Although he was one of the most famous musicians of Classical antiquity, the pipe-player (auletes) Pronomos of Thebes has never attracted serious scholarly attention in his own right. This contribution seeks to address this neglect by attempting to establish a basic chronological framework for his life. In doing so, it introduces a new item of evidence, the inscribed funerary monument of one Potamon of Thebes, a contemporary and colleague of Pronomos in the art of auletike. A close relationship is shown to exist between the epigram on this funerary monument, found in Athens, and that which accompanied the statue on the Theban akropolis, erected in honour of Pronomos.

The pace set in the last three years has been maintained. Golden Mycenae and Nelean Pylos again outshine the rest, but Eleusis has come to the front with the acclaimed Tombs of the Seven. Olympia has yielded the helmet of Miltiades and Argos amazing discoveries of eighth-century armour in a two-drachma burial. Important finds have been made in the islands, and among notable discoveries in Athens is a first-class fragment of an archaic boxer's stele and the epitaph of a Carian prince whose son fought with the Persian fleet at Salamis. The terrible earthquakes in the western islands wrecked the museums—not least those in Ithaca, which were filled with the rich finds from British excavations of recent years; much has been retrieved, but the tasks of reconstitution will be slow and costly. Work is progressing at the Acropolis Museum, and new galleries are due to open in the National Museum. There is again good progress to report from the provincial museums, especially in Crete. The indefatigable Prof. Orlandos and his associates continue their work of repair and restoration around the Acropolis, at the Aphaia temple, and among the Early Christian and Byzantine monuments; among the objects of their attention this year may be recorded the monasteries of Osios Loukas, the Meteora, and the Holy Mountain.

The New York crater, 14.130.15 (PLATES I–III), was first published by Miss Richter fifty years ago. Since then it has frequently been accorded illustration and comment both for its figure scenes—notably the prothesis, the chariot friezes and the occurrence of ‘Siamese twin’ warriors—and for its place in the development of Attic Geometric vase painting. There are, however, a number of features in the figure scenes which have escaped notice hitherto in publication, and which are of some interest to the student of Geometric funeral practice and iconography.

The prothesis itself (PLATE II a) is conventional enough in most of its details. The child crouching over the legs of the dead man extends his arms over them. The child standing behind the head tears his hair with one hand while the other seems to be stretched towards the dead man's mouth. Certainly no branch or fan is held—the motif found in some other prothesis scenes. Before the child's leg is a small fish. The gesture and the fish (an odd filling device, if it is one) are not readily explained but may be borne in mind when other features of the frieze are discussed.

Aeschylus was a dramatist of ideas—of religious ideas. His ideas may have been old or new, clear or confused, crude or profound, but it was in terms of religious ideas that he interpreted the story of the house of Argos; and it was in terms of religious ideas that he interpreted a great event in the history of his own time. It is, therefore, of considerable interest and importance to discover, if we can, a relationship between the way he thought in 472 and the way he thought in 458. In 458 he made a Chorus reject an old doctrine: that prosperity and good fortune in themselves give rise to disaster—the doctrine, that is to say (though the word is not used), of the jealousy of the gods (φθόνος τῶν θϵῶν). No, sings this Chorus, it is the impious deed that begets after its kind, the old hubris that gives birth to new and to a train of evil consequences. In 472, in the Persae, we seem to find both doctrines. We find the Chorus singing of the crafty deceit of a god from which no mortal can escape, and we find the Messenger speaking of the jealousy of the gods. But we also find Darius speaking of the stern punishments of Zeus and attributing the disasters of the Persians to their own acts of hubris. As though such seeming contradictions were sent to test our ingenuity, eminent scholars—I mention no names—have tied themselves in knots to demonstrate that the contradiction does not exist. I would suggest that the contradiction not only exists but is essential to the thought of the play, and that it has, to some extent, imposed upon the play its form.

This paper, and the plates by Mr. A. C. Blunt which accompany it, are the first-fruits of a journey in Phrygia, October 15 to November 27, 1881, for which Mr. Blunt was sent out specially by the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. It would be both unbecoming and unnecessary for me to speak of the drawings which he contributes to this paper; but I may say that he learned photography in the few days that were at his disposal before leaving England specially for the work of the expedition, so that he has been enabled to verify at home, by means of photographs, the drawings that he made on the spot. In addition to this, we together compared most of his drawings with the original monuments, and spared no care to attain accuracy. It has been necessary for me to write in Athens without seeing the completed drawings: this has added much to the difficulty of the work, but the reader who finds the text correspond with the plates will thus have an additional proof of the accuracy of both. I should, however, have found it quite impossible to write what I have here written without constant help from the drawings, the artistic taste and clear memory of one friend who accompanied us, to whom are due the discovery of many monuments in the two necropoleis, and several of the drawings here published.

