Dipper with Fighting Animals

In 480 BC, according to Herodotus, lions came down at night on the army of the Persian king Xerxes as it marched through northern Greece, and attacked only the camels of the baggage train. Lions still lived in that corner of Greece then. There were none in Etruria. The painter of this dipper, working at Vulci a generation or so earlier, around 520 to 510 BC, probably knew them only from pictures on imported objects, yet he gave them a whole frieze.

Around the body a panther and three lions bring down a stag and a bull. Lower down, deer and stags run in a line, and over the horizontal handle a bird of prey holds a snake. The museum's label calls the vessel an attingitoio, a dipper for drawing wine from the bowl where it was mixed with water. Unlike the same painter's plate, with its demon and its myth, it carries no human figure at all.