Apulian Red-Figure Bell Krater (Main View, front)

The scene on the front of this Apulian red-figure bell-krater depicts a phlyax play, a type of farce parodying mythology, popular in the Greek colonies in South Italy in the 300s B.C. The actors wear a distinctive costume of mask, tights, padded tunic, and large artificial phallus. On a simple stage set, an actor costumed as an old man removes the lid of a chest to reveal a diminutive figure with a ram's head and a large erection. Looking bewildered, a second old man clasps the child's wrist. The back of the vase bears a typical scene of three standing youths.

The theatrical scene has been variously interpreted. It might represent a parody of the mythical birth of Erichthonios. In the myth, Hephaistos, the craftsman god, attempted to have sex with Athena. When she resisted, some of Hephaistos's semen fell on her leg. She wiped it off with a piece of wool and threw it away, accidentally impregnating Ge, the earth. The child who emerged, Erichthonios, was cared for by Athena and kept in a sacred basket on the Athenian Akropolis. In the theatrical version depicted on this vase, the elaborate doorway at the left of the stage could represent Athena's temple, and the ram's head on the child might allude to the wool in the story.

Another reading sees this image as a parody of the death of Pelias, king of Iolkhos, who refused to give up his throne after Jason successfully brought back the Golden Fleece. Medea, who had travelled back with Jason, persuaded Pelias's daughters that she could rejuvenate their aged father. To demonstrate, she cut up an old ram and put the parts into a boiling pot. From the water jumped a young animal. Pelias's daughters did the same to their father, only to kill him. On this vase, perhaps, the two elderly men have tried to rejuvenate one of their companions, only for him to emerge as a ram-headed youth.