This paper attempts to investigate the existence of performative rituals—such as processions, songs, dances, dramatic enactments of divine myths and genealogies—in sanctuaries of Asklepios during the Roman Imperial period in Greece. Because of their long life and their well-documented ritual practice, the sanctuaries of Athens, Epidauros, and Messene have been selected as case studies. Archaeological, literary, and epigraphical sources are used to identify the nature of the ritual performed, and to assign to them a topographical space within the sacred precinct. The period under consideration mostly coincides with the reign of the Antonine emperors, when the relatively peaceful environment allowed for an artistic revival, and cultural phenomena such as the Second Sophistic promoted the reappropriation of ancient Greek tradition and a renewed continuity with it, despite the historical discontinuity. Wealthy patrons belonging to the educated elite and holding the highest offices within the imperial bureaucracy were often responsible for the refoundation of sacred buildings, and of long-forgotten religious festivals. In this context, the promotion of performative spaces and rituals in the sanctuaries of Asklepios is interpreted as a product of the cultural and social environment of the second and early third centuries in Greece.

To άρθρο αυτό επιχειρεί να ερευνήσει την ύπαρξη επιτελεστικών τελετών -όπως πομπές, ύμνοι, χοροί, σραματικές αναπαραστάσεις θεïκών μύθων και γενεαλογιών- στα ιερά του Aσκληπιού κατά τη σιάρκεια της ρωμαïκής αυτοκρατορικής περιόσου στην Eλλάσα. Tα ιερά της Aθήνας, της Eπισαύρου και της Μεσσήνης επιλέχθηκαν ως περιπτώσεις έρευνας εξαιτίας της μακράς χρήσης τους και των καλά τεκμηριομένων τελετουργικών πρακτικών τους. Γίνεται χρήση αρχαιολογικών καταλοίπων και φιλολογικών και επιγραφικών πηγών προκειμένου να αναγνωριστεί η φύση των τελετών που πραγματοποιούνταν στα ιερά αυτά καθώς και να προσδιοριστεί τοπογραφικά η θέση των τελετών αυτών στο χώρο του τεμένους. H εν λόγω περίοδος συμπίπτει σε μεγάλο βαθμό με τη βασιλεία των Aντωνίνων κατά τη διάρκεια της οποίας το σχετικά ειρηνικό περιβάλλον επέτρεψε μία καλλιτεχνική αναγέννηση. Πολιτιστικά φαινόμενα όΠως η Δεύτερη Σοφιστική προώθησαν την επανοικειοποιήση της αρχαίας Eλληνικήσ παράδοσης και την ανανεωμένη ςυνέχειά της, παρά την ιστορική ασυνέχειά της. Eύποροι πάτρονες, μέλη της πεπαιδευμένης αριστοκρατίας και κάτοχοι των υψηλότερων αξιωμάτων της αυτοκρατορικής γραφειοκρατίας, ήταν συχνά υπεύθυνοι για την επανίδρυση ιερών κτιρίων, και θρησκευτικών εορτών ξεχασμένων για πολύ καιρό. Μέσα σε αυτό το πλαίσιο, η προώθηση επιτελεστικών χώρων και τελετουργιών στα ιερά του Aσκληπιού ερμηνεύεται ως απόρροια του πολιτιστικού και κοινωνικού περιβάλλοντοσ του δεύτερου και πρώιμου τρίτου αιώνα στην Eλλάδα.

The fine white-slipped pottery decorated in a lively East Greek style which was first found in quantity at Naucratis in Egypt was soon dubbed ‘Naucratite’ and considered the local product of Greek craftsmen. Subsequent excavations on the island of Chios showed that the same pottery and the same techniques were known there from Late Geometric times, long before the Greek settlement at Naucratis, and more recent excavations there have made the Chian character of the pottery even clearer, and have carried the story on into Hellenistic times. The pottery was promptly therefore rechristened ‘Chian’. Dissenting voices have, however, been raised in support of the theory that Chian daughter-factories in Naucratis produced fine pottery for dedication there, particularly those vases embellished with inscriptions which had been painted before their firing and which named both dedicator and deity. This factor has complicated the issue far more than the Arkesilas Vase did the similar problem of ‘Cyrenaic’ and Laconian vases, which was neatly solved by the British excavations at Sparta. But there are also other complicating factors, some of which have not been openly discussed as yet, which it is my purpose to record here.

