The names given to plants in ancient and modern Greek are not only of interest in themselves but have some bearing upon a general point in the history of the meaning of words. Many of the names of plants in ancient authors can only be interpreted with a certain vagueness: of νάρκισσος we can only say that it is some sort of daffodil; κρίνον is pretty certain to be a lily of some kind; we can hardly go further. In these straits it is natural enough to enquire into the meaning of these words in Modern Greek, and here we certainly find no lack of information, but unless we scrutinise this modern evidence with some care we are apt, I think, to let it lead us too far, or even in some wrong direction. How this modern evidence ought, in my opinion, to be used is the subject of this present paper.

It has been demonstrated by F. Herrmann that the earliest issues of Larisean coinage, which are earlier than those of any other Thessalian city, are struck on the Persian standard. The Athenian tyrants of the Chersonese struck coins which conformed to the Persian as well as to the Attic system, but the adoption of the Persian standard by an independent Greek state is, so far as can be at present ascertained, an unique phenomenon. Nevertheless, though his conclusion is remarkable, the arguments of Herrmann appear to be incontestable and are accepted by numismatists. The purpose of this article is to shew that this discovery corroborates rather than conflicts with the evidence of ancient literary authorities. It is hard to reconcile only with modern interpretations of this literary evidence and with reconstructions of the period, which must accordingly be somewhat modified.

The main object of this addition to the paper published under the above title in JHS xlii. 133, is to make known a new discovery in the shape of an unanswerable argument leading to the same solution as before of the problem presented by the Greek notation. This problem is still considered to overshadow all other problems. After the conclusion of the argument the writer proposes to make a few necessary corrections in the former paper, and to lay further emphasis on certain points.

It is an unfortunate circumstance in the music of to-day that performers and composers alike, even those destined to spend their lives as devotees of opera and symphony, begin their careers with little or no acquaintance with the most important branch of musical knowledge, the theory of intonation. They have been taught to think in terms of a scale tuned by fifths (whether tempered or true makes no practical difference), and au fond their instructor is the piano tuner. This is quintal music, to borrow a term used by historians in speculation regarding primitive origins.

Tell me, Muse, of that resourceful Man who travelled far,

After he had sacked the sacred walls of Troy in war,

And looked on many towns of men, and learnt their mind, while he

In his own heart suffered many sorrows on the sea,

To save himself from death and doom and bring his comrades safely home—

Eager though he was, he could not save them; they were fools and ate

The cattle of our Lord the Sun-God; their own folly proved their fate—

Something of that story, goddess, child of Zeus, to us relate.

That, so far as the Muse is concerned, is a complete epic paragraph, the form marked by the chime, ‘Tell, Muse … goddess, child of Zeus, relate!’ The Man, his character and his adventures, his comrades and their folly, are to be the Muse's theme. And yet the pattern still awaits completion, since the Man is not yet named. The second paragraph fulfils an expectation. We are in suspense until we hear ‘godlike Odysseus’ at the end.

There can be little doubt that, as Eduard Schwartz points out, the problem of the political sympathies of Thucydides can only be properly approached if it is remembered that his history in its present form was revised and possibly rewritten after the end of the Peloponnesian War. He was living in an atmosphere of défaitisme. Many of his contemporaries tended to glorify Sparta and her institutions, and to regard Athenian imperialism as a disastrous mistake. As a man of the older generation Thucydides felt it his duty to counteract this tendency by drawing attention to the real idealism which had inspired the Machtpolitik of the Periclean age, and by pointing to the benefits which the rule of Athens had conferred on the Greek world. The Preface to Book I may be regarded as a veiled apologia for the Athenian Empire, which had secured for Greece the freedom of intercourse which the writer holds to be essential alike for economic prosperity and for cultural development. Similarly the contrasts which Thucydides draws between the Athenian and the Spartan character, and the glorification of Athens which is the main subject of the Funeral Oration are inspired by the hope that the disillusioned Greeks of the early fourth century might come to realise that the ideals of Pericles and other Athenian imperialists had been not sordid but noble, and that Greece as a whole had derived benefits from the rule of Athens.

