Although painters of pottery were heavily influenced by what other painters had painted and by the wishes of their customers, the ways in which they represent scenes reflect their own way of seeing the world, and the way in which they represent scenes involving the gods potentially allows us to say something about their personal religion. This chapter looks at the large pots painted in Apulia by the so-called Underworld Painter and argues that the way in which the Underworld Painter lays out scenes that involve gods’ interventions in the world (as in scenes of Gigantomachy, Melanippe, Dirke, Medea and of the Underworld) and the juxtaposition of those scenes with scenes of men and women offering libations or carrying objects associated with religious cult, allow us to say something about the religious assumptions that he is bringing with him, and in particular about the way in which he sees the gods of myth and the gods of cult as part of the same world.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

Exploration of Aeolian foundation traditions and the localizing of such traditions in both the eastern Aegean and Magna Graecia, and of the reflexivity and reciprocality of Aeolian ethnic identity that these mythic traditions entail.