I accept the general consensus that the transmitted end of Septem is not by Aeschylus; his play, as he wrote it, ends by giving an overwhelming impresssion that, while the brothers have killed each other, the city of Thebes has been saved. There are, however, three passages which seem to contradict that impression, by alluding to the usual version of the story in which the city will be destroyed by the Successors of the Seven in the next generation. I argue that all attempts by scholars to explain away this contradiction have been unsuccesssful. Aeschylus deliberately reminded his audience of the alternative version, and the question to be considered is why he did so.

In JHS. xlix, 270, Beazley and Payne, in their article on Attic black-figured fragments from Naukratis in the British Museum, publish for the first time fragments of two cups that belong to a well-marked group of black-rimmed kylikes that was first studied by Droop some twenty years ago (JHS. xxx, 21 ff.). These cups can at once be distinguished from the ordinary black-rimmed Little Master kylix by the following peculiarities:

The upper part of the stem is reserved and generally channelled.

The edge of the foot is convex and black, not, as in normal Little Master cups, whether red or black of rim, straight in section and reserved.

The hollow cone that runs from the base some way up the stem has a black band: in normal Little Master cups this cone is entirely reserved.

Inside the bowl there is a thin reserved band, not, as in normal Little Master cups, right at the top of the rim, but some way down it.

Whereas the normal Little Master cup, whether red-rimmed or black-rimmed, has the lower part of the body black with one reserved band, this treatment is exceptional in the Droop cups, which often shew a great variety of ornamental zones on this part of the vase; of these the most distinctive is a zone of inverted birds or animals, generally in pure silhouette.

The inside of the bowl is decorated with only a small reserved medallion with sometimes a central dot and circle or two, or else is entirely black.

The excavations were directed mainly to four points: the ruins of the Greek temple on the summit and a large Mycenaean house on the east side of the acropolis, an area outside the Lion Gate, and the Treasury of Atreus.

The foundations of the Greek temple were cleared, surveyed, and studied in detail. As they survive to-day they are certainly of the Hellenistic period, and it is clear that neither the Hellenistic sanctuary, nor any earlier temple that preceded it, had a peristyle. Blocks from earlier structures had been built into the foundations, and all round a great variety of tiles from early archaic to Hellenistic times was found. Pottery found below the surface of the northern terrace of the temple area shows that a sanctuary had existed throughout ‘Geometric’ times, and the tiles and architectural fragments indicate that it was succeeded by an early archaic shrine. The temple, with the massive substructures that supported it on the north, lies south and north, and it is possible that it owes this abnormal orientation to the fact that it overlies the shrine of the Mycenaean palace, which faced south. It now seems that the early archaic sculpture in relief previously found did not belong to a temple, but, since it was all found in the southern part of the temple area, may have belonged to some structure, perhaps an altar, which stood before the south front of the sanctuary.

The student of Greek religion has no more difficult problem to face than that of the Prometheus Vinctus. In previous writings I had always evaded it, because I had not found any solution and I hoped that there might be one. Failing to find anything satisfactory myself or in the writings of others, I have spoken of it in the title of this paper as a paradox rather than a problem. And I am only now setting down my thoughts on it in outline, because I do not find that the religious difficulties of that play are appreciated in their full gravity either by the commentators or by the writers on Greek religion.

The play is unique among (a) the dramas of the Attic stage, (b) the literature of Greece, (c) the religious literature of the world. The truth of the first two statements can be proved by a rapid glance through the existing and recorded literature of Greece, especially through the products of the Attic drama.

