Speaker 1:	I'm sure that many of you can imagine what's going through my mind at this moment. When I eagerly accepted William's invitation many months ago, it was not in the expectation of delivering a memorial to Helen North, but much more in the hope of catching up with her after several years of seeing her twinkling smile and hearing her warm voice asking me what I've been up to as she always did when we met. This is a somewhat somber occasion, but it is not a memorial as you heard. That will come next month here at Swarthmore. Rather, a tribute to Helen's inspiring teaching from one of her legion of devoted students. I'm very grateful to William and to Rosaria Munsen for the invitation to give this lecture. And actually, if I had given it two years ago when Rosaria first invited me, it would in fact have been in Helen's presence but, unfortunately, I was on leave in Germany that year.
	Those of you who are current Swarthmore students, I envy you because I had only half of the full Swarthmore experience coming here as a transfer student in my junior year. I would actually never have gotten into Swarthmore from my high school and I've always suspected that Helen had something to do with my being accepted as a transfer knowing that I was already committed to being a classics major. I had spent the year before I came here studying in Athens. But it was an amazingly rich two years. I think I'll turn that off until we get to the image. An amazingly rich two years intellectually, so I sometimes wonder how I managed to spend almost every waking hour in class or in McCabe Library reading Latin and Greek while the campus was convulsed by the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Kent State. 
	There are two people here in the audience to whom I am deeply grateful, Gil Rose and Julia Geiser. I arrived at Swarthmore as a terrible Hellenic snob, convinced that everything worth reading from the ancient world was written in Greek and that Latin was a nuisance one had to endure to be a classicist. But after reading Catullus and Horace with Gil Rose and Plautus and Virgil with Julia Geiser, I had acquired a love of Latin poetry that I have to this day. To my eternal shame and regret, I never studied with Martin Ostwald, though he did become a dear friend in later years and sort of pretended that I had been his student. In my first year, I was too intimidated to take his Greek philosophy honors seminar and in my last year he was away on sabbatical. 
	The overwhelming influence on me in those two years was Helen North, with whom I read Greek in every semester culminating in a one-on-one tutorial in my last semester to prepare me for the comprehensive exams. Even then, I think, virtually every department except Classics had done away with senior comps. 
	When I think back to Swarthmore, my most vivid images are of sitting in Helen's living room for four hours every week for an honors seminar on Greek tragedy and comedy in the spring of 1970. Helen wore her learning lighting and as she guided us gently but firmly through one of the greatest and most difficult works of Greek literature, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, we could tell that under that placid surface lay a hard won and profound understanding of the Greek language that we could only aspire to. To this day, though my research is in art and archeology, my favorite teaching is of Greek authors sitting around a seminar table, not in my living room, with a small group of very smart students wrestling with the text and always hearing Helen's voice in my head. 
	One session in her living room stands out in my memory. We arrived to find an elderly couple whom Helen introduced as one of her old teachers from Cornell, [Friedrich Salmson 00:04:47] and his wife, Lisa Lotta. We had no clue, of course, that this frail old man with a still thick German accent was one of the greatest classicists of the 20th century. But the warmth and solicitousness with which Helen showed him off to us and vice versa, struck me as one of the best things about academia in general and classics in particular, the tradition of learning passed on from one generation to the next. I soon learned that as a young man in Berlin, Salmson was said to have been the last pupil of [foreign language 00:05:26] still considered the greatest philologist of all time, a god in our field. 
	I thought about how Greek heroes would trace their descent over several generations back to a god, usually Zeus, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of academic genealogy at work here. I, a pupil of Helen North, she of Salmson, and he of Villamovits. Therefore, I was descended from a god in the fourth generation. Since we were reading The Agamemnon, Helen had asked him to speak to us about one of the most difficult of it's choral odes. It was more of a meditation, really, as if spoken by the Delphic oracle if the oracle had been German. At the end, the spell was broken only when one brave student raised her hand and said, "That was fascinating, Professor Salmson. But who is [Zois 00:06:28]?"
	In later years, I sometimes thought I had strayed far from Helen's teaching when I became an archeologist. But I soon realized that we had more in common than I thought. Helen, of course, became famous for her book [Sophrosyne 00:06:53], as you just heard, published in 1966, a heavily re-worked version of her Cornell dissertation of 20 years earlier. Rarely has a classical scholar embodied her own research as perfectly as in Helen's case. But in the late '70s she published a second, less often cited book based on the Martin lectures delivered at Oberlin under the title, "From Myth to Icon: Reflections of Greek Ethical Doctrine in Literature and Art." 
