Across the fascinating, if somewhat flamboyant, pictures of the Doloneia there shoots a meteor like Goethe's Sternschuppe:— Aus der Höhe schoss ich her Im Stern- und Feuerscheine, Liege nun im Grase quer: Wer hilft mir auf die Beine?

Rhesos appears in shining armour—or rather, we are told that he appears, for we never see him or hear him. We learn only that on the very night of his entry into the Trojan ranks he is slain in his sleep without a blow. His entry has not been prepared, his exit is forgotten; there is no word of him before or after the tenth book of the Iliad.

In examining and dealing with the fragments of some Flutes found by Professor Garstang during his excavations at the Royal City of Meroë, about fifty miles from Khartoum in the Sûdân, a brief consideration may perhaps be permitted respecting the conditions which obtained at this old Nubian capital on the Upper Nile, so far as they appertain to a phase of music long passed away. It may aid in tracing the origin of these particular flutes, and determining whether they are of local workmanship, or imported.

Kush, an ancient kingdom comprised in Ethiopia, later became one of the dependencies of Egypt proper. From the period of the invasion of Cambyses, B.C. 530, his seizure and destruction of Thebes, the island city of Meroë, decreed by the conqueror to be the capital of the province, became a great trade emporium. Greek influence then began to obtain in the land of the Nile. Although of course the customs, arts, and learning of the more ancient Egyptians extensively prevailed among these more southern people, Meroë was a place of great importance, possessing enough rich and cultured persons to import for use and enjoyment products of art from notable places beyond the Egyptian shores of the Mediterranean.

Avroman is a town in Persian Kurdistan lying close to the Turkish frontier between the sources of the Lesser Zab and the course of the Diala River some distance to the north of the highway from Bagdad (say Ctesiphon) to Hamadán (Ecbatana). Near it in a cave in the mountain called Kuh-i-Sálán, a peasant found about the year 1909 a stone jar hermetically sealed; in it were decayed millet seeds and several documents. These passed from hand to hand and some were lost, only three have survived; two, which being Greek most nearly concern us, are almost perfect, they have only suffered a certain amount from wear and from the gnawing of mice; the third written in an Aramaic script which has not yet been deciphered is said to have been much larger when found; what is left has been a good deal torn and is patched with modern leather.

In the Journal of Roman Studies for last year Professor Haverfield gives an account of certain silver vessels of the late Roman age found on the banks of the Tyne, near Corbridge, in the eighteenth century. I wish to discuss in some detail one of these vessels, which has great importance for the history of late Greek art. This is the remarkable dish or lanx found in 1735 on the north bank of the Tyne, now belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, and kept at his castle of Alnwick.

Other vessels of silver were found, not with it, but near the same spot: a two-handled cup, a bowl bearing the Christ monogram, a silver basin, a small silver vase. Professor Haverfield has figured these, so far as he could. That all these vases belonged together is probable though not certain. Only one of them bears a clear indication of date, the Christian monogram, in the form which it takes on coins of the Constantine period. This particular vessel one would naturally give to the time of Constantine, that is, to the earlier part of the fourth century. It does not follow that all the vessels are of this date: but as we shall see presently, it is a date not unsuitable for the dish which we are considering.

The little treatise which follows is in a manuscript of the Marciana at Venice—gr. fondo antico, 173 (late twelfth century). It throws considerable light on the system of taxation in the later Empire, and explains a good many technical terms which one meets with in the documents. So far as I know, it has never been published. Even if it has, it deserves to be published again. I hope in a future number to say something of its contents. I have numbered the paragraphs for convenience of reference. The treatise begins on f. 276 v. of the manuscript. I reproduce the spelling and accentuation of the manuscript. In some cases I may have gone wrong in enlarging the abbreviations, which are numerous.

Ogni strada, we are told, ogni strada men' a Roma. The roads which lead to Homer, an older goal than the Shrine of the Apostles, are nearly as many. One of them, not the most followed, runs through the literature of the historical centuries. When I say historical, I must observe that I use a term and make a distinction unknown to antiquity. To the ancients Homer was as historical as Pindar, the people of whom he sang were as historical as Pindar's patrons, often their descendants. The μυθῶδες or untrue element which the Greeks noticed in their poetry did not touch the individuals or the events; it was detected in violations of ascertained natural laws, such as the divine interference in ordinary life and the three daily tides of Charybdis. It is the modern world which has set a gulf the other side of Archilochus or Terpander beyond which persons are not found and all we descry is Gods in the making, bloody rites, and commercial movements which have come down to us under a false anthropomorphic and individualistic guise. It is difficult to shake off these modern prepossessions, to realise that the Greek world before 700 was not lit by corpse-candles, a dim field of legal fictions, eponymous and heraldic ancestors, but as human and positive as Phidon with his weights and measures and Solon with his code—as human and positive as the buildings, jewels and vessels which that world has left us. We are reluctant to admit that our ignorance of Lycurgus differs only in degree from our knowledge of Pisistratus, increasing in proportion to lapse of time and such accidental circumstances as the absence of written records.

On page 68 of the Jahreshefte of the Austrian Archaeological Institute for 1899, Band II., I discussed the value of the letter Χ, and with considerable hesitation decided in favour of Schmidt's opinion that it represents θ. The conclusion was based on the only direct evidence available, namely the rendering of the Persian Mithrapata by the Lycian ΜΕΧΡΡΓΡΤΡ. This was greatly discounted by the fact that Mithrapata is also rendered by Mizrppata (T.A.M. 64), and that Mithra appears also in Lycian Mizretije (84) and the Cilician Μισραιος, which rather suggested that the letter was a sibilant closely akin to the Lycian z. It now appears certain that the last conclusion is correct.

The Euphronios problem is more than twenty years old: in 1893; Hartwig, in his Meisterschalen, first attributed to the painter <Ones>imos the Troïlos kylix in Perugia bearing the single signature Ἐυφρόνιος ἐποίησεν. Since then the question has been considerably extended and modified, and the moment has perhaps come for some sort of summary of results.

The attempted answer to the particular question does not profess to be a solution of the whole problem of ἔγραψεν and ἐποίησεν. Dispassionate analysis of style tends more and more to separate potter from painter in most well-known workshops. Makron was in all probability directly or indirectly responsible for the painting of all Hieron's vases, Brygos a potter solely. It is, however, impossible to generalise on the subject. In the black-figure period there is the notable exception of Exekias: there is no difference of style between the vases signed Ἐξήκιας ἐποίησεν and Ἐξήκιας ἔγραψε κἀποίησε με. Again in the strong red-figured period we have the instance of the Gotha kylix (F.R.H. iii. Abb. 7), with its inscriptions ασιαδες (retrograde) and a dubious inscription ending εσεν (left to right)—i.e. a potter's signature, The painter's name is clearly that of Pasiades, the style of the exterior unmistakeably that of his other vases; but these are signed with ἐποίησεν. Here, then, is a contemporary of Euphronios whose ἐποίησεν includes ἔγραψεν.