Hydria with Herakles and Geryon

At the western edge of the Greek world, beyond the strait where the Mediterranean meets the ocean, lived Geryon, a giant with three bodies joined at the waist, who kept a herd of red cattle. Fetching those cattle was one of the labours of Herakles. On the belly of this water jar Lydos painted the fight. Geryon comes on as three armed warriors behind a wall of round shields, and his herdsman Eurytion already lies fallen. Above, on the shoulder, a siren sits between two lions.

Specialists count the jar among Lydos's early works, from around the middle of the 6th century BC. In the same century the Sicilian poet Stesichoros told the story at length, and fragments of his poem, recovered from an Egyptian papyrus published in 1967, give Geryon a voice of his own as he weighs his death before the battle. The jar probably comes from a tomb at Cerveteri, in Etruria.