	When I first picked up this book several years after finishing my own dissertation, I was astonished to learn something about Helen that had entirely escaped me at Swarthmore, although William, you said this was obvious to you, but evidently not to me, that she, too had a passionate interest in the visual arts including the reception of classical antiquity in the art of the middle ages and the renaissance. In fact, part of this book are closely related to the topic of my dissertation on personifications of abstract concepts in Greek art. Helen had spent extended periods of time in both Athens and Rome, and was steeped in the monuments with a keen eye and an amazing visual memory. Though she modestly claims that the art historical forays in this book are those of an amateur, they are, in fact, the fruits of extraordinary learning. 
	One of the goals of that book was to trace the imagery of personified virtues, figures like Lustitia Justice Temperantia, which seems to be the closest Latin equivalent to Sophrosyne or modestia from antiquity through the middle ages to the renaissance. My dissertation stopped in 400 B.C. but it also focused on the depiction of such personifications, ethical personifications, including several that Helen includes in her discussion of early Greek poetry like [Unomia 00:09:08], good order, and [Udimonia 00:09:11], happiness. Though she does not refer to them, I'm sure she was well aware that we find the earliest images of many of these figures in ancient art in the last few decades of the fifth century B.C. at Athens, part of the phenomenon that her teacher Salmson famously described as intellectual experiments of the Greek enlightenment, the title of his 1975 book. 
	Unomia is one virtue that particularly interested Helen in the epigraph of her chapter on rhetoric and education is the invocation to Unomia [foreign language 00:09:54], good order sound of mind, in Bacilidies Ode 13, written perhaps about 460. Note that [foreign language 00:10:05] or [foreign language 00:10:06] is the adjective from which the noun [sophrosune 00:10:10] is formed. She points out that Bacilidies older contemporary Pindar had used the identical phrase [foreign language 00:10:20] in his first pion and that both poets would have been aware of the genealogy in Hicieds theologony that makes Unomia along with DK, justice and Aranei Peace, the daughters of Zeus by the goddess Themnus, or Righteousness. For Hecied, they are known collectively as the Horei or seasons. In Athens, however, there was also a tradition that detached Unomia from her two sisters and gave her an even more political coloring, something like good government, particularly in a long ode in praise of Unomia by the Athenian law give and poet, Solon, at the turn of the seventh century. In her analysis of Unomia, Helen draws a straight line from Solon all the way down to attic orators and philosophers of the fourth century. 
	With that, I would like to turn to some images. I would only like to add to this picture the sudden flowering of political personifications like Unomia in the visual arts of the last two decades of the fifth century in my view as part of a larger project of Athenian pride and civic identity during the Peloponnesian war years. A fine example is this exquisite white ground lekythos that has traveled far from its Athenian homeland to end up in Kansas City. The setting is what Lucila Burn has aptly called a paradise garden representing a kind of an alluring escapism from the grim realities of the war then raging. 
	Of particular interest for my topic this afternoon is that the scene centers on a divine child tended by a benevolent goddess. Inscriptions help us understand the scene but only up to a point. The woman just behind the seated goddess is labeled Patho, persuasion, suggesting that the goddess, whose name is lost, was probably Aphrodite since these two are almost inseparable on vases of the fifth century. I show you for comparison the famous [inaudible 00:12:49] in Boston with Parus leading Helen away as if she were his new bride. Aphrodite fusses over Helen's veil and Patho stands just behind the goddess. 
	The baby, on our vase, does have a name but unfortunately the letters are garbled and the reading has been debated since the vase was first published some 40 years ago. The latest reading is [foreign language 00:13:18], an otherwise unattested name in Athens. We may never know who he is but to judge from the divine women around him, he is a very special child. Besides Aphrodite and Patho, there is Untheya, blooming one, at the left and to the right of the baby gathering fruit off a tree, Unomia, along with Pidya, playfulness, sorry, Pidya has been cut off of this slide. But Unomia is the one who I think is important for us. Aphrodite we should remember though most familiar as the goddess of love, was also a civic goddess at Athens, especially in her guise as Pandemos, she who brings all the demos, the citizenry, together. 
