The drawings we shall be looking at are those engraved on the backs of bronze hand-mirrors. The shape of the mirror is circular. The handle is sometimes made in one piece with the disc; but sometimes, especially in the earlier period, it was made separately of wood and bone, and joined to the disc by means of a tang. At a guess there may be fifteen hundred such mirrors. The quality of the drawing varies from good to bad. The range of subject is wide. There are, first, scenes from everyday life, especially, as is natural, toilet-scenes and courting-scenes; and secondly, scenes in which the lovers are not ordinary mortals, but divinities or heroes and heroines. Among these it is not surprising that two couples are especially popular: Aphrodite, and Adonis; Helen, and Paris or Menelaos. But there are also a very great number of heroic scenes that have no connection with toilet or courting. Sometimes one can see why a particular subject is chosen to decorate a mirror: the interest in Helen extends to the egg from which she was born. If Tyro is a favourite, one might perhaps guess that it is for the sake of the perfect complexion which gave her her name: but nearly always the subject chosen testifies only to the boundless love of the Etruscans for Greek heroic legend and Greek heroic characters, a love which women shared with men. Some legends are represented with more circumstance on Etruscan mirrors than in any extant Greek monument; of others there is no Greek representation, only an echo in a late writer; to others an Etruscan mirror is the only witness. Etruscan ladies could read: the personages are very often named; and these hundreds of inscriptions not only enable us to identify the persons and increase our knowledge of the myths, but are an invaluable aid to the study of the Etruscan language. The names of Greek heroes, heroines, and minor deities appear in Etruscanized versions, from which much may be learned about the character of the Etruscan tongue.

Reading University has recently acquired two fresh examples of the group of small vases with outline drawing first discussed by Wide, who tentatively connected them with Mykalessos. One is a kylix, formerly in the possession of Mr. John Fothergill and most generously presented by him to the University, showing Herakles with his club (Figs, 1 and 2b). The second is a pyxis, damaged somewhat in an air raid of 1945, with a subject on the lid that is less easy to recognise (Figs. 2a and 3). Reading has also a third vase, belonging to this series but standing rather apart from the rest. It is a kylix of the same kind as the first, but decorated inside with a rosebud between sprays (Fig. 4). These three vases with Wide's original five and one other kylix published in the Russian Compte Rendu de la Commission Impériale Archéologique 1901 (1903) p. 131 Fig. 229 (reproduced here in Fig. 5) bring the total of vases of this class up to nine. Nothing is known of the provenance of any of the three vases in Reading and the kylix in Russia is published in a list of chance finds and acquisitions in the government of Cherson with no information as to how it was acquired.

Wide associated his group with the cult of Demeter of Mykalessos whose temple, according to Pausanias, was shut every night and opened again by Herakles.

The following miscellany consists mainly of comments on various archaic inscriptions already published, but also includes four unpublished stones from Crete, observed during a six months' stay in Greece in 1947. Two of these are archaic, the other two considerably later, and therefore added separately at the end. All are listed geographically, under the headings of the relevant volumes of Inscriptiones Graecae or Inscriptiones Creticae; where the inscription discussed is not included in that volume, the heading is bracketed.

Grateful acknowledgment is here made to N. Platon, Ephor of Crete and Director of the Candia Museum, for permission to photograph and publish nos. 8–11, and to G. Kotzias, Ephor of Attica, for permission to photograph nos. 1–2.

In his Handbook of Greek Mythology Professor H. J. Rose several times draws attention to the legendary theme of the floating chest, which occurs so frequently as to suggest that ‘some kind of ritual lies behind all these tales’. The theme is recognised by Dr. A. B. Cook (Zeus II, 671 sqq.) as one of the perennials of folk-lore, and parallels are cited from modern Europe, Siberia, and India. A study by M. E. Cosquin (‘Le Lait de la Mère et le Coffre Flottant’ in Revue des Questions Historiques, 1908), based on material drawn from North Africa, India, and Java as well as the Classical world, links the floating chest to the miraculous suckling of children.

