‘Dread-yelping’ has to be my favorite ancient epithet (or translation of one). That’s how Homer describes Skylla, one of the nasties that heroic Odysseus encountered on his circuitous journey home from Troy.
She lurked in a cave along the Straits of Messina (still a treacherous seeming waterway between Sicily and the mainland), tempting sailors with her beautiful upper half then demolishing them with the twelve dangerously bendy, toothy legs that made up her lower body. Typically they are imagined artistically as terminating in dog heads. (Freud could have a field day with such toothy, man-eating monster crotches…).
The snapping, snarling canines are out in full force in this magnificent fragment in Basel – lunging forward from Skylla’s writhing lower body, all in contrast from her serene face and bodacious torso (arms raised to do some boulder-hurling). The dogs seems just as interested in those delightful sea-creatures as the evading hero, who’s foot makes an appearance in the upper left…
(I wish – selfishly because it’s local for me – Basel’s Antikensammlung would have a big exhibition on vase fragments soon!! In a little room, no need to box up the sculptures….They certainly have some bangers already in their collection, and others abound in collections of local privates and dealers…Who’s with me?!)
