Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

204 The Solar Wheel in Greece

is finely conceived and almost certainly repeats a Greek motif.
Indeed, we have seen the same dramatis personae in the vase-
paintings already reviewed—Hera seated on her throne, Iris
standing with raised right hand, Hephaistos with his hammer
beside the wheel, Hermes with his caduceus glancing round, and
even Nephele, though here by a fine original touch she is repre-
sented as doing her best to avert, not to forward, the punishment
of Ixion. It seems possible to go one step further and to determine
the date of the Greek prototype. Here much help is afforded by
the style of Hermes, its most prominent figure. He might well be
a bronze statue by Lysippos. The proportions of head, trunk, and
legs, the pose of the feet, the attitude of the head turned away
from the leg that bears the weight, would , all support this con-
tention. And the resemblance of the whole figure to the
Lansdowne Herakles, pointed out by G. Rodenwaldt1, would go
to confirm it, if—as Prof. P. Gardner has urged2—the Herakles is
essentially Lysippian in character. On this showing we may
conclude that the Pompeian picture had as its direct ancestor a
Greek fresco dating from the age of Alexander the Great.

An Etruscan mirror recently acquired by the British Museum
and hitherto unpublished3 (pi. xvii) figures Ixion bound to a great
winged wheel in the early 'running' attitude4, which here denotes
rapid revolution. He is nude except for the fillet about his hair
and the bands that fasten him to the eight-spoked wheel. The
flower twice introduced between adjacent spokes serves as a stop-
gap and has no special significance. The mirror is referred by
Mr H. B. Walters to the third or possibly to the fourth century B.C.
The ivy-wreath and the rendering of hands, feet, etc. suffice to
prove that it is archaistic, not archaic.

Finally, a Roman sarcophagus, found in a brick sepulchral
monument behind the second mile-stone on the Via Appia Nuova
and now in the Galleria dei Candelabri of the Vatican, has its right
end decorated with reliefs symbolic of the Under-world (fig. 148)5.

1 G. Rodenwaldt Die Komposition der pompejanischen Wandgemdlde Berlin 1909
p. 178.

2 P. Gardner in the Journ. Hell. Stud. 1903 xxiii. 128 ff., 1905 xxv. 240, 256. The
attribution of this type to Lysippos was first suggested by A. Michaelis Ancient Marbles
in Great Britain trans. C. A. M. Fennell Cambridge 1882 p. 45 r. B. Graef in the Rom.
Mitth. 1889 iv. 1896°. referred it to Skopas; Furtwangler Masterpieces of Gk. Sculpt.
p. 2966°., to Skopas in his first or Polyclitan period ; A. Kalkmann Die Proportionen des
Gesichts in der griechischeit Kunst Berlin 1893 p. 60 n. 3, to Polykleitos himself.

3 Exhibited now in Case C of the Bronze Room at the British Museum.

4 See E. Schmidt 'Der Knielauf in the Miinchener archdologische Studien Miinchen
1909 pp. 249—398.

5 Wien. Vorlegebl. B pi. 11, 3 c, Helbig Guide Class. Ant. Rome i. 282 ff. no. 399.