A disguised Pentheus hiding in the British Museum?

During the last twenty-five years, two opposing trends have dominated over the debate about the relationship between mythological narratives in vase-painting and those in tragedy. On the one hand, there are those who regard the paintings as dependent upon works of literature; on the other hand, there are those who argue that the artistic tradition is fully self-explanatory with no need of any reference to any literature. This paper analyzes some cases, in which the whole phenomenon seems to be more complex, and to be inextricable from the part played both by painted pottery and by the theatre in the whole lives of those who were the public for these pots and these plays