Two vases exist on which the sanctuary of Chryse is definitely identified by inscriptions. The first is an Attic red-figure stamnos, Louvre G413, attributed to Hermonax, on which is depicted Philoktetes being bitten by the snake at the altar of Chryse. The second is an Attic red-figure bell-krater, Vienna Inv. 1144, of the late fifth century B.C., which depicts Herakles sacrificing at the altar of Chryse. With the first vase may be associated an Attic red-figure calyx-krater, Louvre G342, attributed to the Altamura Painter, which bears no inscriptions, but undoubtedly represents the same scene; and with the second may be grouped four other vases of the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C., which resemble it sufficiently closely to suggest that they too represent the sanctuary of Chryse. The interpretation of the two Louvre vases has never been in doubt, since they obviously illustrate the story of the biting of Philoktetes by the snake in the sanctuary of Chryse, but the interpretation of the other group of vases has been the subject of some dispute. In this article, therefore, I propose to discuss the connection of these vases with one another and with the two Louvre vases, and to examine their relation to the literary treatment of the legends concerning this sanctuary.

Thanks to the kindness of its owner, Captain E. G. Spencer-Churchill, I am able to describe a remarkable Minoan bronze object found in Crete, in the shape of a galloping bull with an acrobatic figure turning a back somersault over his back, both modelled in the round. Views of the group as seen in its original state from the front and side are given in Figs. 1 and 2.

The length of the bull at full stretch is 0·156 m., and the height of the group is 0·114 m. Beneath the forefeet of the animal is a metal attachment of angular form, upright in front. It must in some way have served the same purpose of holding the bronze in position as the tangs or nail-like projections visible in the case of many figurines of the votive class. The bull may have been held in some kind of framework, and it is probable that the hind-legs were fixed in a similar way.

It is a common-place of most scholars, followed enthusiastically by writers of text-books, that Greek sailors did not like the sea; they went from island to island, or crept along the coast. Rarely did they leave the sight of land, and then only the most venturesome; and they did not sail by night. I don't know that I have seen it stated in so many words, but it is implied that the close relations between Miletus and Sybaris were maintained by voyages across the Aegean to Corinth (e.g.: ‘Corinth becomes the centre of exchange with Italy: it pays better to break cargo at the isthmus than to sail round the stormy coasts of the Peloponnese’), thence (but in Milesian or foreign ships?) through the gulf, up the north-west coast to Corcyra, hurriedly and anxiously across to Otranto, then, following every curve of the coast, past Tarentum and Metapontum, to their goal. If goods must go further, as so many did to Etruria, they took another isthmus-route overland to Laus or Scidrus, thence along the coast again, even as far as Massalia and Emporiae.

This note discusses some of the images and ideas that led to the depiction of Eros with the attributes of Herakles (PLATE IVa), an iconographical type that was developed and elaborated in the Hellenistic and Romanperiods.

Eros was not, in fact, the first to appropriate for himself the attributes of Herakles. From an early period popular imagination realised that even the mighty Herakles would occasionally be placed in a situation that lesser creatures could take advantage of. Before the Hellenistic period Kerkopes, satyrs and goat-legged Pans made use of whatever opportunities there were to steal Herakles' attributes; thereafter these subhuman thieves appear to have been replaced by a group of Erotes or a single Eros.

‘Your coward’, says Theophrastus, ‘is the sort who, when aboard ship, thinks that every headland is a hemiolia.’ The outline of a promontory, in other words, looks to his timid eyes like the low sinister shape of a pirate craft. And the hemiolia was so characteristically the vessel of pirates that Theophrastus could use the term off-handedly, without any qualification; it conjured up in his readers' minds what ‘Jolly Roger’ does in ours.

A hemiolia, then, must have been a ship designed particularly for lightness, speed and manœuvrability. But so were the twenty-oared vessels that Homer's heroes used or the penteconters that appear in subsequent centuries. What were the distinguishing characteristics of the craft that recommended it to pirates in particular?

