The ordinary silver coinage of Athens from B.C. 480 to 400 is almost unvaried. By the former date a head of Athena and an owl of fixed and conventional archaic type had been adopted for the coin (Pl. XIII. 1). The olive-wreath which adorns the helmet of the goddess seems to have been adopted during the glow of triumph after Marathon. At the end of the century there were certain issues of gold coins, of which we shall speak later. But the great mass of the coinage was in silver. The Athenians obtained silver in abundance from the mines of Laurium and those of Thrace, and it was part of Athenian policy to circulate the coins as widely as possible, and to make them the standard currency of the Aegean. Silver was to Athens what gold was to Persia, the backbone of the finance of the state, and, together of course with the tribute of the allies, the source whence came the plentiful wealth which Athens used for great building-works at home and for expeditions abroad.

The Critias after a long introduction breaks off almost at the beginning of the story. Both in form and subject it presents problems which have occasioned a vast amount of speculation. In the first place if Plato really composed it in order to shew his ideal Republic under the stress of war as illustrated by the ancient Athenians in his story, why is it that most of the introduction describes the rival state of Atlantis with a wealth of detail that is quite superfluous? Atlantis interests him much more than his ideal state, and has interested his readers in all ages to the exclusion of the Athenians. Secondly, why after a few introductory remarks does the Critias cease to be a dialogue at all? From the beginning it is an unbroken narrative on the regular lines of an Epic poem. Why, again, should the work be dedicated to Critias, of all people? The attempt to answer these questions involves a consideration of the truth of Solon's visit to Egypt, a review of the whole problem of Atlantis and a glance at the relationship between Solon, Plato, and Critias.

The cup which the goatherd in the first Idyll of Theocritus gives to Daphnis as a reward for his song has not attracted very much attention either from commentators or archaeologists. Legrand is content to regard the description as a phantasy composed of reminiscences of various works of art strung together at random. Theocritus, he thinks, not only had no actual cup in his mind, but was even at no pains to visualise the work he describes; hence many of the details mentioned are unintelligible when the work is regarded as a whole, and it is useless to try to reconstruct a cup from the description.

This is an extreme view. Brunn allows that the poet had some actual cup in his mind, but believes him to have transferred to it descriptions of other works of art, and to have confused the whole by the addition of decoration invented ‘nach seiner eigenen Phantasie.’ Stripped of these additions, the vessel was a bowl decorated on one side with the woman between her suitors, on the other with the boy in the vineyard, and in the interior with the fisherman.

Thus far I have tried to show that the fully developed legend of Cadmus the Phoenician does not appear before the fifth century. This of course leads to no certain conclusion. Apart from the possibility (which I think an unlikely one) that the fragmentary state of our knowledge of the earlier writers forbids our coming to any conclusion, however tentative, on a subject like the present, it is still possible that the fifth century writers represent an older and better tradition than the poets before them. There is no more unproductive idea than that which assumes that every story bears the date of the writer who preserves it. We find Pausanias especially citing legends which are manifestly older and truer than many told by earlier writers, and Asius the Samian—to take a parallel case—giving a better version of a Boeotian myth than the local Pindar. But if it can be shown that writers of the fifth century, Herodotus and the logographi, were less interested in local tradition than in learned theory, especially when the latter was based on researches in foreign countries, we do then get some probability for the view that a statement found in them, but in no earlier writer, may be theory and not tradition. To do this we must get some idea of their methods.

If you walk out of modern Sparta by the Tripolis road, and take the first branch road to the right after crossing Eurotas, you find yourself moving parallel to the river, with a line of red bluffs on your left hand. The bluffs grow higher and steeper as you go south, and the river edges closer to their foot, till opposite the junction of the Magoula river there is barely room for the cart-track between hillside and Eurotas-bed: but here the line of the bluffs is suddenly broken by a dry ravine converging on the course of the Eurotas at an acute angle from the N.E. The flanks of this ravine are at first as steep as the western face of the bluffs: but after about ten minutes' walk up it, several bays open on the left, affording an ascent to the bluff's summit by an easier gradient. When you reach the top you find yourself on a narrow ridge crowned by a chapel of the prophet Elias, and clearly marked off from the other summits to N. and S. Just N. of the chapel is the shrine of Menelaos, where the citizens of ‘historical’ Sparta used to offer lead figurines. But under the ‘historical’ stratum are the vestiges of a ‘Mycenaean’ city.

The marble head of Aphrodite of heroic dimensions from Holkham Hall in Norfolk was published by Michaelis in his ‘Ancient Marbles of Great Britain’ (p. 314, No. 37) and is one of the few works which he thought worthy of being illustrated by a special plate. In his own words: ‘It is one of the most striking specimens of the collection, and richly merits being better known; being a good copy of an original of the best period. The conception stands about half way between the Aphrodite of Melos and the Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles.’ The illustration in Michaelis, which is here reproduced (Fig. 1), gives an entirely wrong conception of the style and character of the head. The head is tilted back too far, which alters the character as far as attitude is concerned, as well as the proportion of the face, which appears too much elongated, and especially in the drawing and modelling of the features and surfaces introduces elements of softness and sentiment which are most misleading. My contention is: That we have to deal, not with a copy, but with an original, and that the relationship to the well-known types of the fourth century B.C. and of later dates, such as those specially mentioned by Michaelis, undoubtedly exists, but that it cannot possibly be that of a further development of Praxitelean or later types, but of an earlier type, out of which the Praxitelean and Scopasian types were developed, no doubt with distinct originality and with the perfection of artistic technique and feeling characteristic of these great sculptors of the fourth century.