Most of the following inscriptions were copied on a tour through the country of the Rhyndacus and Macestus in the autumn of 1894. A few were added on a hasty visit to Balukiser and Balia in September 1896. I have arranged them geographically in a zigzag line, from Brusa westwards to Cyzicus, then south-eastwards to Tavshanli and the plain of Simav, and then westwards again by Balat, Kebsud, Balukiser, and Balia to the Aesepus. For the precise position of the several places, and for topographical details, I may refer to a paper by Mr. H. M. Anthony and myself published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, February and March 1897. Prof. W. C. F. Anderson, who accompanied me on both journeys, has kindly allowed me to compare his readings of the inscriptions with mine, and in one instance I have adopted his copy in preference to my own. I have not repeated any inscriptions which I have found to be already published, unless I believed that I could make material additions or corrections. Many of the following inscriptions will appear to be of little or no importance, but in Asia Minor much light may be thrown on the ethnology, religion, and civilization of a district by mere nomenclature and spelling. The work of Prof. W. M. Ramsay has shown how much may be learnt from the epitaphs and dedications of semi-barbarous peasants. Several of these inscriptions, however, are of some interest, for example No. 27 for political history, Nos. 13 and 67 for historical geography, and Nos. 48 and 64 for the religion of the country.

Apart from the important Greek trading-town at Naukratis and the shorter-lived settlement at Tell Defenneh (Daphnai) there is little to show in Egypt for the early years of renewed relations between Greece and the kingdom of the Nile valley. Yet already in the eighth century B.C. a few Egyptian objects were reaching Greek lands; in the seventh Egyptians were employing Ionian Greek mercenaries and apparently themselves influencing Greece's first steps in monumental sculpture. Only slight finds of Greek pottery earlier than 500 B.C. have been made on Egyptian sites other than the two named above, notably at Memphis and at Egyptian Thebes, comprising the sanctuaries of Luxor and Karnak as well as the Theban Necropolis. The last-named complex was well known to the Greeks as Thebes of the Hundred Gates, mentioned in the Iliad (ix. 381–4). It is thence that the vase which forms the subject of this paper is said to come. The few fragments which are all that is preserved from it are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1924. 264: Plate I), the gift of Professor Sayce, having been bought by him in Luxor and said to have been found in Karnak. They have already been published by Miss E. R. Price in CVA Oxford ii. IId pl. 10 (401), 24, and associated with the Clazomenian class of Ionian black-figured vases. They seem to merit further attention because the scene figured on one side of the vase has not hitherto been identified, and because its identification may in turn throw a little light on the Greeks who lived in the heart of the Egyptian kingdom. Stylistically the vase can be dated to the decade 550–540 B.C.

The short dialogue entitled Nero or on the digging of the Isthmus, preserved in the manuscripts of Lucian, is an intriguing piece. The contents are quickly summarised. Nero's abandoned attempt to dig through the Isthmus of Corinth is discussed by the two interlocutors, a certain Menecrates and the philosopher Musonius Rufus, who is said to have taken part in the digging (1). The scene is apparently the rugged Aegean island of Gyara to which the historical Musonius was exiled. The discussion broadens out to include Nero's tour of Greece, with a particular focus upon his singing; and it concludes as the news breaks of Nero's death (11). Menecrates' role in the discussion is limited to that of ‘prompter’, while Musonius assumes the authoritative, pedagogic role in the dialogue. Is there any unified meaning to this text? And why the dialogue form (given that Menecrates' role in it is so perfunctory)? This paper proposes one set of answers to these questions, by siting the Nero in the context of the cultural history of Greco-Roman relations, an area that has attracted much attention over the years (and has been further reinvigorated in the light of post-colonial theory).

The north-west corner of Asia Minor, Lesbos and, in particular, Mytilene, have long been recognised as the home of these grey wares called Lesbian or Aeolic bucchero. With remarkable tact, citizens of Mytilene resident in Naukratis proved the point by inscribing their names and place of origin on the grey vases they dedicated. Their evidence was, however, supplemented by the discovery of grey pottery like their own in towns as near Lesbos as Larissa and Troy VIII.

Several centuries before Lesbian bucchero flourished, the same district produced a distinguished grey ware of which the home was in the sixth city of Troy. This pottery left descendants in the seventh city—side by side with the Buckelkeramik—and these descendants would seem to be the direct ancestors of the bucchero of Troy VIII, Lesbos and other Aeolic sites.

Returning to Troy VI, we find that some of its grey wares are unmistakably Minyan, which enables us to carry the pedigree further back still. Minyan ware is found in the second Minoan period, about 1900 B.C. Nor can it be denied that the fabrics of Troy VI are derived ultimately from those of Troy II and Troy I.