1. During a visit to Perachora in April 1975 a new fragment of the runnel or water channel running from the top of the deep shafts to the storage chambers was observed. It consists of a fragmentary block of the local hard limestone, with a partly preserved water-proof lining. It had evidently been ploughed up from the field immediately to the north of the easternmost deep shaft. The total original width of the block was 0·32 m. The original length is not preserved. It has now been taken to the Perachora museum.

The Pelasgian plain is bounded on the east by the foothills of Pelion and Ossa, which rise abruptly from the marshy flats. Among these hills, at the head of a secluded valley some twenty km. from Larisa, lies the modern village of Marmáriane. On the northern side of this valley, at a point about twenty minutes' walk below the village, rises a conspicuous table-topped mound, surmounted by a cornfield from which the grassy slopes fall steeply away.

New excavations were undertaken at Palaikastro in 1986 in the fields lying between the previous excavations and the sea. The remains of two structures and a roadway were found. Building 1 is a monumental structure, constructed in LM IA, that seems to have been destroyed in LM IB, and probably reoccupied and destroyed/abandoned in LM IIIA2. Over the top of Building 1 a less impressive structure was built and occupied then abandoned in LM IIIB. The second structure has many features in common with Late Minoan cult buildings. Building 2 is a typical LM town house of the wealthier variety, destroyed in LM IA with traces of later reoccupation in ?LM III. The roadway, called ‘Harbour Road’, seems to lead from the likely location of the Minoan harbour to the entrance of Building 1.

A recent journey has given me the opportunity of verifying and supplementing the observations on the prehistoric sites of Macedonia made by Mr. M. S. Thompson and myself in 1909. The following remarks are to be considered merely as notes intended to assist in the future exploration of Macedonian prehistoric mounds, as they are based on observation and not on excavation.

In 1911 we noted a prehistoric settlement on a bluff on the right bank of the Haliakmon just above the Serfije end of the bridge over the river on the Kozane-Serfije road. The mound directly overlooks the bridge-head and is skirted on the west by the high road. The fields round are known as Emir Chaiir. In our previous examination of the mound Mr. Thompson and I found only plain hand-made prehistoric potsherds which possessed no sufficiently marked characteristics to enable us to determine to what group they belonged.

The work of publishing the Corinthian pottery from the sanctuary of Hera Limenia at Perachora has suggested the present attempt to offer a few observations on the styles represented in the Corinthian animal-frieze ware and to discuss the chronology of Corinthian pottery in general. There is here no suggestion that Necrocorinthia is out-of-date and superseded. If it were, it would be beyond the powers of the present writer to supply the deficiency. Fortunately it seems clearly established that Payne's broad divisions of style and much of his detail stand unshaken by the addition of fresh material to the corpus of Corinthian pottery. There is, however, a continually developing prospect of further division and subdivision of styles and a greater understanding of the interrelation of these.

This article brings a reassessment of the survey of relations published in the author's 1985 book. The discrepancy in chronology seems now to be much nearer to a solution: more material evidence is known from the frontier area and from the Balkans in general, thus enlarging the documentation of the extent of Mycenaean influence in the north, and also clarifying the situation in Late Mycenaean times, when various northern influences were felt in Mycenaean Greece. The crisis at the end of the Aegean Bronze Age was connected with an influx of new populations, though substantial local traditions were also retained. The joint efforts of tradition and innovation prepared the further development of Greece.

