A characteristic phenomenon of the High Empire, though it is found both earlier and later, is the alimentary scheme, whereby foundations established by emperors or private persons provide a kind of family allowance for the children of free-born but not wealthy parents. Though such schemes may well have had Hellenistic antecedents, the earliest known example is from Julio-Claudian Italy, where T. Helvius Basila, a senator from Atina, leaves 400,000 sesterces to his fellow-citizens ‘ut liberis eorum ex reditu, dum in aetatem pervenirent, frumentum et postea sestertia singula milia darentur’.

In the second century, probably beginning with Nerva, alimentary schemes become part of the system of imperial benefactions, and their workings are attested for many cities of Italy by inscriptions and by letters of the younger Pliny.

In the centennial JHS, R. Goulet proposed a radical revision of the chronology of the life and literary productions of Eunapius of Sardis. Briefly stated, Goulet argued that Eunapius had arrived as a student in Athens in 364, rather than 362, and identified the later date with the terminus of the first ἔκδοσις of Eunapius' History, the publication of which he placed not before 395. This date, in turn, forced him to explain references in Eunapius' other known work, the Vitae Sophistarum, to post-364 events that had already been treated in the History, as anticipatory allusions integrated into accounts of earlier affairs. Though Goulet's reconstruction has as yet gone unchallenged, its infirm foundation of hypothesis supported by special pleading collapses beneath the weight of the evidence at hand.

Toward the midpoint of the OT Jocasta, in a bid to convince Oedipus of the unreliability of oracles, recalls the old prophecy that Laius was destined to die at the hands of his son. Jocasta points out that this prediction proved doubly mistaken, since Laius was killed by foreign robbers at a crossroads and his newborn child was exposed on the desolate mountainside (707–25). To Jocasta's surprise, Oedipus responds with agitation. He questions her closely about the circumstances of Laius' death and then embarks on an autobiographical narrative that touches on his early life in Corinth and his journey to Delphi, reaching its rhetorical climax with the description of his own fateful encounter at the very crossroads mentioned by Jocasta.

Whilst travelling in Asia Minor in 1900 I paid a cursory visit to the peninsula of Cyzicus on the Propontis, in ancient Mysia, and had the opportunity of examining the site of the ancient city, and the canal that has been the subject of considerable controversy in bygone ages, and about which the facts are still only partly ascertained. As the site appeared to promise results of peculiar interest, I applied for a concession to excavate it. I had the good fortune to obtain an Imperial Iradé in February, and began tentative operations in May.

From the Admiralty Chart it will be seen that Cyzicus lies on the 30° long. east of Greenwich, and 40°22′ N. lat. and within easy reach of Constantinople. To Panderma there is practically a daily service of steamers, which leave Constantinople at sunset and arrive at about four o'clock the next morning. At Panderma a sailing-skiff takes one in about an hour across the bay to Yeni-Keui, the landing stage immediately outside the walls of the city.

In connection with a temple of Artemis Eukleia at Plataea, Plutarch tells us that Eukleia was commonly identified with Artemis: τὴν δ᾿ Εὔκλειαν μὲν πολλοὶ καὶ καλοῦσι καὶ νομίζουσιν ᾿´ Αρτεμν(Plut. Arist. 20.6). His testimony is supported by Pausanias, who mentions a temple of Artemis Eukleia at Thebes (Paus. ix 17.1). Plutarch goes on to tell us that the cult of Eukleia was widespread, at the same time giving us a glimpse of its followers: βωμὸς γὰρ αὐτῇ καὶ ἄγαλμα κατὰ πᾶσαν ἀγορὰν ἴδρυται καὶ προθύουσιν αἵ τε γαμούμεναι καὶ οἱ γαμοῦντες(Plut. ibid.). He has himself already mentioned Eukleia's temple at Plataea and we may add the festival of Eukleia at Corinth reported by Xenophon. More important perhaps for the present discussion, Pausanias mentions a temple of Eukleia situated in the agora at Athens: ἔτι δὲ ἀπωτέρω ναὸς Εὐκλείας, ἀνάθημα καὶ τοῦτο ἀπὸ Μήδων, οῖ τῆς χώρας Μαραθῶνι ἔσχον φρονῆσαι δὲ ᾿ Αθηναίους ἐπὶ τῇ νίκῃ ταύτῃ μάλιστα εἰκάζω (Paus. i 14.5).