	The message of the vase seems to be that the newborn, whoever he is, will bring Athens an age of prosperity and fruitfulness, well governed, and enjoying the gods' favor. This is also the message of a far more elaborate vase and one with easier to read inscriptions that I would like to share with you in the remainder of this talk. It is one that I think would have fascinated Helen North for a very particular reasons. In fact, she may well have known of it, though we never had a chance to discuss it. 
	In her chapter on the virtues praised by Greek orators of the fourth century B.C., Helen discusses the concept of Soteria, deliverance, preservation, safety, and I expect that it was of special interest to her Catholic faith that centuries later, in a Christian context, the word Soteria would come to hold a position of central importance as salvation. If she had looked for a visual image of Soteria personified, she would have found very slim pickings. Only a mosaic from a house at Antioch in southern Turkey of the late Roman period with Soteria as a regal woman at the center of a bathing facility. We shall return to this image later on.
	I think it would have delighted Helen to know that we now have an image of Soteria on an extraordinary beautiful if fragmentary vase from the end of the fifth century B.C., the very period when the orators she discusses as well as Athenian historians and tragedians often speak about the concept of Soteria. Now, this vase is not entirely unknown and I certainly did not discover it. But the photo I just showed you of the lid is the culmination of an often frustrating 35 year scholar odyssey that I'd like to share with you briefly.
	Soon after I submitted my dissertation at the end of 1976, there appeared a brief report less than a page in a Greek journal of the excavation of a tomb in downtown Athens that yielded several vases of exceptional interest among the grave goods. The excavator, Olga Alexandrie, who would go on to become director of the National Archeological Museum, only provided a few murky detail photos but remarked that one of the vases, a red figure pixus, or a little toiletry box with part of its lid, had two scenes relating to the hero, Erichthonius, on the body and on the lid. She did us one great service by transcribing all of the 19 inscriptions that could still be read. The list of names included no fewer than two previously unattested personifications, Soteria and Basileia, or kingship. 
	For someone like me who had just written a whole dissertation on personifications in Greek art, this was a pretty exciting discovery, but also maddening since the one published photo did not appear to show either of these figures and the vase itself was likely to disappear into one of the many storerooms of the Greek Archeological Service. The only home was a fuller publication. The excavation report noted that the vases from the tomb would be published by one Mary [Zafuro Pulu 00:18:06], whom I took to be a graduate student working on the dig. Over the years, I checked periodically to see whether there was a new publication of the pixus, but to no avail.
	During the 1980s the great Lexicon [foreign language 00:18:24] or LIMC, a vast encyclopedia of mythological imagery compiled by an international team of hundreds of scholars began appearing at regular intervals with a new volume every other year. In fact, my first job out of graduate school had been as a research associate on this project at Rutgers, years before the first volume appeared. And sure enough, the pixus appeared in a few entries in the LIMC. Here you see the poor photographs. Always written by Mary Zafuro Pulu and accompanied by a couple of new photos slightly different from those in the original publication, but never showing the whole vase. 
	In 1993, while I was living in Athens at the American School of Classical Studies, a revised version of my dissertation was published in Switzerland, the full 17 years later but still not quite as long as it took Helen. In revising it, I was able to include the new information provided by the pixus but could only reproduce a detail from the LIMC. Still, living in Athens I had the bright idea to see if I could track down Mary Zafuro Pulu, and indeed I found her now working in an office job in the Ministry of Culture. 
	Brandishing a copy of my new book to establish my bona fidas, I paid a call on her. After first chastising me for reproducing the same old photo without her permission, she did reluctantly open a draw and pull out a full set of black and white photos of the pixus and sheaf of notes that she had evidently compiled over the past 17 years for her publication. With that, our interview was abruptly ended. 
	We now fast forward 15 years to early 2008, when I had been invited by the Onassis Cultural Center in New York to serve as Guest Curator of an exhibition that eventually carried the title, "Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens." Although the concept of the exhibition to explore women's prominent religious lives in Athens as a counterpoint to their absence from the political process and their supposed seclusion in the home was mine, the director of the National Archeological Museum, Dr. Nikos Colsace, had kindly agreed to act as co-curator, which would facilitate greatly bringing to New York precious objects from various Greek and foreign museums. As the object list began to take shape, I suddenly thought of that pixus, not this time for its personifications, but for the astonishing depiction, which I had never actually seen of the three mythological heroins, the so-called daughter of [Cecrops 00:21:36] being punished by the goddess Athena. More on this story in a moment.
