In the spring of 1950 my wife and I took part in an archaeological dig at Cosa, on the Tuscan coast ninety miles above Rome. Anyone who has travelled by train in daylight on the coastal line to or from Genoa and the Riviera has seen the site: the great grey polygonal walls looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamp-lands of the Maremma. During the war the Fascists had built at Orbetello, the nearest town to Cosa, a dynamite factory which became the target of the air-photographers of our Strategic Bombing Command. These air photographs appeared to reveal on the hill of Malabarba, just inland from Cosa, the characteristic large mounds which mark the site of Etruscan tombs; these mounds, which later turned out, on prosaic terrestrial examination, to be sanddunes, were the bait which attracted the archaeologists of the American Academy in Rome to the site.

In the year 414 b.c. Aristophanes of Athens produced a play which has intrigued the world ever since. It is an uproarious comedy based upon the recapture by the birds, under the leadership of human beings, of the Kingdom of the Universe. The birds, in fact, had ruled it originally. The Olympians were usurpers.

The following fragment of papyrus, written in a late but careful hand, was recently acquired by Dr. Ibn Abig-sel of Plasmopolis, who has with singular generosity granted us permission to publish the text. As it may be of some general interest, it is presented here with a brief commentary based on his transcript and notes; a more detailed study will, it is hoped, appear in a papyrological journal later.

This decisive engagement in the Revolt of the Ionian Cities against Persia has its name from Lade Island, a dissected ridge of rock in the entrance to the roadstead of Miletus, where the naval contingents of the allied Ionian cities were concentrated to oppose a fresh Persian armada of Phoenician, Cypriote, Cilician, and Egyptian ships, 600 in all (vi. 9), of which 353 were war-vessels, probably the provincial levies; but their commanders collaborated (vi. 6). They had two immediate objects: to destroy the Greek squadrons, and to effect a landing in the home territory of Miletus, where a provincial land-force was to meet them for the siege of the city, advancing by the Maeander valley road from beyond Mount Grion and probably based also on the fertile valley of Mylasa about twenty miles south-east.

In November or December 1528 a citizen of Lyon was digging the foundations for a house on the northern outskirts of the town. In so doing he turned up the bronze tablet known to us as the Claudian Tablet. This document, copied from the Acta Senatus and displayed in the federal district at Lugudunum, is a verbatim report of the speech pronounced by Claudius in the Senate in a.d. 48 in favour of the admission to that body of certain Gallic chieftains. Forty-one years after its discovery a historian first placed it alongside the literary version of this same speech which we find in the Annals of Tacitus (xi. 24), and we have not yet exhausted the lessons which this vital juxtaposition can offer us. It is not very often that we are able to look over the shoulder of an ancient writer and see how he wields paste and scissors and box of paints. It is therefore with anticipation and relief that we turn to an undeniably authentic document known, in its original version, to Tacitus, and try to measure the historian's fidelity in using it.

Students of comparative religion have long been familiar with the evidence furnished by ancient Mediterranean myth and ritual pointing to the existence of a common fund of religious experience amongst the early civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near East. In spite of wide divergences between the views of anthropologists of the extreme diffusionist and anti-diffusionist schools, there has in the last twenty-five years or so been a decided reaction in favour of the historical method in this field of study, and there appears to be general agreement that a common culture-pattern, embodied in a common fund of myth and ritual, existed in Egypt, Babylonia, and Palestine. This hypothesis of a common pattern is supported by an ever-increasing volume of archaeological evidence. Routes of migration of peoples and commercial and other cultural contacts indicate a complex interchange of ideas between the Near East and the Mediterranean region generally. Of cardinal importance for the understanding of these mutual relations in early times are the discoveries in Crete, where evidence of extensive cultural relations with the Orient and Egypt, as well as with the mainland of Greece, has come to light.

‘Athenagoras was Alphius before, now he becomes Olphius after that he has married a wife.’ (Translated by Walter C. A. Ker, Loeb edition.)

Athene is mentioned in the Iliad nearly 200 times and almost as often in the Odyssey. On ninety-two occasions Homer calls her γλαυκ⋯πις. How should we translate this constantly recurring epithet? Neither Chapman nor Pope claims to provide a literal translation. Often they are content with ‘Athenian Maid’ or ‘Minerva’: but when they do attempt to render γλαυκ⋯πις they offer ‘Blue-eyed Goddess’, ‘Blue-eyed Maid’, &c. Cowper prefers ‘Pallas cerulean-eyed’, and Lord Derby ‘blue-eyed Pallas’.

Although Telemachus is not the chief character of the Odyssey, his part in the plot is of considerable importance, and in one way he seems to be unique. For he is, perhaps, the only character in Greek literature who shows any development. All the other people who appear in Homer are already fully grown and, as characters, static. For in an epic it is the story which is of first importance, and the people can be adequately described by one major trait. In Greek tragedy, also, where no doubt character is of greater moment and occupies a larger proportion of the whole, we never see the characters growing as time passes. For there was a continual obstacle to the development of character on the tragic stage from a rather unexpected quarter—the Chorus. As H. C. Baldry says, ‘Because of the chorus, a fifth-century tragedy could not easily be a serial drama, leaping from incident to incident and place to place… such plays leave no scope for the development of character. The hero's nature may be revealed to the audience step by step, but in most of the extant tragedies it does not change.’

This Danish scholar is known to the British public not only through his works but also through an essay by Henry Nettleship and the mention made of him in the well-known book on the history of classical scholarship by J. E. Sandys. At the 150th anniversary of his birth Greece and Rome has found it proper to publish an article on Madvig from a Danish source, and in any case it does seem only right to stop and consider for a moment his work from a modern standpoint.