Much has been written in recent years on the ways in which ritual forms, patterns and sequences are remoulded into the imagery and action of classical Greek plays. A tragedy which offers exceptionally fertile ground for studies on ‘ritual and drama' is Sophocles’ Philoctetes, since theatrical and ritual strands are so intimately interwoven in its plot as to create an inextricable knot. In forthcoming work I explore in full both the ritual liminality of Philoctetes' and Neoptolemus' existence as well as the subtle ways in which the vital dramatic experiences of ‘acting’ and ‘viewing’ are inherently intertwined in this play with the initiatory strands of rites of maturation. The present note, conversely, is less ambitious in its scope, as its exclusive focus is one pivotal moment of the play's action, namely the dramatic exhibition of the bow to Neoptolemus' and the spectator's eyes. No matter how inherently interwoven with the action Philoctetes' bow is, Neoptolemus' close look, as he accepts it in his hands (Phil. 776), ‘theatricalises’ the object by converting it into a dramatic spectacle, a thea. But even before being formally delivered to Neoptolemus' custody (Phil. 762-78), the bow is prominently singled out as the prime focus of attention, becoming, as it does, a stage-prop uniquely capturing the boy's concentrated sight.

It is a common-place of most scholars, followed enthusiastically by writers of text-books, that Greek sailors did not like the sea; they went from island to island, or crept along the coast. Rarely did they leave the sight of land, and then only the most venturesome; and they did not sail by night. I don't know that I have seen it stated in so many words, but it is implied that the close relations between Miletus and Sybaris were maintained by voyages across the Aegean to Corinth (e.g.: ‘Corinth becomes the centre of exchange with Italy: it pays better to break cargo at the isthmus than to sail round the stormy coasts of the Peloponnese’), thence (but in Milesian or foreign ships?) through the gulf, up the north-west coast to Corcyra, hurriedly and anxiously across to Otranto, then, following every curve of the coast, past Tarentum and Metapontum, to their goal. If goods must go further, as so many did to Etruria, they took another isthmus-route overland to Laus or Scidrus, thence along the coast again, even as far as Massalia and Emporiae.

τελεσϕόρος in these lines is translated by LSJ as ‘one having the management or ordering’ and this sense of ‘being in command’, ‘having authority’ from the use of τέλος as ‘authority’, ‘magistracy’ (LSJ I 3 and 4) is followed by Sidgwick, Tucker, Verrall, Lloyd-Jones and others going back to the scholiast who glosses the term ἀρχηγός, διοικητής. τελεσϕόρος here, however, picks up in particular two significant earlier uses of the word in this play, at two moments, such as this, of high tension (212, Orestes’ first announcement of himself to Electra; 541, Orestes’ first statement of his predictive dream-analysis and plan of revenge) and it goes beyond, as I shall argue, the reductive reading of the scholia, lexica, commentators, and translators.

There are four passages in Thucydides (two of them from the same chapter) which have certain features in common: they are all of them explicitly comments by the author himself, they are all demonstrably late, that is, written a good deal later than the events to which they are immediately related (three of them certainly, the other probably, after 404 B.C., and the last named at least not long before the end of the war), and they all show, to a greater or smaller degree, a discrepancy with the narrative of those events. They are ii 65.7, ii 65.11, iv 81.2–3, and vi 15.4. The discrepancies are such that they compel, in my view, the conclusion that they were written at times different from the related narratives; this leads us to the problem of the composition of the History, a problem which has given rise to a mass of controversy, most of it barren to the last degree, but which cannot on that account be ignored. Mme de Romilly in her recent book has adequately defined the problem and described the controversy, and as well contributed most to its understanding; as she says, it is not so much a question of when passages were written, as when they were thought. But I have not seen it observed that these four passages form a group, by reason of their common features; and, because of these features, two of which are certain and the third (the discrepancy with the related narrative), as I hope to show, demonstrable, they should form a somewhat surer foundation for any theory about the composition of Thucydides' work. If the discrepancy be there, then, since the comments are late, the narrative must be early, relatively early. All four passages, it may be noted in passing, have this also in common, that they are comment on the effect of prominent individuals on the course of the war (Perikles, Brasidas, Alkibiades); and all are anticipatory in the sense that, where they now stand in the History, they point forward to future events.