The vaulting system of a Persian palace may seem to be a subject remote from the province of the Hellenic Society. It is not perhaps so remote as it appears. The history of Hellenistic art is closely interwoven with the problems of the Orient, and all evidence is welcome which will help to elucidate a period so obscure, yet of so far-reaching an influence, as that which saw the fusion of Greece with the East after the conquests of Alexander. From the age of the Diadochi the arts emerged profoundly modified. To instance architecture alone, we find the builders in the Greek coast-lands preoccupied with Asiatic structural methods, bringing forth new solutions, modifying, with their quick sense of proportion and of beauty, ancient oriental themes, and giving back to inner Asia as much as they had derived from her. Not one of the great cities of the Diadochi in Mesopotamia or Syria has yet been excavated, and the importance of such fragmentary knowledge of the succeeding civilizations as can be gathered together lies in the fact that they indicate the changes that had taken place during a time of rapid development about which we have no direct information. In this development Greece and Asia bore an equal part, and the lines of interaction are everywhere to be traced. I am not, however, concerned here to disentangle these complex questions, but merely to furnish a few more details that bear upon their oriental aspect.

This article has two purposes. First, it proposes a more satisfactory solution to an old problem: the apparently serious inaccuracy of Thucydides' measurements for the length of Sphakteria island and the width of the channels dividing it from the mainland. Second, it offers some more general observations on Thucydides' measures of distance and the light they can shed on an important aspect of his historiographic method.

The solution proposed by R. Bauslaugh (‘The text of Thucydides IV 8.6 and the south channel at Pylos’, JHS 99 (1979) 1-6) to the problem of measurements is rejected. Bauslaugh had emended two of the three figures on the ground that they were so seriously inaccurate as to require assumption of manuscript corruption. It is here contended that his argument is misconceived, and the emendations unnecessary. The counter-argument is based on a close study of Thucydides' idiom and practice in giving measurements of distance, particularly his use of qualifying expressions with numbers of this kind.

The second half of the article uses data compiled in an ongoing study of the use of numbers by Greek historians to make some comparisons between Thucydides' practice and that of several other historians in giving measurements of distance. It is suggested that careful attention to the nuances of Thucydides' practice, especially his use of different qualifying expressions with these numbers, may enable one to draw some interesting inferences about his sources of information and how he used them

In the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India, 1923–4, pp. 125–6, Pl. XLI, c Mr. H. Hargreaves published an ‘unidentified relief from Gandhara’ the subject of which has not yet been explained. The relief (fig. 1), which is believed to have come from one of the numerous mounds in the Mardan subdivision of the Peshawar district, was the property of Mr. F. V. Wylie, I.C.S. (now Sir Francis Wylie, K.C.S.I., C.I.E.) then stationed at Mardan. The scene represents on the left a woman rushing out of a gateway in an attitude combining horror with warning; her arms are uplifted; she is naked to the waist and wears anklets and necklets. Mr. Hargreaves suggested she wore a crenellated crown and might be a city goddess. She seems, however, only to wear her hair in the usual Indian fashion in a top knot. She is obviously expressing hosror at the scene on the right and imploring the participants to desist. The main figure on the right is a tall, fully robed man thrusting a spear into the chest of a horse which is mounted on wheels. Behind the horse is another similarly clothed male figure—young or at least unbearded—with his hands resting on the flanks of the horse and apparently thrusting it forward. Between these two figures is another, an elderly bearded man standing on the other side of the horse. The dress of the male figure is classical, indeed one might say Roman; certainly their footwear appears to be Roman. The lady, however, is depicted in regular Indian fashion. On the extreme right is a standing soldier holding a spear, much damaged. The faces of the male figures are all more or less damaged, but they are certainly laymen and not any of the familiar figures of the usual Buddhist sculptures of Gandhara.

The use of preliminary sketch in Attic red-figure is so widespread and so familiar that even in a detailed publication its presence often passes unmentioned, yet illustrations of it are not always easy to find. It may therefore be helpful to bring together some examples on which the sketch-work is of particular interest and at the same time to include instances of what is basically the same procedure, but applied to other techniques of vase-painting.

As is well known, the sketch is composed of shallow grooves made in the surface of the clay before firing; the lines are most obvious in the reserved areas, but it can sometimes be seen that they extend into the black background, and when they do, the shininess of the black in the grooves shows clearly that they were made before the black was applied. The exact nature of the instrument with which the sketch was drawn is not known; the grooves generally look as if they had been made with a small, blunt tool, though whether it was wood or metal or some other material cannot be determined. Each artist no doubt had his own favourite implement, but it is worth noting that occasionally, and above all on Apulian red-figure, the sketch-lines are narrow slits cut into the clay; this kind of line, at least, must have been made with something sharp, presumably a metal graver. The amount of detail in the sketch varies from man to man, and there may even be differences between works that can be attributed to the same hand, or between the two sides of the same pot. Sometimes the artist does no more than block out the general masses and arrangement of the figures; on other vases the preliminary work is very exact and on occasion may be more detailed than the final drawing.

