The vase reproduced on Pl. II. and in Figs. 1 and 2 was sold by Messrs. Sotheby in the summer of 1919, and is now in the collection of Mr. William Randolph Hearst of New York. It is unbroken and well preserved. The height is sixteen inches and a half, say forty-two centimetres. Photographs of both sides were published in the sale catalogue; but the drawings from which Pl. II. has been made have not been published before.

The shape of the vase is not a common one. It is a kind of amphora; and I use the word amphora, unqualified, to cover all those types in which the neck passes into the body with a gradual curve; instead of being set sharply off, as it is in the neck-amphorae, in the amphora of Panathenaic shape, and in the amphora with pointed foot.

Three types of amphora were used by the makers of red-figured vases. Type A, which has flanged handles and a foot in two degrees, is used by black-figure painters as early as the middle of the sixth century, is a favourite with the painters of the archaic red-figured period, and disappears about 460. Type B, which has cylindrical handles and a foot in the form of an inverted echinus, is older than type A; for it is used by Attic painters at the very beginning of the sixth century.

The student of Theocritus who wishes to know what is the ῥόμβος plied by Simaetha at l. 30 of the second Idyll will find it identified in the scholia with the ἲυγξ of the refrain; and of all the modern commentators who express an opinion, Legrand is alone in questioning the identification. And yet to the attentive reader it should seem more than questionable. It will be well to begin with an examination of the passage.

The incantation of Simaetha, who might say, with Tibullus (1. 5. 16), uota nouem Triuiae nocte silente dedi, consists of nine terms, each of four verses, framed and articulated by the intercalary verse, ῖυγξ ἔλκε τύ τῆνον ἐμόν ποτὶ δῶμα τόν ἄνδρα of which there are therefore ten occurrences. The type to which the terms of the incantation in the main conform is given in the first two quatrains—(1) Strew barley-groats on the fire and say, ‘I strew the bones of Delphis.’ (2) I burn bay-leaves: so may Delphis burn. It consists, that is, of a magic act, accompanied by a prayer or by a statement equivalent to a prayer.

The vases published below were found during the excavation of foundation trenches for a seaside ‘kentron’ between the main road and the sea at the western limits of the site of Amathus. They were in clean sand, at a depth of about 2 metres; no traces of bones were observed. The finds were removed in the presence of Mr. Perikleous, Honorary Curator of the Limassol Museum.

There is little doubt that these objects constituted a tomb-robber's cache: Mr. Perikleous was convinced that there was here no question of a tomb, a fact which would seem to detract from the value of the find. Furthermore, the objects are not all contemporary: about half belong to the fifth century, the rest to Cypriot Geometric, with the exception of two imported Protogeometric vases.

In spite of this, it is quite possible that all the objects came from one tomb. Secondary burials after a long period are by no means infrequent in Cyprus. The vases obviously came from a tomb or tombs in view of their completeness—and the Amathus cemetery area is very close. Cypriot tombs are rich in vases, and one tomb would make a sizeable haul for a robber.

I do not propose to publish the later vases. But what I hope to show is that the earlier vases are sufficiently homogeneous to constitute a true burial group, and that the Protogeometric vases are most likely associated with them. So far as concerns the Cypriot vases of earlier type, I propose to set them against vases from Amathus Tomb 101 wherever possible, as this burial seems to provide vases nearest in type.

The editorial introduction to a Greek play will often include a section on the characters, in which their various traits are collected into a series of sketches. There may be sketches not only of the main characters but of minor, anonymous personages together with a sort of collective sketch of the chorus, and they are commonly made without fuss or discussion of critical theory. There has, of course, both here and in general books on the tragedians, always been room for differences of interpretation: as to whether, for example, Pentheus is moral or prurient. It is round such differences that discussion revolves, and the arguments have been heated enough. Why is the Aeschylean Agamemnon made to tread the purple carpet? Professor Thomson suggests that it is by reason of Clytemnestra's irresistible feminine charm. But since this charm, so far from being explicitly attested, is only an inference from three lines of dialogue; since the king has said a little earlier (in Thomson's own translation):

Seek not to unman me with effeminate

Graces and barbarous salaams agape

In grovelling obeisance at my feet—

from which any susceptibility to Clytemnestra's charm seems singularly absent; since, moreover, he has brought with him a concubine who is—

of many chattels the elect flower,

—one might be tempted to maintain that even if the charm is accepted as a help towards interpretation, there must be other reasons also for Agamemnon's acting as he does. Very well, you may say, modify the sketch to suit your taste.

