possession of the kingdom. He then established the worship of Athene, and built to her, as goddess of the city (Polias), a temple, named after him the Erechtheum. Here he was afterwards worshipped himself with Athene and Poseidon. He was also the founder of the Panathenaic festival. He was said to have invented the four-wheeled chariot, and to have been taken up to heaven for this by Zeus, and set in the sky as the constellation of the charioteer. His daughters were Orithyia and Procris (see BOREAS and CEPHALUS). Originally identified with Erichthonius, he was in later times distinguished from him, and was regarded as his grandson, and as son of Pandion and Zeuxippe. His twin brother was Butes, his sisters Procne and Philomela. The priestly office fell to Butes, while Erechtheus assumed the functions of royalty. By Praxithea, the daughter of Cephissus, he Was father of the second Cecrops (see PANDION, 2), of Metion (see DAeDALUS); of Creusa (see ION), as well as of Protogoneia, Pandora, and Chthonia. When Athens was pressed hard by the Eleusinians under Eumolpus, the oracle promised him the victory if he would sacrifice one of his daughters. He chose the youngest, Chthonia; but Protogeneia and Pandora, who had made a vow with their sister to die with her, voluntarily shared her fate. Erechtheus conquered his enemies and slew Eumolpus, but was afterwards destroyed by the trident of his enemy's father, Poseidon.
 
MINOS 10.30%

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A mythical king of Crete, the centre of the oldest legends of that island. He is the son of Zeus and of Europa; in Homer, brother of Rhadamanthys, father of Deucalion and Ariadne, and grandfather of Idomeneus. Residing at Gnossus as the "familiar friend of Zeus," he had a "nine-yearly" rule over the flourishing island [<italic>Od.</italic> xix 179], an expression which later generations explained as signifying periods of nine years; at the end of which he went into a cave sacred to Zeus, in order to hold converse with his father, and to receive the laws for his island. Just as he was thought to be the framer of the famous older Cretan constitution, so he was also considered a founder of the naval supremacy of Crete before the times of Troy; Hesiod calls him the "mightiest king of all mortals," who rules with the sceptre of Zeus over most of the neighbouring peoples. Later legend gives him another brother, Sarpedon, and a number of children (among others Androgeos, Glaucus, Catreus, and Phaedra) by his wife Pasiphae, a daughter of Helios and Perseis. When after the death of Asterin, the husband of Europa, he has driven away his brothers in consequence of a quarrel, he seizes the kingship of Crete, in which he is supported by Poseidon, who, on his prayer that he should send him a bull for sacrifice, causes a wonderfully beautiful snow-white bull to rise from the sea. But as he, desiring to keep it for his own herd, sacrifices another, the god to punish him inspires his wife Pasiphae (q.v.) with love for the bull. Homer [Od. xi 322] calls Minos the "meditator of evil"; in later times he was represented as a hard-hearted and cruel tyrant, especially on the Attic stage, because of the part he played in Attic legends. On account of the murder of his son Androgeos (q.v.) at Athens, he undertook an expedition of revenge against Attica, captured Megara (see NISUS), and compelled the Athenians to send him once in every nine years seven boys and seven girls to Crete, to be devoured by the Minotaur (q.v.; see also THESEUS). Tradition made him die in Sicily, whither he had pursued Daedalus (q.v.) on his flight, and where king Cocalus or his daughters stifled him in a hot bath. His Cretan followers interred him near Agrigentum, where his grave was shown. In Homer [Od. xi 568] Odysseus sees him in Hades with a golden sceptre in his hand, judging the shades; he does not appear in the legends as judge of the dead by the side of Aeacus and Rhadamanthys till later [Plato, Apol. 41 a, Gorg. 523 e].
 
