awing and subject, as well as their inferior technique (fig.
35).

[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Etruscan Amphora imitating Greek style; parting
scene of Alcestis and Admetus, with Etruscan inscriptions.]

At a later date (4th-3rd century B.C.) they began to copy red-figured
vases with similarly unsuccessful results. With the exception of a small
class of a somewhat ambitious character made at Falerii (Civita
Castellana), of which there is a good example in the British Museum with
the subject of the infant Heracles strangling the serpents, they are all
marked by their inferior material and finish and their bizarre
decoration. The style is often repulsive and disagreeable, as well as
ineffective, and the grim Etruscan deities, such as Charun, are
generally introduced. Some of these vases have painted inscriptions in
the Etruscan alphabet. The latest specimens positively degenerate into
barbarism.

Painted vases of native manufacture are also found in the extreme south
of Italy and have been attributed to the indigenous races of the
Peucetians and Messapians; their decoration is partly geometrical,
partly in conventional plant forms, and is the result of natural
development rather than of imitation of Greek types. Some of the shapes
are characteristic, especially a large four-handled _krater_. They cover
the period 600-450 B.C., after which they were ousted by the
Graeco-Italian productions we have already described.

ROMAN POTTERY.--Roman vases are far inferior to Greek; the shapes are
less artistic, and the decoration, though sometimes not without merits
of its own, owes most of its success to the imitation or adaptation of
motives learnt from earlier Grecian, Egyptian or Syrian potters. They
required only the skill of the potter for their completion, and, being
made by processes largely mechanical, they are altogether on a lower
scale of artistic production.

It has been noted that during a certain period--namely, the 3rd and 2nd
centuries B.C.--ceramic art had reached the same stage of evolution all
round the Mediterranean, painted pottery had been ousted by metal-work,
and such vases as continued to be made were practically imitations of
metal both in Greece and Italy. These latter we must regard as
representing ordinary household pottery, or as supplying to those who
could not afford to adorn their houses and temples with costly works in
metal, a humble but fairly efficient substitute. There is a terra-cotta
bowl o