Any list of the most eminent Greek physicians must inevitably include the late Hellenistic doctor Asclepiades of Bithynia. He was both extremely successful during his lifetime, and highly influential after his death. His revolutionary pathology and therapeutic method were the objects of much discussion. His importance, however, goes beyond the history of medicine as such. In spite of the fact that most current handbooks of ancient philosophy ignore him altogether, philosophy does appear to have been a major interest of his. He was an uncompromising opponent of providentialism and teleology. He challenged the idea, at the time the dominant one, that matter is continuous. He accounted for the functioning of the body in purely mechanistic and quantitative terms, and also developed an account of the soul, unique in its time, which arguably provides the closest ancient antecedent to modern reductionism.

It is now fifty years since Hans Gerstinger published the editio princeps of a Vienna papyrus containing hexameter poems by, as he believed, Pamprepius of Panopolis. Out of seven fragments Gerstinger, working with H. Ibscher, was able to restore one binion of a codex (P. Gr. 29788A-B). A separate leaf (P. Gr. 29788C) was presumed by the restorers to come from the same codex as the binion. The binion contains (1) a hexameter idyll evoking the successive moods of Nature on a day in spring or autumn, (2) a hexameter encomium on the patrician Theagenes of Athens, (3) letters nos. 80 and 90 by St. Gregory Nazianzen. Lines from another hexameter poem are partly legible on two fragments which together constitute the top of the first page of the binion. The only trace of an author's name in the binion is the genitive-ending ο]ụ in the title of the encomium on Theagenes. The separate leaf (P. Gr. 29788C) preserves some fifty lines from a second hexameter encomium, but has been torn in such a way that the line-beginnings are missing from the Verso and the line-endings from the Recto; the names of the author and the addressee have not survived. Gerstinger's opinion that the hand is the same throughout and the writing of a style current in the fifth and sixth centuries has not been challenged. It has seemed to me unnecessary to reproduce in fuller detail the description of the papyrus given in the editio princeps. Should this not be available to the reader, ample information may be found in the reviews by Maas, Körte and Keydell. Gerstinger's attribution of the poems to Pamprepius was greeted by these and other critics with reactions varying from reserve to trenchant scepticism. There is reason to connect the encomium on Theagenes with Pamprepius, since the two were in Athens at the same time, Theagenes as archon, Pamprepius as a grammaticus. But even if we accept that Pamprepius wrote the encomium, the idyll is of higher quality, as Keydell and Maas noted, and might well be the work of a different poet. Doubt concerning the attribution has persisted, and Gerstinger's title-page remains virtually the only place where the poems are ascribed without qualification to Pamprepius.

The vases to be discussed in this article have as their common element a flat body and the turned-in rim that we now associate with an unspillable inkpot. The question of their name and use has already been the subject of much indecisive discussion, the fullest and ablest statement of the problem being given by E. Pernice, Jahrbuch 1899, pp. 60–72, where he maintains that the vases were all censers. Pernice had before him, however, a comparatively small number of typical vases, those he actually quotes being only 20. The fact that at Rhitsóna we had excavated 112 such vases suggested to us that it was worth while to see what light could be thrown on the problem by statistics dealing with all the vases extant. The new evidence does not definitely solve the problem. It does, however, emphasise and increase the serious objections already raised by Kourouniotes to Pernice's theory; and makes it not improbable that some, at least, of these vases were lamps, a view which has never yet been argued, either for or against. Our object in the present article is not to prove a theory but to state evidence.

About fifty miles to the north-east of Baghdad, an irregular eminence known as Tell Asmar has covered till recently the town of Eshnunna, which was abandoned to the desert after its destruction by Hammurabi in the twentieth century before Christ. The excavations now being conducted there by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have unearthed, among other important finds, a number of cylinder seals from early Dynastic and Akkadian levels, of which those reproduced in Fig. 1 and Plate II, 1, together with one seal (Plate II, 2) from the Southesk collection, form the basis of this article.

It will be observed that the designs shown in Fig. 1, a Sumerian impression pieced from fragments of clay, and Plate II, 1, an Akkadian stone cylinder of about 2500 B.C., both represent the conquest of a hydra-like monster. The impression has a serpent, two of whose seven heads have already been severed by a crudely-rendered man or god who holds a head in either hand, the stumps being visible above the living heads which still menace him. The scene is placed between friezes of scorpions, among whom is a single-headed snake, while a dragon with scorpion-tail stands behind the hydra, a participant, it may be, in the contest. An almost obliterated inscription in pre-Akkadian signs throws no light on the artist's intention.