In Vols. XVIII. (1898) and XXXI. (1911) of the Journal I gave some account of black-figured vases acquired by the British Museum subsequently to the appearance of Vol. II. of the Catalogue of Vases in 1893. On page 1 of the latter volume a promise was made that another paper should follow, describing red-figured vases similarly acquired; but its appearance has been delayed by the war and other circumstances, with the result that the number of vases now included amounts to nearly fifty. Seventeen other vases acquired during the period 1895–1920 are omitted here as having been already published elsewhere, but a list is appended on page 150. The total number of red-figured vases added to the collection since 1894 is thus over sixty.

Pelasgus goes off to summon his people, bidding the chorus pray for their desires to be fulfilled. They appeal to Zeus to ward off the lust of men, and in the antistrophe claim his support as the ancestor of Epaphus. M's γϵνέσθω in 527 must mean fiat, an impossible sense with no closer analogue than LXX γένοιτο γένοιτο. Schütz' γένϵι σῷ, adopted by most modern editors, gives good sense with little change, but removes the sense-pause at period-end (here marked by hiatus and the sequence ). Period-end without pause is sufficiently infrequent in Aeschylus (about 10%) to deter us from introducing it by emendation, and especially infrequent when marked by hiatus (about 6%). Moreover, πϵίθου or πιθοῦ is not a word used by mortals to gods in prayer (though Pindar so addresses his Muse, P. 1, 59).

The Rubrics to be discussed here are five in number: and They have often been discussed before, both singly and together, but their relationship to each other was given a new prominence by Meritt's ordering of the lists for the Assessment Periods in which they appear. If his arrangement of them is accepted as a starting-point for discussion, the results for the tribute-history of the cities in these Rubrics are as set out in the table in ATL (iii 87). From this general picture of the Rubrics the following points emerge:

(1) ἄτακτοι cities are first noted as such in ATL's List 20 (435/4), in which five cases are observable—Gale, Pharbelos, Othoros, Chedrolos and Miltoros—all in the Thrakian panel. These cities may all have appeared in List 19 (436/5) making similar payments, but if ATL's placing of their entries in that list is correct, they were not then noted as ἄτακτοι. Before List 19 two of them (Gale and Miltoros) had never made any appearance in the lists, as we have them, at all; one (Chedrolos) last appeared in 447/6 and was absent from a full panel in 443/2; and the remaining two (Pharbelos and Othoros) had appeared fairly regularly down to 441/0 and are not known to have been absent ever. In all cases where an ἄτακτος has paid before, it pays exactly the same amount as it paid in its latest known payment before 436/5.

The editor having invited me to reply to Professor Bernard Ashmole's ‘New Interpretation of the Portland Vase’, the reader will, I hope, forgive me for returning to a topic which he may think in danger of being worn threadbare. Although my own interpretation has been generously characterised by Professor Ashmole as ‘persuasively argued’, its failure to convince not only him but Professor Hans Möbius and Professor F. L. Bastet shows that it was not persuasive enough; and the aim of the following pages is to re-state the case for it and to fortify it, as I hope, with additional arguments which would have overloaded the popular publication in which it first appeared.

I begin, as before, with the young man who advances to the right in front of a small structure consisting of two square pillars raised on a continuous base and supporting a Doricising entablature (Plate IV). According to Möbius and Ashmole this structure is a gateway and the young man has just passed through it. ‘Ask yourself’, Ashmole bids the reader, ‘where he can have come from if not through the gateway, and you will see that this must be the correct solution.’ But must it? If the young man had come through the supposed gateway, surely the foot he first set to the ground—his left—would be more or less on the axis of the opening and not, as it actually is, with the heel almost touching the corner of the base nearest the spectator: an artist in whose work ‘no detail is negligible’ would hardly have put a foot as wrong as that.

