Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Bias.
The gallery
Lucanian Nestoris: Melampus Healing the Daughters of Proetus
Unknown (Lucanian red-figure vase painter), c. 360 BC
This South Italian red-figure nestoris, painted around 360 BC and now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, stages the great deed of the seer-house into which Bias, son of Amythaon, was born. At the center the prophet Melampus, brother of Bias, performs the rite that cures the maddened daughters of Proetus, king of Argos, while Artemis presides and Dionysus and a satyr look on at the right; the seated priestess attends the two afflicted women. In the tradition followed by Apollodorus the brothers acted together, and for the cure Melampus demanded and won a third of the kingdom of Argos for himself and a third for Bias, so the scene marks the moment that knit Bias's Pylian line into the royal house of Argos and gave him his own share of the realm.