	Attic heroins and their cults were to be one of the key themes of the exhibition. And of course, secretly, I was thinking what a coup it would be to put on display in New York an important vase that no scholar had laid eyes on since it came out of the ground almost 35 years before. To my amazement, Nikos Calsace wrote in an email that the pixus would indeed come to New York. But as it turned out, that was only half the battle. On my next visit to Athens to plan the exhibition, I mentioned the pixus to Calsace and asked whether we should ask Mary Zafuro Pulu to write the catalog entry, assuming she could still be found. He answered casually she's right here. She now works in the bronzes department of the National Museum. And would I like to see her? 
	He picked up the phone and five minutes later she appeared. To my shock and dismay, the young woman I had met 15 years ago in the ministry was now an old hag. Hair disheveled. Sorry, not to be sexist here, but really. She was wearing a ratty old t-shirt, jeans. Now, I knew that Greek curators are usually more casually dressed than the fashion plates you find working in American museums, but clearly there was something amiss. In the best modern Greek I could summon, I said, "Isn't it wonderful that your pixus will be in our exhibition?" She didn't speak, just a little nod. "And you'll write the entry for the catalog as long as you like." Another little nod. "And we'll do a new set of colored photos showing all the figures." "Oh, no!" She roared. I said, "What?" "Oh, no! Just one detail photo and no lid." The refusal of the lid was a crushing blow since one of the most amazing features of this vase is the juxtaposition of two scenes from the same myth on different parts of the vase, an almost unparalleled phenomenon. 
	In that moment, I understood how wrong I had been thinking that the opportunity to publish the vase fully in our catalog would lift the burden of responsibility that had been weighing on Mary Zafuro Pulu for 35 years. Just the opposite was true. The pixus, I realized, was perhaps all she had in life and if she let go of it, put it out there in a publication, she would be bereft. Later, I pleaded with Calsace, pointing out that the pixus did not belong to Miss Zafuro Pulu but rather to the Hellenic democracy and furthermore he was her boss. But he simply shook his head and said, "There's nothing I can do."
	And so the pixus, sans lid, came to New York at the end of 2008. Here, you see it as it was installed in the exhibition. Before I ever got to see it, it was installed in a case against a wall so you could not see much more than what was already in the published photographs. And Mary Zafuro Pulu wrote the longest entry in the catalog with an excellent description of the piece, but only allowed us one tantalizing detail photo. She forced us to print at the end of the entry, "unpublished, being prepared for publication by the author of the entry." But that's not the end of the story, either. The Onassis Center has a strict policy of no photography, even by the curator. So there was no chance of capturing at least a little more of the vase on film. 
	Meanwhile, however, the show was well received in New York and a snap decision was made to transfer the whole thing to the National Museum in Athens in the summer of 2009, even supplemented by additional pieces from the museum's collections and with catalog translated into Greek, the language in which much of it had been written in the first place. To be honest, the show looked far better in Athens in large light filled galleries so unlike the low ceiling basement gallery of the Onassis Center in New York that some of you may know. 
	A few days after the opening in Athens, I went back with some friends and students from the American School and was surprised to see a tourist photographing one of the objects. I checked with the guard and was told there was no restrictions on taking pictures direct orders from Dr. Calsace himself. I was even more surprised to see the pixus complete with its lid. Thus, I'm able to show you what remains of the lid, though more than half the cylindrical body remains unillustrated. I suspect that if Mary Zafuro Pulu knew I was showing you her pixus lid, she would have a fatal stroke and the publication rights would pass to her heirs, who for all I know now run a [foreign language 00:27:20] stand in Athens. But this is the way things work in Greek archeology and you wonder why the country is on the verge of falling apart. 