To a traveller sailing over the Aegean from the West, and threading his course between the Sporades towards the Carian coast, two headlands would stand out as prominent landmarks, Mount Poseidion to the north and the city of Myndos to the south. Between these two points lies the middlemost of the three large bays into which the coastline of Caria is irregularly broken. And nearly in the innermost recess of this central bay —for the bay itself is subdivided into a number of lesser inlets—a little rocky island, of only a mile and a quarter in circumference, lies close to the Carian mainland, to which indeed in later days it has become united by a narrow isthmus. Upon this rocky islet, lurking as it were behind the shelter of inclosing shores, a Greek colony—from Argos, it was said—had early established itself. But in their struggle with the Carian natives, who resented their intrusion, the settlers experienced such reverses, that they were glad to invite the son of Neleus, the founder of Miletus, to come to their relief. This he did, and with important results; for this influx of Ionian settlers from Miletus, while it repaired the fortunes of the little colony, transformed lasos from a Dorian into an Ionian city.

This paper is concerned with a problem which has puzzled me for many years. The Greek philosophers of the Ionian tradition, from Anaximander to Epicurus, are commonly called specially ‘scientific,’ in contrast with the Italian tradition started by Pythagoras. Why is it, then, that their systems are cast in the form of dogmatic pronouncements? It is not only that they describe, with complete confidence, matters beyond the reach of observation, such as the origin of the world; but when they come to matters of detail, they make assertions which could have been upset by a little careful observation or by the simplest experiment.

It has been argued—by Burnet, for instance—that this dogmatism may be only apparent. Our evidence is fragmentary, and comes largely from manuals compiled much later by men whose object was to discredit science for reaching contradictory conclusions, and by no means to record the methods employed to reach those conclusions. W. A. Heidel, too, thought that, if we possessed the philosophers' notebooks, we should find that their results were obtained by methods akin to those of modern science, though with less awareness of the need for caution in experimental tests. Behind these arguments lies the assumption that the questions they asked themselves, the motives prompting their inquiries, and the quarter to which they looked for the sources of knowledge, were the same then as now.

The traditional route followed by the Army of Cyrus the Younger as shown in Map I of Vol. VI of the Cambridge Ancient History and in Bury's History of Greece take an almost straight line from the sea at Myriandros to the great bend in the R. Euphrates where it turns to the south-east. Thapsacus, where Cyrus crossed the river, is shown at the bend, approximately where the modern Meskeneh now stands, in the Cambridge Ancient History, while Bury places it farther east at or near the modern Raqqa. Both identify the R. Araxes with the modern Khabour.

As a result of a close examination of parts of Chapters iv and v of the Anabasis, wide reading of the works of ancient and modern travellers in those parts, coupled with some researches in the parasang and a knowledge of the terrain gained during some war-time journeys in that area, I find myself unable to accept these identifications, as they fit neither the length of marches itemised by Xenophon, nor the physical features of the terrain. Both entirely ignore the existence of a considerable river known today as the R. Belekh.

1. On June 3, 1882, while travelling from Apollonia to Antioch of Pisidia, we observed a long inscription in a cemetery by the roadside, about eleven or twelve miles west of the latter town, and close to the village of Gondáne. It was engraved on a pillar of peculiar shape, commonly used in Roman and Byzantine times: a horizontal section of the column would give the annexed figure.

A short inspection showed that the inscription was important, and Sir C. Wilson delayed the march for a day to allow me to copy it. I was exceedingly anxious to get an impression, but a strong and bitterly cold north wind, accompanied by frequent heavy showers, frustrated our attempts. At last, by laying my coat over the impression-paper on the stone, I got a squeeze of a small part. The inscription has been engraved by an unskilful workman: the lines are very uneven, the letters are unequal in size and various in form, sometimes deeply and clearly cut, sometimes merely scratched, ligatures are frequent, and often three, or even four, letters are united. In some cases it was impossible to tell, except from the meaning, whether a group of letters belonged to one line or another. In the heavy rain the only way of copying the inscription was to learn half a line by heart, and get into some shelter where I could write it out in my notebook. In this way I made a complete copy during the day: at night I wrote out lists of the proper names, compared the different forms together, and made a note of the places where difficulties struck me. Next morning the rest of the party went on to Antioch: I waited behind, revised the whole of the inscription, and carefully observed every difficulty that I had noted. A few other difficulties have occurred to me in subsequent study of the inscription; but in the great majority of cases where I remark on an uncertainty, the difficulty was distinctly present in my mind when comparing the copy with the stone.