Two Late Minoan IIIA1 cups were recently found in the excavations at Tel Beth-Shemesh, Israel. They were part of a larger assemblage of local Late Bronze IIA (first half of the fourteenth century bc) drinking and eating vessels sealed under a destruction layer in one room of a large edifice, presumably a ‘palace’. A commemorative scarab bearing the name of Amenhotep III and related to the first Jubilee (Sed festival) in his thirtieth regnal year was found alongside the cups, providing further chronological evidence. This article examines the Late Minoan IIIA1 cups from Beth-Shemesh within their Aegean context and emphasises their close affinity with comparable cups from the palace of Knossos, catalogued and republished here. The Tel Beth-Shemesh cups are the second occurrence – after Sellopoulo Tomb 4 – of Knossian Late Minoan IIIA1 pottery found together with Amenhotep III's scarab. This new evidence strengthens the likelihood of some chronological overlap between Late Minoan IIIA1 and the reign of this Pharaoh. The article also considers the biography of the two Minoan cups, as social agents within the intricate network of the Late Bronze Age palatial gift exchange in the eastern Mediterranean. While it is possible that the cups came to Beth-Shemesh directly from Knossos, another viable option is that they arrived as a gift from the Egyptian court. The two rare Late Minoan IIIA1 Knossian cups could have reached Egypt on the occasion of Amenhotep III's much-discussed official embassy to the Aegean – including Knossos – and then been sent as royal gifts to the ruler of Beth-Shemesh.

All references to Ithaca in ancient authors are in Homeric contexts. The BSA's excavations in the island, here summarized, have shown the importance throughout classical times of the shrines at Aëtos and Polis, indicated by the objects dedicated from many parts of the Greek world. Among these, the twelve tripod-lebetes found in the Polis Cave cannot be dissociated from the Phaeacian tripods given to Odysseus. It is suggested that the dedications preceded, and inspired, that part of the Odyssey, and that the importance of Odysseus in the Homeric poems reflects that of the cults at these shrines. Problems of transmission are considered, with a discussion of Homer's island geography and pre-colonial routes to the West.

This article argues that a holistic approach to documenting and understanding the physical evidence for individual cities would enhance our ability to address major questions about urbanisation, urbanism, cultural identities and economic processes. At the same time we suggest that providing more comprehensive data-sets concerning Greek cities would represent an important contribution to cross-cultural studies of urban development and urbanism, which have often overlooked relevant evidence from Classical Greece. As an example of the approach we are advocating, we offer detailed discussion of data from the Archaic and Classical city of Olynthos, in the Halkidiki. Six seasons of fieldwork here by the Olynthos Project, together with legacy data from earlier projects by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and by the Greek Archaeological Service, combine to make this one of the best-documented urban centres surviving from the Greek world. We suggest that the material from the site offers the potential to build up a detailed ‘urban profile’, consisting of an overview of the early development of the community as well as an in-depth picture of the organisation of the Classical settlement. Some aspects of the urban infrastructure can also be quantified, allowing a new assessment of (for example) its demography. This article offers a sample of the kinds of data available and the sorts of questions that can be addressed in constructing such a profile, based on a brief summary of the interim results of fieldwork and data analysis carried out by the Olynthos Project, with a focus on research undertaken during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons.

In the spring of 1910 the work which had engaged the School at Sparta since 1906 was brought to an end, and it was decided to devote a season to a supplementary excavation at the prehistoric site of Phylakopi in Melos, the scene of the School's activity from 1896 to 1899. These dates are of some significance; the work in Crete, which has revolutionised our ideas of the Bronze Age in the Aegean, was only begun in 1900 with the first work at Knossos, and on the mainland of Greece the recent work of the German Institute at Tiryns, the Greek and German work at Chaironea and Orchomenos in Boiotia, and the prehistoric researches in Thessaly and North Greece, first of Tsountas at Dimini and Sesklo and later, over a much enlarged field, of Mr. Wace and his colleagues, had none of them been even begun when the first excavation at Phylakopi was closed in 1899. It was in fact the first important prehistoric excavation in Greece since the death of Schliemann. Few comparisons with other sites were therefore possible; the results of the work of Schliemann and of his successors at Mycenae and the researches in the Cyclades published by Tsountas were the main guides for Mr. Edgar in his pioneer work on the pottery from Phylakopi.