HEROS 8.65%
A hero. This is in Homer a descriptive title given specially to princes and nobles, but also applied to men of mark sprung from the people. Hesiod reserves the name for mortals of divine origin, who are therefore also known as demigods. Many of these he places on the Islands of the Blessed, where under the sovereignty of Cronus (Kronos), they lead a life of happiness Hesiod makes no allusion to the influence of heroes upon the life of man, or to the worship due to them in consequence. But in later times this belief spread throughout the whole of Greece. The heroes are in most respects like men and suffer death; but death puts them in a more exalted rank, and they then have power to do men good as well as harm. The most distinguished warriors of prehistoric times were accounted heroes, being generally regarded as the offspring of gods by mortal women; to their souls another destiny was accordingly assigned than that allotted to the souls of mortals. But even amongst the heroes of old time there were some who, without being children of the gods, nevertheless so distinguished themselves by their virtue, that they appeared to participate in the divine nature, and therefore to deserve a higher distinction after death. Even in later times such men were not unknown, when personages recently deceased were actually exalted to the ranks of heroes, as in the case of Leonidas at Sparta, and Harmodius and Aristogeiton at Athens. The founders of colonies were especially considered worthy of worship as heroes; when the true founder was unknown, then some appropriate hero was selected instead. Formerly there were many such fictitious heroes; to this class properly belong all the titular ancestors of the noble and priestly families of Attica, and the founders of particular arts and trades, as Daedalus. Many heroes of historical times were originally gods, who, in course of time, were divested of their primitive dignity. There was no town or district of Greece in which a host of heroes was not worshipped by the side of the higher divinities; many as special tutelary spirits of the country, others as the heroes of the country, as the Dioscuri at Sparta, the Aeacidae at Aegina, and Theseus in Attica. There were festivals in their honour everywhere, many of them small and unimportant, and only celebrated in a restricted circle, others observed by the state as festivals of the people in general, and not a whit inferior, in wealth of equipment, to the most important festivals in honour of the gods. This was especially the case with the heroes of the country. Many heroes had shrines, known as Heroa, which were generally erected over their graves. The altars of heroes were lower than those of gods, and were commonly designated sacrificial hearths; they were generally on a level with the ground, and on the west side, the region of the nether world, were provided with a hollow into which the libations were poured. Like offerings to the dead, these consisted of honey, wine, water, milk, oil, and blood which had been shed by sacrificial victims; the flesh of the animals sacrificed was burnt. In the period of decadence it became customary to treat the living with heroic honours. Such honours were paid to the Spartan Lysander by the towns in Asia Minor, and were afterwards accorded to kings, e.g. to Antigonus and his son Demetrius at Athens.
 
