L. D. Caskey, J. D. Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

But the male figure on our vase does not seem to be Apollo, for he wears a short chiton, a skin, boots, rests his hand on a clubby stick like a blackthorn, and has a cow at his side. He is a herdsman, and has much in common with the cowherd Paris on the contemporary white pyxis in New York.² Now Apollo was a herdsman once: for a year, as a punishment, he kept the cattle of Admetus. Can this be Apollo in Thessaly?

The demeanour of the Muses is against it. Even if the master is disguised, and more or less in disgrace, they should be like angels ministering to him. They are not: he looks at them,³ but they take no notice of him.

If not Apollo, who is he? He cannot be just a herdsman, he must be a particular herdsman, by the laws of Greek art, and especially Greek art of this still early time. And on a cylindrical vase with its unbroken field, and a vase painted with care, he cannot be a picture by himself, he must be a herdsman connected with the Muses. What if he were Daphnis? Daphnis was the herdsman par excellence, ὁ βουκόλος, and his cows were famous, they were sisters to the cows of Helios. And the poet calls him 'the dear to the Muses, the not undear to the nymphs':

τὸν Μοίσαις φίλον ἄνδρα, τὸν οὐ Νύμφαισιν ἀπεχθῆ.⁴

The story of Daphnis may have been known in Athens at this time, for Aelian seems to imply that Stesichorus sang the blinding of Daphnis.⁵ But whether to Stesichorus, as to later Greeks, Daphnis was the inventor of bucolic poetry, is not clear. Moreover, the Attic poets never mention Daphnis (who could have fitted into many a tragic chorus); and there are no certain representations of him until Hellenistic times. Hauser, indeed, hinted that the goatherd-boy pursued by Pan on a vase of our period, the Pan painter's masterpiece in Boston,⁶ might possibly be Daphnis; but prudently did not insist.⁷

So let Daphnis pass down the river. There is another name which I make bold to pronounce: Hesiod. In the sublime overture to the Theogony, the poet tells how the Muses taught him song as he was tending his sheep on Helicon.⁸ Alas, on our vase the herdsman's charge is a cow, not a sheep. But Hesiod says a great deal about cattle, and if we can allow the painter this one inaccuracy, the subject may be Hesiod's first sight of the Muses, in their home, near his, on Helicon. Helicon is represented, and even named, in the picture of two Muses on a white lekythos.⁹ Sappho and Alcaeus, Solon and Anacreon, and other poets and musicians of less enduring fame, are all represented on Attic vases: there is no reason why Hesiod should not have been represented; and if a mortal was to be shown with the Muses, it might fitly be the great poet, not who first invoked them, but who first, and in magnificent language, related his vision of them — the earliest direct account of a personal experience in all Greek literature.¹⁰

The Boston pyxis must have been painted about 460 or 450: it naturally brings to mind the white-ground work of the Sotades painter and such white pyxides as that with the Judgement of Paris in New York,¹¹ that with a wedding in the British Museum,¹² or the maenad pyxis which was in the market some years ago.¹³ But the style is quieter than there, and has more of the Pistoxenos painter in it than of Sotadean. The vases which come nearest it are three stemless cups in the same technique. The first is the masterpiece in the Louvre with the seated Muse tuning her lyre.¹⁴ The workmanship is much more delicate and beautiful than in our pyxis, and the single figure is set more freely in space, but the drawing is very like: note especially the shape of the head, rather wide from back to front, the receding upper lip, the receding chin, the interest in furniture, and above all the