Miss W. Lamb has kindly asked me to publish the terracotta sarcophagus in Cambridge, which comes from Rhodes. Fig. 1 explains the system of reference to the various parts of the face of the typical Clazomenian sarophagus. Unless it is otherwise stated, figures and heads of men and animals face towards the centre of the sarcophagus.

The sarcophagi listed below consist of five found in Rhodes and presumed to be of local manufacture, and of three probably from Clazomenae which are loosely related.

Polybios, in the course of a long fragment on the knowledge necessary for a general, preserved in the Codex Urbinas (IX, 17), has an account of an ineffectual attack on the town of Cynaetha in North Arcadia by Aratos during one of his early generalships. Aratos, he tells us, had made full arrangements for a simultaneous attack on the town from traitors within and Achaean troops without, and as a signal to the latter a man was to go and stand on a certain hillock dressed in a cloak. Unfortunately a sheep-owner, while looking for his shepherd, went and unwittingly stood on this very hill, whereupon the Achaeans attacked too soon and were disastrously repulsed. What was the cause of the failure asks Polybios, and answers ‘῾τὸ ποιήσαοθαι τὸν στρατηγὸν ἁπλοῦν τὸ σύνθημα, νέον ἀκμἡν ὄντα καὶ τῆς τῶν διπλῶν συνθημάτων καὶ παρασυνθημάτων ἀκριβείας ἄπειρον,᾿’ because the general was still young and ignorant of the principle of signals and counter-signals.

The incident has been inexplicably neglected: Beloch, Tarn and Ferrabino omit it entirely; Niese omits it from his article on Aratos in Pauly-Wissowa, and in his large work writes simply ‘Aratos unternahm einmal einen Versuch, sie (sc. Cynaetha) zu überrumpeln,’ vaguely indicating a date in the neighbourhood of 245–40; Pieske writing on ‘Kynaitha’ in Pauly-Wissowa, has a bare reference, and Freeman, mentioning it in a note, declares that the attack was one of the first of a series of events leading up to Cynaetha's joining the Achaean League. The words νέον ἀκμὴν ὄντα can, he adds, refer only to one of the earliest of Aratos' generalships, or possibly to some subordinate command held before he was general. In short, the incident has been almost completely ignored, and no attempt has been made to set it in its historical context. The purpose of this paper is to shew that it offers important evidence both for the date of Aratos' birth, and also for Achaean and Aetolian policy during the years 245–35.

In a paper on Ancient Oil Mills and Presses I touched upon Heron's screw-cutter, an instrument for cutting an inside screw thread in wood, described by him in his Mechanics (iii. 21). In relation to the oil-presses, it was a mere side-issue; but since the editor of the text, L. Nix, did not seem to have understood the instrument fully, I gave my own interpretation of the text, and a reconstruction, on paper, of the instrument.

This interpretation, or rather, the reconstruction, has been called in question by Mr. E. J. Andre Kenny, who in Antiquity, 1933, 7. 249, declares, that it is ‘ technically impossible.’ If that is the case, either the text, or my interpretation of it (or both), would seem to be at fault. Quite apart from the general inadvisability of starting an argument against a review it seems clear that such a question could only be satisfactorily answered in one way: by a practical experiment.

Plate V represents a small Attic bell-krater in the collection of Mr. Edward Armytage, who has kindly permitted its publication. The subject is novel: it appears to be the arrival in Attica of Theseus, and shews in detail a close correspondence with our main literary source, the seventeenth ode of Bacchylides. The two youths on the left are the two companions of Theseus, Peirithoos and Phorbas—δύο (F)οι φῶτε μόνους ὰμαρτεῖν λέγει (l.c. line 45). They are in travelling costume, booted and cloaked, wearing ephebic fillets and bearing pairs ofspears—ξεστοὺς δὲ δύ᾿ ἐν χέρεσς᾿ ἀκοντας (1. 49, though said of Theseus himself, not of his comrades).

Piety toward the past is seldom more unselfishly displayed than when scholars copy inscriptions totally devoid of meaning. Such were to Chishull, Borrell and Schonborn these fragments which, thanks to modern discovery, can now in the main be understood.