A scene from mythology decorates this vase. On the left, Persephone rises from an opening in the earth, wearing a necklace and a crown. Persephone is the bride of Hades, lord of the underworld. This scene is rather the opposite of a wedding; instead of going to her husband's house, Persephone is coming back from the underworld to rejoin her mother Demeter; she stands to the right, holding a staff. In front of Demeter, Hekate, a goddess of darkness and of the earth, lights the way with two torches. The male figure facing straight out at us is Hermes, a god of transitions and journeys. He is one of the few who know the entrances to the underworld, and he is responsible for taking the dead there. Here he is bringing Persephone out. Persephone did not want to marry Hades or live in the gloomy underworld. She stayed with him there for part of the year, and spent the rest of the time with her mother. The Greeks used this story to explain the alternation of seasons in the agricultural year. When Persephone is away, Demeter mourns; the earth seems dead and nothing grows. When she returns, Demeter makes plants spring up in her happiness.

There is nothing overtly supernatural about the outcrop of earth from which Persephone rises; she looks as though she were coming up a flight of underground stairs. For the Greeks, the world of myth was present in the very ground they walked on. The gods lived on Olympus, a mountain in northern Greece, and routes to the underworld ran from specific openings in the earth.