	What then makes this long-awaited object so special? There is, of course, the exquisitely delicate painting style, which can be connected with the hand of the last great master of the attic red figure style, known as the Mitius painter because the anonymous painter collaborated with a potter named Mitius who signed their masterpiece this hydria that once belonged to Lord William Hamilton is now in the British Museum. He was the finest of several painters active in Athens in the years 420 to 400. The best vases of this period were long ago dubbed by German scholars the rich style because aside from the elegance of the drawing, some painters experimented with new techniques for enriching the surface with color and texture. Hence, the dazzling gleam of [Nikae's 00:28:33] golden wings and the ivy berries in Cecrops' hair, which are little globs of clay. 
	The imagery of our pixus is not unrelated to Athens desperate struggle for survival during the war years, her longing for Soteria. For the iconographer of Greek art, the unique fascination of this vase is, as I said, that it coordinates the scenes on the body and on the lid into a kind of grand program revolving around the charter myth that proclaimed the Athenians superiority over their Peloponnesian enemies. The claim is what they called [autochthany 00:29:19] that the Athenian people were indigenous to the land of Attica, not immigrants like the Spartans, as symbolized by the birth of two of their earliest kings out of the very soil of Athens. 
	The earlier of those kings is Cecrops, whose autochthany is evident in his snakey lower body and, in fact, we have him twice on this vase. Right? Both times with the snakey body. The other is Erichthonius, the baby in the whicker basket on the body of our pixus. The story, as many of you well know, is that Hiphistoce once conceived a passion for Athena and chased the virgin goddess around the acropolis until he could contain his lust no longer and ejaculated on the ground. The soil thus fertilized produced this baby boy who would one day be king of Athens under the name Erichthius and ancestor of the whole Athenian race. 
	On earlier classical vases a half century before our pixus, the moment of Erichthonius' birth is always roughly the same. Mother earth, gay, or gaia, rising up out of herself and presenting the newborn to his foster mother, Athena. Hiphistoce as the proud father, often observes from close by. The irony that this happy family gathering, what one commentator has called a Greek nativity, the irony of this in light of the back story was surely not lost on the Athenian viewer, but what mattered most in these years after the Persian wars and with Athens' rise to hegemony in the Aegean was the Athenians claim to autochthany, to being routed since time immemorial in the soil of Attica. The popularity of this motif increases markedly during the last third of the fifth century, the Peloponnesian war years. But whereas the earlier vases generally lacked any indication of a physical setting, those of the late fifth century make more explicit reference to the Acropolis. And ornate spot lekythos in Cleveland brings in the three daughters of Cecrops, eagerly watching as if from behind the rocky slope of the citadel. 
	This is a proleptic reference to the next stage of the story when Athena will entrust the newborn baby to these girls with strict instructions not to peak into his crib. The secret she does not want them to see is that she has placed snakes in the basket, good snakes to protect the infant. When the girls' curiosity gets the better of them and they disobey the goddess, they feel the full force of Athena's wrath. In one version, two of the three [Aglouris 00:32:30] and [Hersee 00:32:31] leap in a frenzy from the acropolis while the third, more obedient sister, Pendrosis, mourns their loss.
	The earliest known depiction of Athena punishing the daughters of Cecrops appears on a crater now in the San Antonio Museum of Art. By a strange twist of fate, I borrowed this vase from the collector who then owned it for the first exhibition that I organized in New Orleans in 1981. No wonder it took my breath away when I first saw the ferocious power of Athena on the pixus from Athens as she lunges at one of the girls and the astonishing motif of two enormous snakes as they literally coil themselves around the baby's basket, like a miniature precursor of the [inaudible 00:33:27] Group. 
	Sadly, I cannot show you what the rest of the body of the pixus looks like, as it remains so poorly published, but I am immensely grateful to Jacquelyn Clemmins, a graduate student at John's Hopkins for making this rollout drawing, piecing together the published detail photos and the inscriptions recorded by the excavator. Framing the violent scene on the right hand side is a quiet gathering of heroes, heroines, and minor divinities only loosely connected to the story of Erichthonius. These include [foreign language 00:34:10] and perhaps most interestingly, Basileia, the personification of kingship. They would've been disposed in casual poses in an idyllic landscape like the figures of the subsidiary freeze of the Mitius painters name vase in London that we saw earlier. 