Xenophon participated in the March of the Ten Thousand, but in the Anabasis, instead of parading his autopsy, he keeps his narratorial persona separate from his character. This separation, however, is subtly blurred when, on the one hand, the narrator adopts the perspective of the character, who is by far the most prominent focalizing instance in the narrative, and, on the other hand, the character appropriates narratorial functions: Xenophon the character comes to the fore as embedded narrator and commentator of the events. Furthermore, his references to the past can be read as meta-historical, i.e. they shed light on the commemorative act of the Anabasis. While the choice of a hetero-diegetic narrator helps Xenophon to enhance the credibility of the account of his deeds, the intricate entanglement of narrator and character contributes to the characterization of himself as the privileged agent in the March of the Ten Thousand.

One hundred years ago, in 1842, the Lycian Marbles were exhibited for the first time in the British Museum. Sir Charles Fellows had discovered them at Xanthus, the capital of Lycia, and succeeded in procuring them for the Trustees of the British Museum. Since that time, the Lycian Marbles have formed one of the main parts of the collection of Greek sculpture in London. But their London home seems to have had the strange effect of making them more and more reticent: these Lycian sculptures have indeed been extremely successful in withstanding all attempts at explaining them or even understanding them. In spite of the immense sensation caused at the time of their arrival in England and all through the nineteenth century, there is nobody who can even nowadays assign to any of them an accurate date or supply an adequate commentary.

The Harpy Tomb provides us with an excellent example for these (I admit) rather sweeping statements. Its place was in the middle of the Archaic Room of the British Museum. Everybody walked round it, looked at it, tried to explain it, and gave it up. Much has been written about it during these last hundred years, but the only solutions offered were of a vague mythological or symbolic character. However, I believe the time has come to attempt an explanation from a different angle altogether. It seems hopeless to continue on the well-trodden track, and to consider it simply as a piece of architecture or a piece of sculpture, in which we try to puzzle out the religious views expressed in the reliefs. In the interpretation offered in this paper, it is regarded primarily as the tomb or heroön of a certain family and as a monument of a certain historical character.

The hymn to the Greatest Kouros from Palaikastro, Crete, has occasioned considerable debate among students of choral lyric and ancient Greek religion since its discovery in 1904. The god invoked as the greatest kouros has been identified with Zeus Diktaios in whose sanctuary at Palaikastro the hymn was discovered. The hymn as we have it is a second or third century AD copy of a late fourth or third century BC composition. As is so often the case in Cretan studies, Minoan antecedents for the cult of Zeus Diktaios at Palaikastro and for the hymn have been suggested and explored.

Among the many discoveries made by the Greek Archaeological Society at Mycenae in 1886 there is one which, for the student of primitive religion, possesses a quite exceptional interest—I refer to the strange fresco here reproduced (Fig. 1). It was recovered at the excavation of a chamber belonging to the oldest period. The fresco itself was found on a wall somewhat to the south of this chamber, but evidently connected with the same group of buildings. M. Tsountas, the able director of the operations, describes it as It may be well to quote further his own account of the find. bearing on their shoulders a pole, which they grasp with their right hands—the left in each case not being shown.

R. M. Cook has recently pointed out that the transport of warships across the Isthmus of Corinth was not the normal use of the diolkos since there was no regular need for such transport. Rather, the diolkos from its inception served a commercial function and its use provided the Corinthian state with a source of revenue.

In the summer of 1884 I was permitted to accompany Professor Ramsay on his journey in Asia Minor, assisted by the Senate of the University of Cambridge with a grant from the Worts Fund. To my great regret, however, a fever compelled me to return home after spending only two months in the country, during which time I had been a novice in the various arts required for scientific travel. Hence, therefore, so far as my personal share in the expedition is concerned, the results obtained are limited both in number and in value. Such as they are, they are embodied in the following pages, and in the accompanying map; I have also introduced matter, as will be seen by the references, of which the credit belongs entirely to Professor Ramsay.

It will be seen from a study of the map, that our route during the part of the journey to be discussed in these pages, lay in the upper valley of the Maeander, with its tributary the Karasu (Morsynus); in the upper valley of the Gerenis Tchai (Indus); in the valleys of the Gebren Tchai and of the Istanoz Tchai, and in the district west of the Lake of Buldur. As regards the political divisions, it lay in the border lands of Caria, Phrygia, and Pisidia. The whole journey occupied about five weeks, as we left the railway at Kuyujak on May 28, and rejoined it near Denisli on July 5.

This article examines the place of tragic poetry within the early history and development of ancient literary criticism. It concentrates on Euripides, both because his works contain many more literary-critical reflections than those of the other tragedians and because he has been thought to possess an unusually ‘critical’ outlook. Euripidean characters and choruses talk about such matters as poetic skill and inspiration, the social function of poetry, contexts for performance, literary and rhetorical culture, and novelty as an implied criterion for judging literary excellence. It is argued that the implied view of literature which emerges from Euripidean tragedy is both coherent and conventional. As a critic, Euripides, far from being a radical or aggressively modern figure (as he is often portrayed), is in fact distinctly conservative, looking back in every respect to the earlier Greek poetic tradition.