There are in the Hope Collection two vases, which may help towards an explanation of the well-known myth of Theseus and Sinis. They are both known from publications of about a hundred years back, but have for a long period been lost sight of. By the kindness of the owners I am able to bring them once more to light.

The scene from the side of one of them was published by Millin in his Peintures de Vases Antiques. It shows in the middle a tree growing from a small rise of ground. To the left of it stands Sinis, naked and bearded. He has pulled down a branch. To the right is Theseus, a young man in travelling costume, wearing a sword and carrying two spears. He has pulled down a larger branch. On the extreme left is a draped bearded man holding a sceptre. Millin writes, ‘le vase est aujourd'hui en Angleterre: il appartient à M. Edouard.’ By ‘M. Edouard’ he must mean J. Edwards, whose collection was dispersed in 1815, when the vase probably came directly into the hands of Thomas Hope. Millin's drawing is so incorrect and his description so scanty (he does not even indicate the shape) that a republication is necessary.

In this paper I publish the remainder of the inscriptions gathered by Messrs. A. J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson in the course of their journeys in Thessaly and Macedonia during the years 1910–12. All except the last belong to ancient Thessaly (including Perrhaebia), though several were found to the north of the frontier of modern Greece as it was prior to the events of 1912–13. Seven of the first eight texts come from Eastern Thessaly, the other (No. 7) from Tirnavos; Nos. 9–11 are unpublished stones from Elassona, Nos. 12 and 13 are substantial, and Nos. 14 and 15 trifling, additions to texts of manumission-records from the same place already published in the Thessalian volume of the Corpus (I.G. ix. 2). Nos. 16 and 17 are long and well-preserved decrees of respectively the Thessalian city of Phalanna and an unidentified city of Upper Macedonia situated in the region called Orestis, the former belonging to the second century B.C., the latter dated to A.D. 194.

The fragments reproduced in Fig. 1 are in the Archaeological Institute at Heidelberg, and Prof. von Duhn has kindly allowed me to publish them. They formed part of a cup: it is not possible to say whether the cup had pictures on the outside or not. Round the figure on the inside runs the broken inscription The outlines of the figure are all relief-lines, except the further edge of the chiton below, the outer line of the sleeve near the elbow, and the front part of the sole. The wreath is red, the contour of the hair reserved with a relief-line on either side of the reserve.

Three other cups have figures in the interior which resemble ours closely: Munich 2612; a fragmentary cup in Leipzig (woman running holding a wreath); and a cup found at Capua and published in Annali, 1849, Pl. B, but now lost. This third vase bears the legend It is likely then, though of course not certain, that we are to restore our inscription as or This is not a certain restoration; for the anonymous artist who worked for Euergides may have worked for, say, Euthymides, as well, although we do not know that Euthymides ever owned a workshop, since his extant signatures are all artist's signatures.

The object of this note is to examine the earlier history of this North Syrian province, and incidentally to suggest a cause for its political independence, of which we have striking evidence in the establishment of a kingdom of Kommagene when the power of the later Seleucidae had declined. In spite of lying in the more immediate neighbourhood of Antioch, the province had already won its independence in the time of Antiochus IV. Epiphanes; at the beginning of the first century King Mithridates Callinicus obtained recognition of his dynasty from the Seleucid house; and even after the kingdom had become a Roman province it reverted for a time to its independent status. Hitherto, the need for an inquiry into the cause of so decided a tendency to break away from its surroundings has not been apparent. The descent of the Seleucid province from a Persian satrapy of the same area has served as a bridge to Assyrian times; and the continual ‘revolts’ of ‘the land of Kummukh’ from the end of the twelfth century onwards have furnished sufficient analogies to its history during the later period.

I regret that an acknowledgment of the courtesy of the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, in supplying the excellent photographs from which the illustrations of the Boston relief were produced, was accidentally omitted from my previous article.

Since the appearance of my article on this relief in the last number of the Journal, I have to thank Dr. Eisler for calling my attention to the very interesting and suggestive paper published by him in the Transactions of the ‘Kunstwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft’ of Munich in the Münchener Jahrbuch für bild. Kunst, 1912. Whatever, view one may take of the artistic problems involved, the interpretation of the reliefs is extremely difficult, and is not satisfactorily solved in Prof. Studniczka's discussion. Dr. Eisler suggests that we should recognise in the Boston relief a duplication of Aphrodite— the sorrowful and the rejoicing—as well as of Adonis, and regards the whole as representing a Babylonian and Phoenician symbolism of astronomical import—the balance recalling the constellation libra and the equilibrium of night and day at the equinox, and the figures in the scales the approach of the winter and summer half-year with the elevation and depression of the sun.

Last year was not remarkable for any sensational archaeological discovery in Greece, but much good work was done, and the amount that was accomplished by the Greek authorities in spite of the interruption of the Balkan War is very creditable to their zeal and enthusiasm. It is perhaps fitting to offer them the congratulations of all interested in Greek archaeology on the amount of new ground that is now available for scientific study.

In the minds of those who have known Athens in past years this season will perhaps be best remembered as the first after the definite retirement of Dr. Dörpfeld from his position as First Secretary of the Imperial German Institute in Athens. It is hard to estimate what his loss means not archaeologically only but also socially to Athens and to the students who go there, but happily through his work in Corfu his connexion with Greece is not yet severed.