The gate of the year

Red-figure painting on an Attic lekythos (oil vessel), dating to about 460 B.C., now in the Louvre Museum, Paris.
The figure represents the Trojan warrior Dolon, wearing a wolf skin. The episode is narrated in the Iliad (X, 333-336), where Dolon went overnight to the Greek campsite, but was intercepted by Odysseus and Diomedes, caught and killed. According to Louis Gernet (1968) the costume worn by the Trojan warrior recalls the wolf disguise proper of many Indo-European warrior “fraternities”, that should have existed also in archaic Greece, though no documentary evidence has remained. In the Homeric poems the warriors are often compared to wolves, of which they show the fierceness and courage during the fight. For example, the Myrmidons, warriors in the retinue of Achilles, were described as “wolves, raw-ravening beasts” (Iliad XVI, 155-156).

[Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lekythos_Dolon_Louvre_CA1802.jpg]




Human-Animal Transformation

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Red-figure painting on an Attic lekythos (oil vessel), dating to about 460 B.C., now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. The figure represents the Trojan warrior Dolon, wearing a wolf skin. The episode is narrated in the Iliad (X, 333-336), where Dolon went overnight to the Greek campsite, but was intercepted by Odysseus and Diomedes, caught and killed. According to Louis Gernet (1968) the costume worn by the Trojan warrior recalls the wolf disguise proper of many Indo-European warrior “fraternities”, that should have existed also in archaic Greece, though no documentary evidence has remained. In the Homeric poems the warriors are often compared to wolves, of which they show the fierceness and courage during the fight. For example, the Myrmidons, warriors in the retinue of Achilles, were described as “wolves, raw-ravening beasts” (Iliad XVI, 155-156). [Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lekythos_Dolon_Louvre_CA1802.jpg]