Our campaigns of 1967 and 1968 have confirmed and supplemented that of 1960, especially concerning the Late Bronze Age habitation of the Dodecanese. Pottery of Mycenaean type has been found for the first time on Patmos, Leros, and Syme, and further Mycenaean settlements have been identified in the northern part of Kos, at Asklúpi and Palaiópyli. On many sites it has not been possible to determine from the surface finds the exact period of prehistoric habitation, but pre-Mycenaean material has been noted for the first time on the islands of Patmos, Leros, Telos (?), Syme, and Kasos. A particularly interesting early phase is represented by the sherds from Troúlli on Kos. Among the finds from periods subsequent to the Bronze Age, the most interesting are perhaps the Geometric sherds from Kastélli on Patmos and from the Kástro at Pólin on Kasos. A remarkable phenomenon also is the size and strength of the Hellenistic fortifications on some of the smaller islands, namely Patmos, Telos, Syme, and Castellorizo. It would appear that these islands probably enjoyed at this time a prosperity disproportionate to their size and agricultural resources.

Perhaps the most characteristic artifacts other than pottery found with any frequency at Mycenaean sites are the small, vertically perforated conoid objects described as spindle whorls or buttons, although neither use has been satisfactorily proved. They occur in several shapes. Persson distinguished the purely conical type with or without a rounded top from the shanked and the disc-shaped; Wace divided them into conical, shanked, shanked with concave base, and biconical; Blegen into bicones, short cones, and shanked; Furumark into conical (Type a 1), biconical (a 2), shanked (b), and disc-shaped (c). They belong, that is to say, to five basic types: bicone, semi-globular (Persson's round-top conical), conical, shanked, and flat or disc-shaped (Fig. 1), with variations in the shape of their bases (flat or concave) and of their tops (plain or ringed).

In this paper – the revised text of a public lecture given in Athens on 23 February 1989 – the author reviews both the historical and anatomical evidence for identifying the occupants of the royal tombs at Vergina as: Tomb I: not known; Tomb II: Philip II and either Cleopatra or Meda; Tomb III: Alexander IV. The case for Philip III Arrhidaios and Eurydice in Tomb II is shown to be anthropologically weak. The paper also includes a catalogue of the human remains from Tomb II antechamber (Cleopatra or Meda) and Tomb III (Alexander IV). The arrival of cremation in Greece, and both Homeric and later Macedonian attitudes to the rite are also discussed. The general conclusion is that cremations are a valuable source of biological and archaeological information.

The persistent absence of pendent concentric semicircles in the West is commonly regarded as surprising. MG skyphoi with this motif are among the earliest Greek types at Al Mina, and Boardman has suggested that ‘Euboean workshops may have stopped making them by the time Pithekoussai was founded’, though he later qualified this: ‘I think all it demonstrates is how very little we still know about early colonisation or precolonial days in Italy.’ The earliest imported type in Italy—all that is left of Blakeway's pre-colonial period of ‘trade before the flag’—is normally taken to be the Atticizing Euboeo-Cycladic MG II chevron skyphos, or ‘Cycladic cup’, long known from pre-Hellenic Cumae and joined recently by many examples from other native Iron Age cemeteries at Capua and Pontecagnano in Campania and at Veii in southern Etruria. In its turn, the chevron skyphos is so far absent from the oldest Western Greek colony, Pithekoussai, where the extensively imitated Corinthian LG ‘Aetos 666’ kotyle currently begins the sequence in the Valle San Montano cemetery, the Scarico Gosetti, and the Mazzola metal-working site.