	A more vexing question is how to restore the nearly half of the lid that is now lost? Once again, I'm grateful to Jacquelyn for this skilled visualization. I had always assumed that it must have depicted the birth of Erichthonius, forming a kind of cycle with the scene on the body. First, the child emerging from the earth and received by his foster mother as she's completed the scene here. And then the sequel with Erichthonius in his basket and Athena punishing the girls to whom he was entrusted on the body. As I've suggested, this cycle is expressed more subtly on other vases of the period like the Cleveland, squat lekythos, from which she has borrowed the motif of the three daughters of Cecrops. Our pixus would be the first known vase on which the two separate compositions, lid and body, are devoted to two key moments in the myth and two of the key figures are repeated, Athena and Cecrops, father of the disobedient daughters. 
	But, re-reading Mary Zafuro Pulu's catalog entry, I was surprised to see that she suggests a bold and original alternative. She still sees the vase as an Erichthonius cycle, but with the scene on the lid coming after that on the body and not before. "It would have shone," she writes, "The episode after Athena has taken basket and baby back from the Cecropids and given it to another group of goddesses such as nymphs or [foreign language 00:36:25], the graces, to care for." This may remind you of the story of the baby Dionysus who was given to the nymphs of Nysia to raise.
	The main problem I see with her interpretation is that none of our sources tell us what became of baby Erichthonius after he lost his first guardians, the daughters of Cecrops, though presumably Athena made some other arrangements. Nor do any of our surviving vases pick up the story at this point. All we have to go on in restoring the scene is that Athena's gaze is clearly directed downward while both Cecrops and Basilei look intently to the right here, toward the birth of the baby, and showing that something of interest must be going on here. That, and the first five letters of Erichthonius' name, which can be seen here, Erich, just beside Athena's head. All this proves that he must have been there below her. Guided by other vases of the same period, even the same workshop, we have restored the scene as Mother Earth presenting the baby to Athena. 
	This still leaves a number of intriguing questions. Why the magnificent chariot driven by Nikae, here occupying a bit portion of the lid? Who is the woman labeled Basilei reaching excitedly toward the now missing baby Erichthonius? And lastly, what Helen North would most want to know, what is the meaning of Soteria in this context depicted only from the waist up and seemingly oblivious of the momentous events taking place just below? I have no great insight into the motif of the golden winged Nikae driving a chariot, which is repeated on both lid and body except to say that the goddess of victory is inordinately ... So, you see here there was the chariot, sorry, here, at one end of the body and as well on the lid, both times driven by Nikae. 
	All I can say is that the goddess of victory is inordinately popular in the art of the Peloponnesian War years as if the Athenians thought they could will themselves to win the war if they filled their city with her image. A temple to Nikae, expressed as Athena Nikae had just gone up on the acropolis when our pixus was made with it's famous parapet crowded with carved Nikae bringing sacrificial bowls, setting up trophies, and attending the city's patron goddess. Ever since the iconic freeze of the Parthenon with it's thrilling teams of galloping horses, this motif had become a favorite with the vase painters as well. 
	Basilei is a much more complex question, especially since this is the first and perhaps only depiction of a figure by this name. It is further complicated by the presence of Basileia on the body of the vase. You'll remember that one of the freeze on the body was Basileia, kingship, and them Basilei witnessing the birth of the baby. This has led some to assume that they are synonymous, two versions of the same name. But I do not believe that a vase painter as meticulous as ours would refer to the same goddess by two different names. 
	Rather than a personification, Basilei seems to be a minor Attic heroine but one who is attested in just the period of our vase. There was a sanctuary ... I'm sorry. Here, just to remind you of the positions of Basilei and the inscription with Erichthonius' name. Right. There was a sanctuary near the Elysis River in the southwest part of the city sacred to the heroes Cadres, Nelius, and Basilei. We know that because this inscribes [inaudible 00:41:03], records the renting out of land in that sanctuary in the year 417. Since there were kings of Athens named Nelius and Cadres, the latter being the last attested king of Athens who sacrificed himself in battle to save the city, it is reasonable to think that Basilei was also part of Athenian royal genealogy and hence takes her place on the pixus among other members of a complex family tree that we can no longer fully reconstruct. 
	And what of Soteria? What first strikes the viewer is that she is in the scene but not really of it. In contrast to Basilei and Cecrops, who seem intently focused on what is happening to the right, namely the birth of Erichthonius, she looks off into the distance and appears only from the waist up as if rising from behind a hill or on another plane entirely. This is an artistic convention that has parallels on vases from the same workshop. A good example is this image of a figure who could be Soteria's evil twin sister, Eris, or strife, hovering above an elaborate scene of the judgment of Paris. Eris looks both backwards to the wedding of Pilius and Thetas, where she crashed the party and provoked the beauty contest that is being decided here, as well as looking ahead to the bitter strife of war that will be the ultimate result of this very contest. 
