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Take a simple instance from the work of Douris, the kylix in the Louvre, in the centre of which is painted Eos carrying the body of Memnon.

The mythologist, that is man in his early days of thinking, cannot conceive or name the abstract, empty “dawn.” The glow of morning is to him the print of unearthly yet human fingers. He images “dawn” as “Dawn,” in terms of humanity, that is of the one and only thing he inwardly felt and knew—himself. The dawn is for him a beautiful woman, and to complete her humanity, she is a mother. Literature, which is at first but story-telling, took up the tale, and knew that Eos the Dawn who rose in the East had a child of the East for her son, and mourned for him in his death, and carried him away for his burial.

The vase-painter is a mythologist too, and he takes a mythological story for his motive, but his art has other ends than that of the poet. He may have heard the story recited at a Panathenaic festival, just as he may have seen it painted on some Stoa or Lesche. But he does not illustrate it, does not translate from an alien art into his own. He takes the myth and lets his own art say what it and only it can say. He has seen in the human body the vision of a heavenly pattern; he gives us the grace of a bending body, the poise of a flying foot, the swiftness of straight lines, the majesty and poignancy of limbs stark in death. That is all, and, surely, enough.