It has become fashionable to discover political allusions in subjects painted on Attic pottery of the Archaic period. These allusions are of two kinds, not always clearly distinguished. One is deliberate party propaganda, especially for or against Pisistratus or his sons. The other, which reflects results of political action, need not have political intent: Theseus, for instance, was becoming more popular in Athens by the end of the sixth century, with official encouragement it seems, and his more frequent representation in art may be due simply to that popularity. Here I am concerned only with partisan propaganda, and particularly that concerning Pisistratus and his equation with Heracles. Though the propagandist theory has by now quite a literature, it is surprising that there has been little objection, at least in print.

The importance of Schliemann's excavations at Troy, Mycenae and elsewhere is beyond dispute. Yet the aura of greatness which his remarkable achievements have rightly conferred on his name has tended to blur our perception of the man himself. Psychoanalytic studies by W. G. Niederland have offered fresh insight into his complex character, but it is the paper given by W. M. Calder III on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth that marks the beginning of the new sceptical attitude to Schliemann. Calder pointed out that Schliemann's autobiographical writings contain many false claims and purely fictitious episodes which biographers have uncritically accepted as fact. This new view of Schliemann as an unreliable witness, which, incidentally, was held by many of his contemporaries, has now been confirmed and expanded by subsequent research.

It is principally in matters of his personal life that recent studies have exposed Schliemann's propensity for lies and fraud. However, G. Korres has shown that in his scholarly work too Schliemann did not shrink from seriously misrepresenting the truth. It is the purpose of the present article to demonstrate that even Schliemann's archaeological reports are vitiated by this kind of behaviour. We are not here concerned with Schliemann's interpretations of his discoveries.

In this chapter Diodorus is specifically giving the numbers of the various contingents who actually crossed into Asia with Alexander in 334 B.C. (οἱ μὲν οὖν μετ΄ Ἀλεξάνδρου διαβάντες εἰς τὴν Ἀσίαν κτλ.), that is to say, the numbers of the advance-party sent over by Philip in 336 are not included in his totals. If this fact is borne in mind, a possible emendation and solution can be offered to the much disputed clause Θρᾷκες δὲ πρόδρομοι καὶ Παίονες ἐννακόσιοι.

‘Most things in Greece’, so Pausanias tells us, ‘are subject to dispute.’ Nowadays, however, the chronological development at least of archaic and early classical art is no longer regarded as a matter for controversy. Indeed so little dispute remains that the art of this period is being used with increasing confidence to reconstruct the social, political and economic history of Greece. Before new orthodoxies arise, however, it may be in order to question some of the old ones by re-examining the ‘fixed points’ on which the chronology of Greek art is based. These points of contact between art and history are familiar. They include, for example, the sack of Hama in Syria, Thucydides' dates for the western colonies, the siege of Old Smyrna, the Greek occupation of Tell Defenneh and other Egyptian sites, the construction of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, the youthful careers of Athenian kaloi (notably those of Leagros, son of Glaukon, and of his son Glaukon), ostraca, the Marathon tumulus and the Persian sack of Athens.

In this paper we evaluate the evidence of two well-known buildings which are generally thought to have been constructed in the sixth century BC. We argue that available evidence may not require this chronological conclusion. We begin by attempting to demonstrate that the marble Temple of Apollo Daphnephorus at Eretria with its pedimental Amazonomachy was erected in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, not in the sixth century. We then reconsider in the light of this suggestion the traditional date of the Siphnian Treasury (c. 530–25 BC).