The preservation of a child or a mother and child in a floating chest was obviously a good story, and Euripides, by choosing this version of the Telephus legend in preference to that which left the child exposed on land, no doubt contributed to its popularity. Moreover, in legends of the introduction of a new cult the story teller often required a miraculous means of transport. The chest may have served a similar purpose to the floating rock of Celtic saints. But these explanations are not sufficient to account for the recurrence of the chest in a large number of stories which have important common elements.

Lunar mansions are twenty-eight constellations or single stars on the route of the Moon during the twenty-eight nights of its visibility. As a mere astronomical curiosity they could neither attract nor reward much attention. Accordingly learned discussions have been limited to descriptions, to controversies where and when they were first established, in Babylonia, India, or China, or to catalogues of the medieval evidence. But if it is realised that they were not observed for their own sake but because the revolution of the Moon was the basis of early time-reckoning which led to the creation of the first calendar, conclusions of more than limited interest can be produced by relating astronomical to religious problems. And this interest will be further increased by the realisation that our zodiac is nothing but the successor of the mansions as it served first the lunisolar, and then the solar, year, of which the former was a device to bring the monthly revolutions of the Moon into harmony with the annual revolution of the Sun, and the latter was based on the revolution of the Sun alone.

But how can we find material to reconstruct a system which was superseded in the remote past, seeing that even the victorious system remains in important respects mysterious, e.g. the reasons for the strange selection of the signs and the presence among them of animal and human figures? We are helped by two circumstances. One is the natural conservatism of our calendars, astrological prognostics, and magical texts: these often preserve traces of earlier stages of human thought. The second circumstance is less natural.

An Article of 1935 in Retrospect.—Since certain views on the above subject, put forward in JHS LV, have received the honour of detailed discussion in Mr. R. M. Cook's important contribution to Vol. LXVI and also in a notable recent book (Dunbabin, The Western Greeks, 446 ff.), some comment from the author of the original article would appear to be in order.

In JHS LXVI, 123 f., fig. 2, Mr. Martin Robertson described and illustrated a lost cup fragment by Douris formerly in the collection of Josef von Kopf in Rome (Hartwig, ‘Ein Schalenfragment in Stile des Duris’ in Festschrift für Otto Benndorf (1898) 86 ff.; Pollak, Professor Joseph von Kopf als Sammler, 98, pi. 5; Beazley, AV (1925), 204, no. 53, and ARV (1942), 286, no. 86). I am glad to be able to report that I came across the fragment in the summer of 1948 in a private collection in Paris. The present owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, has generously given me permission to publish the photograph that he had specially taken for me (Fig. 1). As one might expect, it is greatly superior to the careful drawing made by Count Ludwig von Thurn-Valsassina for Hartwig and reproduced by Pollak and Robertson. A comparison between the two makes one realise the sensitivity of Greek draftsmanship. (The comparison is best made with the drawing in Hartwig's article, which is about the same size as that of the photograph here reproduced.)

I.—A. Wilhelm has recently republished the inscriptions on an altar at Side in Painphylia, originally published by Van Buren in JHS 1908, 190 sqq. Wilhelm's restorations and commentary, based solely on the photographs printed, without comment, by B. Pace in Annuario III , 33, have very greatly advanced the interpretation of these interesting inscriptions; but the disadvantage of working without seeing either the stone itself or a squeeze of it has led in several cases to readings which are not in fact on the stone. While assisting at the Turkish excavations at Side in September 1948, I had an opportunity of examining the stone in question, and with the kind permission of Prof. Arif Miifid Mansel, director of the excavations, I am able to offer the present note. My purpose is not so much to engage in the controversy concerning the altar and the significance of its inscriptions, as to help to establish the true text.

A committee has been set up under the auspices of the British Academy with the object of compiling a prosopography of the later Roman Empire (A.D. 284-641). Its object is to do for the later Empire what the Prosopographia Imperii Romani has done for the Principate, to provide the materials for the study of the governing class of the Empire. The majority of the entries will be persons holding official posts or rank together with their families, and the work will not include clerics except in so far as they come into the above categories.