	So, too, Soteria. She looks into the future to the safety and protection of the city that the birth of this miraculous child as future ruler portends. The word soteria occurs in almost every Greek writer of the fifth century, with a range of meanings that include, according to Lidel and Scott, deliverance, preservations, safety, safe return, and security. To get a sense of the nuance of her meaning here, we would do well to look at the plays of Euripides, which belong, generally, to the period of our vase and often share with it an intense interest in the civic identify of the Athenians. 
	I would suggest one passage in particular that comes close in spirit to the scene here if not in subject matter. This is at the very end of Euripides children of Heracles produced in the early years of the Peloponnesian War and one of his most overtly political plays. Theseus, the archetypal just ruler of Athens, grants asylum to the children of the now dead hero, Heracles, who are pursued by their cousins, Theurgist, the very same villain Heracles had been forced to serve when he performed his 12 labors. In a bizarre twist, at the end of the play, when Euristhius has been defeated, he announces that he goes willingly to his death and in fulfillment of Apollo's oracle, will be buried at a shrine of Athena in Attica whence he will offer himself as a protector, Soterias, he calls himself, of the city from any invasion by the future descendants of Heracles. 
	This has been taken as a veiled reference to the annual Spartan invasions of Attica that were going on when the play was first staged. Theurgist chief adversary, [Alcameni 00:44:59], the mother of Heracles and grandmother of the orphan children, in the plays final speech, proclaims to the chorus of Athenians that they shall secure Soteria both for their city and for their descendants. In the time of Euripides, the Athenians often referred to themselves as descendants of Erichthius, that is, the king this baby will grow up to become. Thus, his birth heralds safety and salvation for his city and his people. Or so the Athenians fervently wanted to believe in the years when vases like our pixus were made.
	What so fascinated Helen in her book, "From Myth to Icon," was the ways in which ethical concepts first created by the Greeks took on different shades of meaning and different visual forms over the centuries into the early modern period. For Soteria, as I mentioned, the iconographical record is rather sparse, aside from our vase, there is only this beautiful mosaic from Antioch made some seven or eight centuries later. Inscriptions of the Roman period indicate that the word Soteria had come to mean bodily health and well being. So it is fitting that she adorns the floor of a bathing complex at Antioch. After that, the trail goes cold and there appears to be no image of her in Christian art as the personification of salvation. 
	As Helen modestly declared herself, quote, an amateur of art history, I would say the same of myself. But I can't resist ending this talk with an astonishing work of Baroque art with a puzzle that perhaps any real art historians in the audience can solve. Two weeks ago, during a visit to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, I came across this painting by Rubens entitled, "The Finding of Erichthonius." The panel has evidently been cut down from a much larger painting, what you see here is the whole of the painting as it is today, a much larger painting that must have included several more figures including all three of the daughters of Cecrops. 
	Instead, the picture is dominated by the one whom scholars have identified as  [Aglaurus 00:47:43] in arguing that Rubens' one and only source was [Avid's 00:47:46] metamorphoses for in Avid's account, both of her sisters, Pandrosus and Hersee, are obedient to Athena's command and only Aglaurus mocks them for their cowardice, [foreign language 00:48:05] and peaks into the basket. So far, so good. But I have not found any explanation for the grotesque depiction of Erichthonius as a chubby baby with snakes for legs. Surely, this does not come from Avid who clearly says that the girls see a snake stretched out beside the baby, the last line, [foreign language 00:48:36]. True, Greek artists loved composite creatures like the snake bodied Cecrops, but I wonder if Rubens was trying to go the ancients one better. 
	I like to think that Helen was as delighted as I was to stumble upon this painting during the week she spent at Oberlin in 1972, giving the Martin lectures. With her eagle eye and profound knowledge of the sources, she might well have a ready answer to this conundrum. We will all miss her sparkling company but the love of classical learning that she instilled in so many generations of Swarthmore students is perhaps her greatest legacy to the college and to all those whose lives she touched. Thank you very much.