In vol. iii. (1902) of the Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Egypte Mr. J. E. Quibell gave an account of a large discovery of papyrus at Kom Ishgau, a village situated 7 kil. to the S.W. of Tema in Upper Egypt. The discovery was made in 1901 by some of the villagers who were digging a well, and the papyri found were divided among the inhabitants. News of the discovery coming to the authorities, a police-guard was despatched, only to find that the papyri had disappeared; some seem to have been burnt, the rest were hidden for the time being and afterwards no doubt disposed of to various dealers, through whom, like the famous and much larger ‘Faijum-fund,’ they became dispersed through Europe.

The Epic of Kumarbi is the latest of a number of epic works which have been recovered and restored to us by patient scholarship from the wreckage of the royal library of the Hittite Emperors at Hattušaš (Bogaz-köy). This particular text, however, is doubly noteworthy: for the sake of the story which it tells, and because it is evidently in essence not merely a piece of Hittite literature, but, in the form of a translation, a glimpse of another, more remote and virtually lost literature. For although this text is written in the normal Hittite language, the names of the divinities who play the chief roles in the drama are in fact not Hittite at all. A few are Babylonian, the rest Hurrian. That is to say, they are the gods of an important people or group of peoples who dwelt in south-eastern Anatolia, north Syria and north Mesopotamia, and spoke a language akin neither to the Indo-European speech of the Hittites nor to the Semitic languages. During the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. many of these people were incorporated into the Hittite Empire, and their gods were received into the hospitality of the Hittite Pantheon. This text is evidently the translation of a Hurrian saga, and it is even reported that fragments exist (or existed) of the Hurrian original, but they have not been published. The present text originally extended over several tablets, many of which now survive, if at all, only in very battered form. The resultant lacunae make it very difficult for us to follow with certainty the meaning and sequence of action in the surviving fragments. The saga appears to be in three parts: The Struggle for the Kingship of Heaven, The Song of Ullikummi and Kumarbi and the Hero of the Flood. We shall be content for our present purpose with giving a summary of this poem. And a strangely primitive and barbarous story it is, doubtless of very great antiquity.

Professor A. H. M. Jones in the appendix to his new book (pp. 161–80), Athenian Democracy (see below, p. 182), tackles afresh the problem of the population of Athens during the Peloponnesian war, and introduces three novelties: that the 13,000 hoplites of Thucydides ii 13.6 mean hoplites of the age-classes 20 to 39, not 20 to 49 as most of us, if not all, have assumed from Lykourgos, Leokrates 39–40, and some other evidence; that klerouchoi (but not apoikoi) remained in Athens, drawing rents from their kleroi in the subject states, all now within the hoplite census and included in the 13,000; and, the most important of the three, that to get a true picture of mortality rates and so of the relative strengths of different age-classes we must liken the Athenians to certain groups of persons in the Roman Empire between the first and third centuries A.D. and to India at the beginning of the present century, not to any European country during the last hundred years.

Jones takes me to task for suggesting that the at first sight surprising number of ‘oldest and youngest’ in the reserve to whom during the war was allotted the defence of the walls (Thuc. ii 13.7) was in part to be accounted for by the inclusion of all those in the classes 20 to 49 who were not fit for active service in the hoplite ranks, who would be a source of weakness rather than of strength to an army. ‘There are serious objections to this theory’, he says (p. 162). ‘It is in the first place not what Thucydides says. Secondly, it is pure speculation, unsupported by any evidence.’ ‘Let us then’, he adds, ‘set aside this theory and examine the facts afresh.’ This promises well.

