Aurora Krater (Eos and Kephalos)

In Greek myth Eos, the Dawn, rose each morning in her chariot and had a habit of carrying off handsome young mortals. On the main side of this big wine-mixing bowl she drives a four-horse chariot with a youth she has seized. A winged female figure leads the horses, and the museum's label calls her a Lasa, one of the winged spirits of Etruscan religion. Geese fly overhead, and a sea monster and a dolphin swim below. The label names the youth as Kephalos, a hunter Eos fell in love with, and scholars have also suggested Tithonos or Orion, two other mortals she took.

On the other side a mortal takes a goddess. The hero Peleus wrestles the sea nymph Thetis, who changed her shape again and again as he held on, and two of her companions run off. Their son would be Achilles. Around the neck, griffins attack a bull on one side and a stag on the other. The krater was painted at Falerii in the second quarter of the 4th century BC and buried in tomb 4 of the Colonnette cemetery there.