All editions and translations of Homer's Iliad present the epic as a series of twenty-four segments always marked off in the same places. In this respect the Iliad conforms to, and seems even to originate, a practice in which narratives of any considerable length are almost always presented in marked segments, usually called chapters. Similarly, dramas, except very short ones, usually run as a series of acts whose dimensions are determined in the composition (i.e., not afresh with each performance). Acts may be marked by curtains, intermissions or briefer pauses, or other variations in the performance: in ancient Greek drama the segmentation is unmistakeably marked by the placement of choral lyrics (Arist. Poet. 1452b). It is not exactly clear why the chapter and the act should be so indispensable, but authors and audiences alike know intuitively that they are. Yet many scholars since antiquity have believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey originally lacked marked segmentation, and that the now-familiar presentation was imposed upon them later by someone other than their composer(s). Even today, when few scholars see profit in analyzing the Iliad and Odyssey into earlier and later strata, the so-called 'book divisions’ continue to offer a tempting target for analytic criticism.

We understand that it is not proposed to publish the Attic vase-fragments found at Naucratis in the London section of the Corpus Vasorum: we have therefore asked Mr. Walters for permission to publish a selection of them; and our request has been kindly granted.

The fragments are all from Naucratis, except Nos. 11 and 50. In references to the Corpus Vasorum we omit the rubric III He, and represent III Hd by d only. We refer freely to the second Oxford fascicule, soon to appear, of Corpus Vasorum; to Payne's forthcoming Necrocorinthia (abbreviated N.); and to Beazley, Attic Black-figure: a Sketch (abbreviated ABS.). We had hoped to give page-references to Necrocorinthia: but the page-proof has been held up.

The initial chapter of M. Perrot's memoir on Thasos makes it unnecessary to give any general description of the position, aspect, and climate of the island. But since he wrote before the Austrian staff-map, which contains rough contours, was produced, it will be well to supplement and correct his remarks on the mountain system of the island.

On this M. Perrot wrote (p. 7):—

‘Le système des montagnes de l'île est assez confus, et très difficile à établir sur une carte. Le seul trait remarquable et qui frappe tout ďabord, c'est une chaîne principale, très étroite au sommet et souvent taillée en lame de rasoir, qui traverse l'île à peu près de l'est à l'ouest, en jetant vers le sud et le nord ďépais contreforts et des vallées sinueuses. Les points les plus élevés de cette longue crête, qui serre toujours de près la côte nord, sont le Saint-Élie (960 mètres) et l'Ipsario (1030 mètres) . . . tout le pays au sud de cette chaîne, environ les deux tiers de I'île, est formé de hauteurs qui se mêlent et courent en tout sens, et ne dépassent guère cinq ou six cents mètres.’

Buschor, by his Crocodile, has brought order into the study of Attic plastic vases, but even after Buschor much remains to be done. I propose to examine and classify the Attic vases in the form of human heads. I shall not discuss, or not fully, either the vases in the form of complete human figures —the Dionysos in London, the satyrs in Saraievo and Taranto; or the sphinxes; or the groups—mounted Amazon, blackamoor and cayman, pygmy and dead crane; or the small and usually petty plastic adjuncts to hydriai, oinochoai, kyathoi, epinetra; or the head-vases and bust-vases of the fourth century, which are best studied in connexion with the other plastic vases of the same period.

Some head-vases are oil- or perfume-pots, others drinking-vessels, others jugs. The perfume-pots have the same mouth, neck, and handles as a round aryballos: fourth-century vases borrow this part from the squat lekythos, but with these we are not concerned. The drinking-vessels, whether two-handled or single-handled, have a kantharos mouth: I shall keep the word kantharos for the two-handled sort; the single-handled kantharos I shall call a mug. The jugs nearly always have the same mouth as the kind of vase which I have called oinochoe shape I: but three other kinds of mouth occur as exceptions, and will be noted each in its place.

At the VIIth Congress for the History of Religions, held at Amsterdam in 1950, the central question was posed whether a mythical-ritual pattern could be discerned in various ancient and modern civilisations. Reading the Congress Report, one does not get the impression that many final and far-reaching conclusions have been reached. Various conflicting views were brought forward in the section-meetings. But meanwhile the discussion goes on. And it may be not without interest to inquire into some individual cases where a ritual background behind some famous myth can be reconstructed, if not beyond all doubt, at least with a high degree of probability. In the following pages such an attempt is made in the case of the Seriphian Perseus-legend.

The present writer believes that there is a clue to the understanding of this story, which has been overlooked hitherto, namely its connexion with hot springs. A certain number of cults, myths, and legends were connected with such springs in the ancient Greek world; that they all show in origin a chthonic aspect is self-evident. But to dwell upon all of them would fall beyond the scope of this article. Let us for the present moment turn our attention to the thermal springs of that tiny piece of rock in the Aegean round which a major part of the Perseus-story centres.

