My attention was called recently to an account by G. M. Vizyenos of a Carnival festival celebrated in the district about Viza (ancient Βιζύη) in Thrace so remarkable that it seemed worth while to verify the author's account by a personal visit. This I was able to do at the Carnival of 1906, and the account below has been drawn up from my notes, supplemented by this article, from which I quote everything of value.

Of the writer's good faith there is no doubt, and of almost all the points he mentions I had ocular confirmation. He was a native, not of Haghios Gheorghios, the village whose festival he describes, but of Viza itself, the chief place in the district, lying some two hours to the west. He left his native place while still a boy, and died at Athens in 1896, aged forty-two. The middle part of his life he spent in Germany, and he does not seem ever to have returned to Thrace. His account is therefore probably a description of the festival as it was in his youth some forty years ago, when modern conditions had affected the district even less than' at present. He calls it σαλό and makes as many classical comparisons as possible. All these I have omitted, and drawn upon him only for matters of fact.

This house, known locally as the Casa Greca, was partially excavated about two years ago at the private expense of the owner of the land: it lies on a level site to the east of the road leading from modern Girgenti to the temples, directly opposite the church and gardens of S. Nicola, and a short distance north of the Temple of Concord.

For the most part, the ground has here risen about four feet since the Greek period, and the existing remains present a complete horizontal section of the house up to that height, formed by the lowest drum of the columns and from two to four courses of masonry in the walls.

The boxing of the Hellenic world even in the fifth century B.C. could boast an antiquity and renown to which modern pugilism can offer no parallel. The ‘noble art’ was associated with some of the most famous names of the heroic age, including even kings and demigods, so that the opprobrium which has become attached, perhaps unjustly, to the term ‘prize-fighter’ was precluded from the titles of the Greek champions. The antiquity of the sport is shown by the vivid descriptions of Homer and the place assigned to it in the Funeral Games, while a fragment of a relief showing a boxer armed with ίμάντεσ discovered by Dr. Evans at Cnossus carries us back to a remoter past. In historic times especially in the earlier period we find the Ionians were the chief boxers and supplied most of the champions. The Dorians, especially the Spartans, do not seem to have looked upon pugilism with much favour, although some victors are known to bave come from the Peloponnesus.

In this Journal in 1893 I published a very interesting amphora discovered by Mr. Arthur Evans in a tomb at Gela in Sicily, which I described as shewing on one side Cacus dragging the oxen of Geryon backward into a cattle-shed, while a satyr above plays the flutes, and on the other side Herakles singing to the lyre.

Pentelic marble. Total height, 113 cm. Height of body, 96 cm. Of figured space, 47 cm. Circumference round the bottom of figured space, 116·5 cm.

The upper part of the neck and the whole of the handle are missing.

This beautiful marble grave lekythos, which I have received kind permission to publish from Dr. Kastriotis and M. Stais, is now in the National Museum of Athens (No. 2584). It was discovered in the year 1904 in the house of Spiliotis near the σφαγεῖα on the left bank of the Ilisos.

The vase itself is considerably broken, and the surface of the marble is unfortunately a good deal damaged, but in spite of this, at the first glance, one is struck by the beauty of the whole composition of the relief which covers more than half of the body of the lekythos. This relief is interesting also for its subject matter, which, as far as I am aware, has no exact parallel; a somewhat unusual fact, for on the whole there is not very much variation in the scenes and motives represented on the Greek grave reliefs.

During a visit to Turin last autumn to photograph the so-called ‘Diadumenos,’ which is here published, I believe for the first time, I took the opportunity to photograph one or two other works which seemed to be interesting. The photographs of these are published with the ‘Diadumenos’ in this paper. The discussions added to the descriptions of them are not intended to be complete, nor are they, I fear, perfect. My excuse is my desire to make interesting sculptures accessible to those better fitted to criticize them. In preparing this paper I have received much kind help from Dr. Amelung, who has most generously placed at my disposal many of his notes, especially as regards the list of replicas of the Praxitelean Athena, which is entirely his own.

In the sketch of the pottery of Knossos that appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1903, pp. 157–205, it was sought to give a general account of Knossian ceramic development on the basis of such finds as were to hand up to date.

Since then, however, further evidence has been accumulating such as serves to bring into clearer outline particular phases in development. This happens to be specially true of the Middle Period. The object, accordingly, of the present paper, which I undertake by kind permission of Dr. Arthur Evans, is to examine the new ceramic materials in so far as they are illustrative of the successive phases of Middle Minoan ceramic development.

The results of a special examination of the pottery found in Early Minoan deposit up to date are to the effect that the two kinds of ground, respectively light and dark, coexist from the very beginning of the use of paint in Cretan ceramics. Thus it can no longer be a question of the one kind of ground supervening upon the other at any later stage but only the problem of the relation to each other, throughout the course of their collateral development, of two kinds of background which co-exist from the beginning and so co-exist in virtue of a technical principle which is as old as any decorative art.

