the vase scholar sir john beazley wrote in 1918 in "attic red-figured vases in american museums" (p. 18): "the best of [epiktetos] is in his plates. you cannot draw better, you can only draw differently. epiktetos' people are all lightness and fairy grace, as if they belonged to a world where passion and pain were unknown, to those 'woods of athens' where oberon reigned in the days before 'the middle summer's spring'".