[This paper describes the results of a short journey in South-Western Asia Minor undertaken by Messrs. A. M. Woodward and H. A. Ormerod of the British School at Athens, in June and July of 1910. Its main purpose was to search for prehistoric remains in the district lying to the west of Adalia (Attaleia in Pamphylia), namely in northern Lycia, south-western Pisidia and southern Phrygia, and to this end Mr. Woodward was in receipt of a grant from the Oxford Craven Fund. The prehistoric sites which were noted and the objects which were found, together with the circumstances which drew attention to the existence of prehistoric remains in this district, are dealt with in detail in the second part of this paper by Mr. Ormerod, who contributes also a special study of the pot-fragments collected. The first part describes the route followed, with notes on such remains of classical antiquity as seemed to merit discussion; the inscriptions found, and the coins obtained are dealt with by Mr. Woodward in Parts III. and IV. respectively.—ED.]

A Survey carried out in 1964 revealed that this site, briefly reported by Payne as ‘a very small village doubtless inhabited by fishermen’, was more extensive than had been realized. It covers the flatter ground on the low ridge that separates lake from sea, for a length of 570 m. and a maximum width of 100 m. or so. The canal connecting the lake with the sea cuts through the middle of the site and gives a good cross-section of its stratification. There seems to have been some fluctuation in the lake level since prehistoric times, for sherds and traces of walling can be observed in the hardened limestone concretions beneath the present lake's surface.

In 1965 a trial trench 2 m. × 16 m. was opened, almost parallel to the canal and running inland from a point 39 m. to the west of the canal's entrance to the lake. This trench was not taken down to the earliest occupation levels. Four phases of occupation were revealed (Fig. 1), the last being of the seventh century B.C. The other three, all of the Early Helladic period, are designated ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’, X being the earliest yet reached. There is absolutely no trace of subsequent occupation until the seventh century B.C., the remains of which occur directly above those of the latest E.H. level.

After the close of Mr. Heurtley's excavations, an attack on the site by illicit diggers showed that the deposit had not been exhausted and that there were still fine vases (e.g. 1023, Plate 22) to be found there. Moreover, some of the conclusions drawn from the facts observed at Aetos merited further investigation.

Date of Building 9: Bench mark for both excavations was the threshold of St. George's Church. Heurtley kindly allowed me to use some of his plans, so we uncovered part of Building 9, and were thus able to fit the plans of the two excavations together. I have included Building 9 on my plan (Fig. I ), also the ‘Cairns’ 1, 2, 4, and Wall 6. An undisturbed part of the foundation trench of Building 9 contained sherds of sixth-century Corinthian kotylai, so it cannot be the Protocorinthian temple as Heurtley suggested: no offerings were connected with it.

The village of Kalývia Sokhás lies against the base of one of the massive foothills in which Taygetus falls to the plain three or four miles to the south of Sparta (Plate 26, 1). It is bounded by two rivers which flow down in deep clefts from the mountain shelf. The hillside above rises steeply to a summit which is girt with cliffs on all but the west side and cannot be much less than four thousand feet above sea level; this von Prott believed to be the peak of Taleton. Its summit is crowned by the ruins of a mediaeval castle which was undoubtedly built as a stronghold to overlook the Spartan plain; the only dateable object found there, a sherd of elaborate incised ware, indicates occupation at the time when the Byzantines were in possession of Mystra. The location of the other sites mentioned by Pausanias in this region remains obscure, but fortunately that of the Spartan Eleusinion has not been in doubt since von Prott discovered a cache of inscriptions at the ruined church of H. Sophia in the village of Kalývia Sokhás. In 1910 Dawkins dug trenches at the foot of the slope immediately above the village and recovered a fragment of a stele relating to the cult of the goddesses and pieces of inscribed tiles from the sanctuary. The abundance of water in the southern ravine led von Prott to conclude that the old town of Bryseai with its cult of Dionysus also lay at Kalývia Sokhás; but no traces of urban settlement have come to light at the village, and the name rather suggests copious springs such as issue from the mountain foot at Kefalári a mile to the north where ancient blocks are to be seen in the fields.