I just got one of these for my own, and I am happy to have it, but I'd rather tell everyone to go to page 3 of Jochen's
mythology thread for
his new-and-improved one, though Lars also has a nice one. What I can contribute is the very ambitious, and doubtless expensive, wall painting from Pompeii, from the plate in Pfuhl's
Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen (actually scanned from the one-volume English edition). The darker band across the middle is due to its being a double-spread plate, across a quarto book, so that it barely fits my flatbed scanner (which is 18 inches long); therefore, too, I have
had to reduce it to post it here. But ancient pictures of
Herakles and
Omphale are
rare. This one must have come from a very expensive house (the earliest digging at Pompeii recorded NOTHING), but its
style is
grossière, however painstaking, and the taste, even of the original, may not have pleased cultivated persons: perhaps Trimalchio would like it best.
The Lydian coin, on the contrary, is graceful and subtle, hard as it is to get a perfect one.
Pat L.
