Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Amythaon.
The gallery
Corinthian column krater of the Amphiaraos Painter (the "Amphiaraos Krater"): funeral games of Pelias
Amphiaraos Painter (Unknown), c. 570–560 BC
This Late Corinthian red-ground column krater (formerly Berlin Antikensammlung F1655, lost in 1945 and since held by the State Historical Museum in Moscow) is the masterpiece of the painter who takes his name from it. One side shows the departure of the seer Amphiaraos; the reverse and handle zones stage the funeral games held for Pelias — a wrestling match and a chariot race — with the figures labelled by painted inscriptions in the Corinthian alphabet. These games are the great public event of Amythaon's own family: Pelias and his brother Neleus were sons of Amythaon's mother Tyro, and the named competitors and judges (among them Amythaon's brother Pheres, alongside Akastos, Argeios, Euphemos and Kastor) are his close kin. The vase is the most important early visual witness to the saga of the children of Tyro, the Aeolid house to which Amythaon belongs, and a cornerstone document of named-figure narrative in archaic Greek vase painting.
The Encounter of Jason and Pelias (House of the Golden Cupids, Pompeii)
Unknown (Roman wall painter), before AD 79
A Roman fresco on the east wall of exedra g in the House of the Golden Cupids (regio VI.16.7) at Pompeii, sealed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. It depicts the fateful meeting at Iolcus between the usurping king Pelias and the young Jason, who arrives wearing a single sandal — the omen Pelias had been warned of. This is the episode in which Amythaon plays his one recorded narrative role: in the tradition he travels to Iolcus to back his nephew Jason's claim and his petition before Pelias, standing as one of the Aeolid kinsmen of Iolcus (brother of Jason's father Aeson). The painting is among the best-preserved Pompeian treatments of the Argonautic prelude and shows how the dynastic conflict of Tyro's descendants, Amythaon's family, was still being staged on Roman house walls centuries later.