SCULPTURE 6.41%
 
POTTERY 2.95%

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The simplest, and at the same time one of the oldest, branches of the primeval art of working in clay is the manufacture of bricks and tiles, the invention of which (at Athens) was ascribed by the Greeks to the mythical personages Euryalus and Hyperbius [Pliny, H. N. vii 194]. So far as bricks were used at all, their use was generally confined to private buildings; and Greeks and Romans for ages employed only unbaked or sun-dried bricks. Bricks baked in the kiln came into use at a later date. The first to employ them extensively were the Romans, probably at the period when the population of the city rendered it necessary to build houses of several stories, which demanded a more solid material. In imperial times such bricks were the common material for private and public buildings. The walls were built of them, and then overlaid with stucco or marble. Building with baked bricks extended from Rome into Greece, and, generally speaking, wherever the Romans carried their arms, they introduced their exceptional aptitude for making excellent bricks. Bricks which presented flat surfaces, to be used for walls or pavements, were made of the most various dimensions, but were for the mostpart thinner than ours. Besides these, there were also rounded bricks for bujlding dwarf column, and for the construction of circular walls. For roofs flat tiles were chiefly used (Lat. tegula), which were provided with a raised rim on both of their longer sides, and were so formed that the upper fitted into the lower. Concave tiles also were used (Lat. imbrex) of the form of a half cylinder, which covered the adjoining edges of the flat tiles. The lowest row was commonly finished off with ornamental moulding. From the same material as bricks were also made pipes for conveying water, for sewers, and for warm air; the section in the first two cases was round, in the last, square. Pottery in its proper sense, the manufacture of utensils, is very old. The potter's wheel was known even before Homer's time [IL. xviii 600]. Its invention was variously ascribed to the Corinthian Hyperbius [Pliny vii 198] and to the Athenian Talus, nephew of Daedalus. Corinth and Athens, where the neighbouring promontory of Colias furnished an inexhaustible supply of fine potter's clay, were, in fact, the headquarters of the manufacture of Greek pottery. Next came Aegina, Samos, Lacedaemon, and other places in Greece itself, which always remained the principal seat of this manufacture, especially in the form of vases of painted clay. These were exported in large numbers to the countries on the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The high estimation in which Greek, and especially Attic, pottery was held is proved by the numerous vases which have been discovered in tombs, chiefly in Italy. More-over they represent almost every period. The excellence of the workmanship lies in the material, which is very fine, and prepared with the utmost care; also in the execution and in the baking. Its thinness, as well as the hardness of its sides, even in vessels of large dimensions, astonishes experts in such matters. The shapes are mostly produced by the potter's wheel, but also by hand in the case of vessels too large to be conveniently placed on the wheel; for example, the largest wine-jars. [The prehistoric pottery from Mycenaene, the Troad, and other Hellenic sites, was-also made by hand.] Whereas small vessels were made of a single piece, in the case of large ones the body, handles, feet, and neck, were fashioned separately, and then united. They were first dried in the sun, then twice baked, before and after the painting. The colours are No less admirable than the workmanship. The clay shows a beautiful bright reddish yellow, which is produced by the addition of colouring matter, and is also further intensified by a thin coating of glaze. The black colour, which often verges upon green, and is of a brilliant lustre, is then applied. Either (1) the design stands out black against the bright background or (2) the figures appear in red on a black ground, the former being the earlier method. Other colours, especially white or dark-red, were applied after the black glaze had been burnt into the clay by the second baking, and served as a less lasting adornment. In later times yellow, green, blue, brown, and gold were also used. [In the case of vases with black figures, the vase was first turned on the wheel, and in order to give it a surface of deeper red: clay finely ground and mixed with water to the consistency of cream, technically known as "slip," was applied by a brush or other wise while it was still revolving. The outline of the design was next roughly sketched, either witho . nt or in light-red ochre with a brush. The vase was then dried in the sun, and again put on the wheel, and the glaze, finely powdered and mixed with water was applied to it with a brush as it revolved. The vase was then in some cases fired for the first time in the kiln in order to provide a smooth, almost non-absorbent surface for the use of the painter. The painter then put on the black enamel figures and ornaments with a brush. After the firing of the enamel, the details were drawn in by incised lines, cutting through the enamel down to the clay body of the vase. In vases with red figures instead of the figures being painted in black, the ground is covered with black enamel and the figures left, showing the glazed red "slip" which covers the whole vase. This method produced a great artistic advance in the beauty of the figures, the details and inner lines of which could be executed with freedom and ease by brush-marked lines, instead of by the laborious process of cutting incised lines through the very hard black enamel (Prof. Middleton on "Pottery" in Encyc. Brit. xix 608, 609).] Lastly, the form deserves all praise. The vases of the best period present the most tasteful elegance of form, that is at once fine and strong, and the most delicate proportion of the various parts to each other and to the whole, without interfering with their practical utility (see cuts under VASES and VESSELS). It was not until the times when taste had begun to degenerate that the fashion was introduced of giving to clay ware, by means of moulds, all kinds of grotesque forms of men and beasts, and of furnishing them with plastic (as well as painted) ornamentation. [The technique of ancient pottery is illustrated by figs. 1 and 2. The first represents a youth seated in front of an oven, from the top of which he takes with two sticks a small, two-handled vase which has been newly glazed. The second shows the potter giving the last polish to a finished vase, while two other vessels are standing to dry on an oven, the door of which is closed (Guhl and Koner's Life of the Greeks and Romans, p. 141, Eng. ed.). Among the votive tablets in the Louvre there are two from Corinth, The first of these represents an early Greek type of kiln, which is domed over, and has a space for the fuel on one side, and a door in the side of the upper chamber, through which the pottery could be put in and withdrawn. The second shows a potter applying painted bands while the vessel revolves on the wheel (Prof. Middleton, l.c., figs. 3 and 20). See also VASES.] The ROMANS, with whom, as early as the time of the second king, Numa, a guild (collegium) of potters existed, neither had vessels of painted clay amongst their household goods, nor did they employ it for the ornamentation of their graves. In earlier times at least, they used only coarse and entirely unornamented ware. They imported artistically executed vases from their neighbours, the Etruscans. In the last hundred years of the Republic, as well as in the first hundred years after Christ, the chief place for the manufacture of the red crockery generally used in households was Arretium (Arezzo) [Pliny, xxxv 160; Martial, i 54, 6, xiv 98; Dennis, Etruria, ii 335]. The ware of this place was distinguished by a coral-red colour, and was generally furnished with glaze and delicate reliefs; in fact, ornamentation in relief was widely employed in later Roman pottery. Very much valued was the domestic ware, called vasa Samia, which was an imitation of the earlier pottery brought from the island of Samos. It was formed of fine, red-coloured clay, baked very hard, of thin make, and very delicate workmanship. It was glazed and generally adorned with reliefs, and served especially for the table use of respectable people who could not afford silver. While this fine ware was made by hand, the manufacture of ordinary pottery as well as of bricks and pipes, especially under the Empire, formed an important industry among capitalists, who, on finding good clay on their estates, built potteries and tileworks, and either worked them on their own account through slaves or had them carried on by lessees. The emperor himself, after the time of Tiberius, and the members of the imperial family, especially the females, pursued a similar trade, as is shown by the trade-mark which, according to Roman custom, was borne by clay manufactures. The production of large statues of clay, apart from the purpose of modelling, belongs amongst the Greeks to the early times. It continued much longer amongst the Italians, especially amongst the Etruscans, who furnished the temple at Rome with clay images of the gods before the victorious campaigns in the East brought marble and bronze productions of Greek art to Rome. On the other hand, throughout the whole of antiquity, the manufacture of small clay figures of very various kinds, for the decoration of dwellings and graves, and for playthings for children, etc., was most extensively practised. They were generally made in moulds, and after baking were decorated with a coating of colour. The excellence which Greek art attained in this department, as in others, is shown by the "figurines" discovered at Tanagra in and after 1874, specimens of which are given in figs. 3, 4. Very important too was the manufacture of clay reliefs, partly with figured representation and partly with arabesque patterns, for the embellishment of columns, windows, cornices, and also of tombstones and sarcophagi. (See Dumont and Chaplain, Ceramiques, 1888: Kekule, Thonfiguren aus Tanagra, 1878, Die antiken Terracotten, 1880, and Die Terracotten von Sicilien, 1884; Henzey, Catalogue des figurines antiques de terre cuite du Musee du Louvre, 1882, id. 60 plates, 1883; and the popular work by Pottier, Les Statuettes de Terre Cuite dans L'Antiquite, 1880.)
 
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