In his History of the Athenian Constitution (Oxford, 1952, pp. 159 ff.) Mr. Hignett rejected Aristotle's attribution of the law of ostracism to Kleisthenes and this rejection met with approval from R. J. Hopper in a review of his book in JHS lxxvi (1956) 141. In preferring a later date for the law, Androtion's date—or what is supposed to be Androtion's date, for without the full context of Harpokration's quotation we cannot be sure that the τότε πρῶτον of that passage is so precise in its reference as to imply a date significantly later than Aristotle's—Mr. Hignett relies mainly on the well-established argument (which he imagines may well have been Androtion's also) that ‘the authors of such a law cannot have intended to let it remain a dead letter … it must have been passed not long before its first application’ (p. 164). Indeed, this must be regarded as his only decisive (so intended) argument, for, as far as sources are concerned, he states ‘the Atthidographers … had no documentary evidence for the date of the law’ and ‘the different dates given by different writers are all due to conjecture’ (p. 160). Here he has the agreement of Jacoby, who says in FGH iii(b) (1954) 121 ‘there was as little documentary evidence for the introduction of ostracism as for the Seisachtheia’ (i.e. none at all), but the latter's conclusion is more cautious—‘our tradition does not allow of making a final decision between the dates of Androtion and Aristotle’ (p. 124).

Our purpose in this paper is, first, to re-examine the historical (and even merely logical) possibilities in this question and to suggest that the more cautious conclusion is the proper one in the light of these possibilities; and, secondly, to review certain other conclusions, based on archaeological as well as literary evidence, arrived at by recent writers regarding the actual history of the institution, in order to see whether some of these too would not need to be more cautiously stated if all the possibilities were taken into account.

The battle took its name from Pydna because it was fought ‘in the plain before Pydna’. Accordingly the first need is to identify the site of Pydna as it was in the year of the battle, 168 BC. Originally a Greek city, planted by settlers from the south on the coast of Pieria and possessing a good harbour (Diod. xi 12.3, xix 50.4), Pydna was acquired by the Macedonian king Archelaus, who moved the people to a site two or three miles inland (Diod. xiii 49.2). In the ensuing period the original site was reinhabited. For Pydna appeared as an independent city in the 360s (IG iv2 95, II 6), ‘a Greek city’ (Ps.-Scylax 66) ‘on the coast’ (Ps.-Scymnus6i8). When Philip II captured it, he had good reason to maintain it as a port. In 317–316 BC it was besieged by land and by sea. It was certainly on this coastal site in 168 BC.

It used to be thought that Pydna was on the elevation 56 m due cast of the old part of the village Makri Yialos (now having a regular population of 1,600). However, we found only a little pottery there and that probably of recent date; and the fact that there is a toumba, covering a Macedonian built tomb, on the elevation shows that it is not the site of a settlement. On the other hand, on the coast to the south between the hotels ‘Achilleion' and ‘Ancient Pydna’ there are the clear remains of an acropolis, its highest point being 36 m above sea level. As we walked over the site we collected one piece of Attic Black-Figure pottery, much excellent black glaze, and sherds of Hellenistic gray ware and relief ware. The present area of the acropolis is some 400 m from east to west and 150 m from north to south. Its natural defences are formed by cliffs on the seaward side and by steepish slopes on the three landward sides. These defences were reinforced by a circuit wall, of which the northern part is indicated today by a swell in the ground at right angles to the road just north of the top.

The argument of this paper is that the fort on the Euryalus at Syracuse was modernised by Archimedes, who is recorded to have been the chief military engineer or scientific adviser to his native city before and during the siege by the Romans.

The fort lay outside the populated area of Syracuse though within the walls. The town had originally been confined to an island between the two harbours, but soon extended on to the mainland of Sicily; the ground to the west was swampy, hence the suburbs necessarily spread up the Epipolae hill to the north. This hill forms a tilted plateau, 3½ miles long, which slopes towards the island, but is surrounded elsewhere by a cliff, except at the inland extremity where it joins on to higher country. Since the cliff afforded a strong line of defence, the town walls were eventually carried all round the edge of the plateau, making them 17 miles in circuit. This great extension was the work of the tyrant Dionysius I, in the year 402 and later; the need for it had been demonstrated twelve years earlier, when the Athenians captured the plateau and almost starved the town into surrender. The strongest part of the fortifications was necessarily at the inland extremity of the plateau, the one place where nature provided no obstacles. Here the highest ground runs off to the west in a ridge that rises into two gentle mounds, one of which was called Euryalus, meaning the ‘wide nail’ (or wart). The town-walls included only one of these summits, and upon it stands the fort in question, overlooking one of the main gateways of the city.