Students of ancient metrology have long since been acquainted with a short tract, though so far none seems to have been aware of the fact that it has been published in four different versions:

(1) The manuale legum, or Hexabiblos, of Constantine Harmenopulos, a Byzantine compilation dating from 1345 and transmitted in a great number of manuscripts, has been published a number of times since the editio princeps of 1540; the most accessible edition, with Latin translation and some notes, is that of Heimbach. In book 2 ch. 4 (De novis operibus), there appears (but not in all MSS) a page-long metrological table (# 12), purporting to derive from an architect Julian of Ascalon, according to the editors not attested elsewhere. The text in the still basic collection of F. Hultsch, Metrologici scriptores (Leipzig 1864) i. 54 ff.; 200 f., on which all students of ancient metrology depend, derives from this authority. Though there is nothing in the text of Harmenopulos that indicates the end of his excerpt of Julian, it is implicit in the discussions of modern scholars that only the metrological table is Julian's work and that the paragraphs devoted to building laws which follow it derive from a different source.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, I tried to shew that the cities of Ionia which took part in the revolt against Persia in the years B.C. 500–494 issued an uniform coinage in electrum. So far as I am aware, this discovery has met with general acceptance. It may, however, in consequence of the place where it appeared, not have come fairly before most of those who are interested in Greek history and archaeology. I therefore propose here to state my view somewhat more in detail, and to trace certain corollaries which are as yet unpublished.

I need not go through the story of the Ionian Revolt, as narrated by Herodotus: it is fair to assume that every scholar is familiar with it. It may, however, be well here to mention the cities, the names of which occur in this section of the story of Herodotus, with the definite facts recorded of them, as the issues of coins would probably be civic issues. It was Miletus, under the guidance of Aristagoras, which began the revolt (v. 35). It spread rapidly to Mylasa and Termera in Caria, as well as to Mytilene and Cyme.

I am delighted with Mr Anderson's article in this number of the Journal (171–2) on the Greek names of sea-birds. Δυτῖνος is a rare word and it must refer to a bird diving from the surface like our divers, the commonest of which is our Little Grebe (Podiceps ruficulus), but of course the term could include all ducks. The name κολυμβίς could also be applied to all these birds but it need not be confined to them. The Greeks knew that terns dived from a height and said κηξ or καυάξ: Homer compares the bird to the lady, who fell into a hold (Od. xv 479).

There is a picture of two birds with plumage like that of Black-throated Divers or Great Northern Divers on a Middle Minoan mug found at Palaikastro near the sea in East Crete (Unpublished Objects 92 fig. 77: Zervos, Crete no. 742). One bird is diving from a rock, towards a root on the bottom, the other is standing on a stone opening its beak to give an alarm signal. It might be objected to this picture that divers do not dive from rocks, nor stand upright on stones; otherwise it is a good picture. According to the Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe, there appear to be two birds, but I can only find one Latin name: Colymbus Arcticus. In spite of its name the bird is known in Greek waters.

The agora, the nucleus of all Greek cities, was in the beginning simply a convenient open space, around which buildings were irregularly placed. With the growth of systematic planning in Ionia a new type was evolved, and henceforth the old-fashioned agora and the Ionian existed side by side. Several years ago F. J. Tritsch wrote an account of the old type of agora, taking Elis (Fig. 1) as the best example. Since then Athens has yielded richer and more interesting material. The new evidence clarifies and confirms the picture drawn by Tritsch, which may still be accepted as true in principle. One might, however, attempt a brief general account of the new or Ionian agora, which has not perhaps been given the place it deserves in the history of Hellenic architecture. Finally, since remarkable Hellenistic developments have been revealed in the Athenian agora, one is prompted to ask whether the influence of new ideas and methods produced modifications in the older type.