At the end of the play, when the Eumenides are to be ushered to their cave beneath the Areopagus, Athena joins to the procession a special escort of her own temple-servants, and sets forth the procession with these words:

The unsolved questions in lines 1028–1030 are two:—first, how to punctuate them, that is, who are to be the wearers of the crimson cloaks, the Escort or the Eumenides themselves: and second, what is the reason for the crimson colour? Neither question, perhaps, may seem to be of great importance; but Aeschylus is not a poet who does things at random; he is apt to have more than superficial meanings; and enquiry may, I hope, reward us with a new significance.

The central photograph shewn on p. 279 is of a fragment now in the courtyard of the Terme Museum in Rome, but unpublished as yet in the catalogue. The material is a white coarse-grained marble probably of Greek origin, and the fragment represents the right leg (Standbein) of a standing male figure, and the trunk of a tree which supports it. Against the trunk, and at the side of the leg, is a quiver with conical lid, slung by a strap over a projecting branch. The foot is missing from the centre of the ankle-bone, and the upper line of breakage runs from the hip-bone inwards and downwards to the junction of the legs. From this point to the ankle the fragment measures 67½ centimetres, so that it is approximately life-size. There is a puntello in the middle of the thigh on the outside.

The bronze statuettes which are reproduced on PL XVIII. form part of the small collection of Greek and Roman antiquities in the Egyptian department of the British Museum, They are practically entire, though the surface of the bronze has suffered considerably from oxydization. I am much indebted to the authorities of the Museum for allowing me to publish two such interesting pieces.

The provenance of the two bronzes is indicated by their place in the Museum: they come from Egypt. It is evident too that they have been made as a pair. At first sight they might be taken for Olympian deities, but looking more closely one sees that the heads are intended for portraits. They must therefore represent a deified king and queen, and there can be little doubt as to what royal couple they do represent.

When writing about the Atalanta of Tegea in the earlier part of this volume (pp. 169 sqq.), I stated my impression that I was not the first to have made the observations which I there recorded; but I overlooked the fact that Prof. Furtwängler's opinion, which in essential matters accords with mine, had already been published in a footnote to an article by Dr. L. Curtius in the Jahrbuch des K. Deutsch. Inst. xix. p. 79. There is, however, the less to regret since my article has given occasion to some further notes on the subject by Prof. Furtwängler, which he has published in the Sitzungsberichte of the K. Bayer. Akademie, 1896, pp. 383 sqq. I have to thank him for a copy of these notes, which give a fuller account than before of his observations and the inferences to be drawn from them. His visit to Tegea, at which his notes were made, was in March 1904; mine was in April of the same year; and so his observations have the priority, though I had, of course, no knowledge of them either when I examined the sculptures at Tegea, or when I wrote down my results for publication; it is a matter for great satisfaction to find them confirmed by so eminent an authority.

The British Museum has recently acquired a small bronze statuette, which is of some interest, not for its artistic merit, but for the probable place of its discovery. The statuette, 2⅞ inches high, represents a woman, who is dressed in a long chiton, which folds over so as to form a sort of cape and has short sleeves, leaving the arms bare from above the elbows. She is standing with her feet close together and holds her skirt with her left hand in the familiar ‘Spes’ attitude. Part of the left foot and the right arm from the elbow are broken away. Her hair falls in long tresses over her neck and shoulders, and is indicated by incised lines. Another incised line seems to represent a necklace.

Since the appearance of my article Tsade and Sampi in the preceding issue of this journal, a discovery highly important for the history of ‘Tsade’ has been made in the course of excavations at Ephesus by Mr. D. G. Hogarth, to whose kindness I owe the following information.

On a silver plate found in the primitive stratum of the Artemision, below the Croesus temple, there is an inscription in which Τ occurs thrice, in the words τέΤαρες and τέΤαρες forming part of sentences in Ionic Greek.

The position of the objects found in relation to the Croesus temple makes 550 B.C., the beginning of the reign of Croesus, the absolute terminus of date on the lower side: there is, I understand, little doubt that the inscription belongs to the latter part of the 7th century B.C.

While the painter Sodoma was lying ill at Florence, in 1529, his pupil, Girolamo Magagni, nefariously removed from his master's studio a number of objects, a list of which is set forth in a document formerly in the Archivio Notarile at Siena, but now lost. The document, which is an acknowledgment of the return of these objects, was printed by Milanesi, and is repeated by Mr. R. H. H. Cust in his exhaustive work on Sodoma. But as it is nevertheless likely to escape the notice of the classical archaeologist, it seems worth while to extract from the list the descriptions of those objects which were certainly, or may possibly have been antiques. It is perhaps incorrect to speak of the objects as a collection; they were rather a few odd pieces picked up as useful models by a painter who owed more of the qualities of his style than is generally recognized to his appreciation of antique sculpture.