It is agreed that of the extant accounts of the battle of Gaugamela, that of Arrian is by far the best, the only one, in fact, that permits of a coherent reconstruction of what took place. The best modern accounts derive mainly from Arrian, and it may perhaps be felt that modern criticism has resolved satisfactorily the two or three important obscurities in his story, and that everything is now plain. With this opinion I cannot agree. To me Arrian's story is not obscure, but, equally, it is not complete; and what he omits is of such importance that without it I cannot see clearly why Alexander, and not the Persians, won this battle. I am not suggesting that really the Persians did win it; but my aim is to supply that part of the picture which (in my view) Arrian has left blank, and without which the manner of Alexander's victory is still not fully explained.

Several investigations have been devoted to the Athenian calendar and to the cycles of Meton and Kallippos. However, most authors have not clearly distinguished between true and mean lunar months, nor between astronomical calendars and the Athenian calendar. In investigating the Athenian calendar, many authors have made use of the regular successions of full and hollow months described by Geminos in his Isagoge, without first making sure that these months were in actual use at Athens. Discussion as to whether ‘the month’ began with the astronomical New Moon or with the visibility of the crescent might have been avoided if the authors had realised that the word ‘month’ has several meanings and that in every particular case the meaning has to be inferred from the context. Peasants or soldiers, far away from civilisation, would start their month with the visible crescent, astronomers would make it begin at the day of true or mean New Moon, and cities would adapt their festival calendar to the needs of the moment, intercalating or omitting days in such a way that the festivals can be held at the days prescribed by law or tradition. Of course, it may happen any time that a civil month coincides with the astronomical or with the observed lunar month, but in absence of definite evidence we never have the right to identify a civil month with an astronomical month.

Not much attention is given to the diolkos across the Isthmus of Corinth, nor is much known about it. There are a dozen or so explicit or probable references to it in ancient literature, one relevant inscription and some remains of its track. The remains, principally at the west and close to the modern canal, are from a paved roadway with two parallel channels about 1·50 m apart, evidently to hold the wheels of some sort of carrier; and associated pottery and inscribed letters suggest that it was constructed in the late seventh or early sixth century B.C. The written references tell us that the eastern end of the diolkos was at Schoinos, that it was said to be 40 stades long, that warships were transported across the Isthmus in 412, 220, 217, 102 and 30 B.C., that the diolkos was in use in the early period of the Roman Empire, and that some ships were too big for it: there is, though, no precise statement of the commercial use of the diolkos.

Yet transport of warships is not likely to have been the normal use of the diolkos: ancient historical writers were more interested in war than commerce, and warships cannot have needed transporting very frequently.

In the spring of 328 Alexander the Great was at a critical point in his career. During the previous summer he had pressed too far too quickly and underestimated the resistance of the local population to his authority. Consequently, when he was engaged with nomad hordes on the banks of the Iaxartes (Syr-Darya), the whole of the populous satrapy of Bactria–Sogdiana rose in rebellion, from the fringes of the Hindu Kush in the south to the frontier cities by the Iaxartes. His morale was moreover weakened by a compound fracture of the fibula, sustained near Maracanda and exacerbated by a severe bout of dysentery at the Iaxartes.

The structure which is generally taken to underlie the composition of the plays of Aristophanes is made up of a number of quantitative parts which have been abstracted by dividing the comedies into broad sections. It roughly corresponds to the quantitative division of tragedy offered by the twelfth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics (viz. prologue, episode, exodos, khorikon or choral song, the last-named subdivided into parodos and stasimon), and includes prologue, parodos, ‘proagon’ or ‘battle scene,’ ‘epirrhematic agon,’ parabasis, iambic scenes, choral songs or stasimo, exodos.