In this article I review 11 books published since 2010 that bring the ‘material turn’ to classics. Some start from emic ancient perspectives on matter and materiality; others take their cue from current theoretical models such as those of the new materialisms. All offer new insights into our relationship with the material world and consider the material object as active within different paradigms. In reviewing these important volumes together, I question entrenched boundaries: from those between (sub-)disciplines to those between human and non-human agents. I explore the material turn not as an isolated phenomenon, but, first, as a cyclical ‘re’-turn and, second, as an integrated set of ideas incorporating (to name but a few strands) aesthetics, cognitive humanities, embodiment, affect and the senses. The books reviewed range from literary studies to archaeology to art history to material culture to heritage. Taken together, they set new directions for classics, and indeed for our thinking about our place in the world.

In JHS xcvii (1977) 54–63 I argued against the view that the prevalent Spartan attitude towards Athens throughout the Pentekontaetia was aggressive and that in the First Peloponnesian War Sparta was eager to engage and crush her, being prevented only by the barrier of Mt. Geraneia with its Athenian garrisons. There seemed to me to be four main difficulties in this view:

(a) The Corinthians succeeded in crossing Mt. Geraneia with their local allies early in the war, even though the Athenians were already present: so why not Sparta?

(b) A full Peloponnesian army was able to reach central Greece by sea after the war had been in progress for some three years, and their reluctance on that occasion to cross the northern frontier of Attica even after they had defeated the Athenians seems inexplicable on this view.

The student of Greek religion and mythology who devoted his attention solely to the more striking figures of the Hellenic Pantheon would very imperfectly apprehend its true extent and character. No doubt the wide-spread cultus and the many-sided nature of its Dii Majores give them a pre-eminent claim upon our study, but at the same time we can never leave wholly out of sight those innumerable subordinate beings—whether divine or semi-human—who were created by the exuberant fancy of the Greek, and honoured by his worship. The presence of these lesser gods is felt at every turn: their images are set, as it were, upon every high hill, and under every green tree; and though their personality may often be less interesting than that of the greater deities, nay, though it be sometimes colourless or barely intelligible, our survey of the broad field of Hellenic worship and legend will always remain imperfect so long as we suffer these, its minuter, objects to escape our vision. Thus, for instance, in treating of the great Greek divinity of healing—Asklepios—we cannot afford to ignore those inferior personages who follow in his train and even share his powers. It is of one of these subordinate divinities—the god Telesphoros—that I propose to speak in the present paper.

Mrs Ure has recalled attention in recent JHS Notes (lxxxviii [1968] 140 f.; lxxxix [1969] 120 f.) to the class of fifth-century Corinthian cups and other small vases studied formerly by Sam Wide (in AM xxvi [1901] 143 ff.) and her (in JHS lxix [1949] 18 ff.). It is surely time the class had a name and, with Mrs Ure's approval, I suggest ‘The Sam Wide Group’. Mrs Ure mentions a cup of the group in Oxford and I take this opportunity to publish it. It is in private possession but at present exhibited in the Ashmolean museum, whose photographs of it are shown here (Plate II 1–2). The fabric and the outside decoration (partly painted handles, tongues on the lip, a band within the concave foot) are wholly normal for this group. The cup interior, which carries the figure decoration, measures 9.2 cm across. The paint is a reddish brown, used with varying intensity from the pale wash for hatching to heavy stippling over painted areas (as the cloak). The scene is of Oedipus and the Sphinx—with a difference which is easier to describe than explain. Oedipus sits at the left, his petasos slung behind his neck, his sword drawn and held upright over his knees. A chlamys fastened round his neck appears to be raised in a protective gesture over his head. Passing from the ridiculous to the sublime we might compare the gesture of a Niobe protecting her child. The left arm holding the drapery is not shown, but this explanation seems the most plausible. The only alternative is that this is the rock on which we might expect the Sphinx otherwise to be sitting, and which can be shown in this form. The monster is perched on a column with a volute capital which is not strictly Ionic but of the type commonly seen on vases for structures or furniture. A high plinth over the volutes serves as base for the creature, rocking back on its haunches, balancing, it seems, on a springy tail.

The object of the present essay is to bring together whatever fragments of evidence we possess which may throw light upon the cults of Olbia, the colony founded by the Milesians at the mouth of the Borysthenes about 647 B.C. But by way of preface it may be worth while briefly to indicate the claims that Olbia has to be the subject of special study. All the Greek settlements on the North coast of the Euxine must have had in common many traits which marked them off from Greek colonies elsewhere, but Olbia, while in many respects it may be regarded as a typical city of the locality, was also undoubtedly possessed of an individuality of its own.