The name itself is so curious that one instinctively feels it contains a clue. The adjective hemiolios means ‘one and a half’ by analogy with words like trireme, quadrireme and so on, a hemiolia (sc. naus) should hlave a ‘1½-fold’ arrangement of the oars. An ancient lexicographer, Hesychius, describes it as dikrotos, i.e. with rowers in two levels, and with this in mind Lazare de Baif had suggested as long ago as 1537 that perhaps it had one bank of rowers from the prow to the mast amidships and two from that point to the stern. This solution, accepted for some time, has been put aside by modern writers. ‘As no ancient representation [of a hemiolia] has survived,’ observes Ormerod, ‘we are uncertain as to its exact design and rig.’ As a matter of fact, there is an ancient representation of a hemiolia extant. It has been under our noses for years waiting to be recognised.

Buschor, by his Crocodile, has brought order into the study of Attic plastic vases, but even after Buschor much remains to be done. I propose to examine and classify the Attic vases in the form of human heads. I shall not discuss, or not fully, either the vases in the form of complete human figures —the Dionysos in London, the satyrs in Saraievo and Taranto; or the sphinxes; or the groups—mounted Amazon, blackamoor and cayman, pygmy and dead crane; or the small and usually petty plastic adjuncts to hydriai, oinochoai, kyathoi, epinetra; or the head-vases and bust-vases of the fourth century, which are best studied in connexion with the other plastic vases of the same period.

Some head-vases are oil- or perfume-pots, others drinking-vessels, others jugs. The perfume-pots have the same mouth, neck, and handles as a round aryballos: fourth-century vases borrow this part from the squat lekythos, but with these we are not concerned. The drinking-vessels, whether two-handled or single-handled, have a kantharos mouth: I shall keep the word kantharos for the two-handled sort; the single-handled kantharos I shall call a mug. The jugs nearly always have the same mouth as the kind of vase which I have called oinochoe shape I: but three other kinds of mouth occur as exceptions, and will be noted each in its place.

Herodotus in the course, of his description of Kambyses' conquest of Egypt gives both the earliest and the only detailed account we possess of Polykrates, the tyrant of Samos. Thucydides makes a brief reference to him, also dating him to the reign of Kambyses (ἐπὶ καμβύσου), 530–522 B.C. Other references, as will appear, are late, scattered, and incidental. In attempting to determine the length of the Samian tyranny, Herodotus will, therefore, be our most important source of evidence. Although his interest is concentrated on the career of Polykrates, he provides enough information about Samian activities in the immediately preceding period to suggest that Polykrates is, in most cases, continuing a policy already initiated a generation before him. The difficulty of compressing into the brief period of Kambyses all that is referred to the tyranny of Polykrates is notorious, as is also the difficulty of reconciling with the usually accepted dates of Polykrates the chronological references to other people connected with the Samian tyranny. There is a similar problem about the dating of two of the great Samian works which Herodotus describes, the water tunnel of Eupalinos, and the Heraion of Rhoikos. The usual assumption that the Samian tyranny began with Polykrates' seizure of power in the middle or late thirties is not, I think, adequate to explain the evidence. There are various indications that the Samian tyranny, or a régime at Samos which closely resembled the subsequent tyranny, had begun in the generation before Polykrates, and that Polykrates himself, because of his spirited resistance to Persia, has been credited with what was in reality the achievement of a continuous policy which had been begun earlier, perhaps by his father.

The restoration of lost works of art in accordance with the descriptions of ancient authors and the monuments which serve to illustrate them presents problems which can never fail to be attractive to archaeologists. Nor has there been any lack of such attempts at reconstruction. The descriptions which we owe to Pausanias of the chryselephantine statues of Phidias, the paintings of Polygnotos, the chest of Kypselos, and the throne at Amyclae, have formed the text of such works, which reflect with considerable accuracy the standard of archaeological knowledge prevailing at the time to which they belong, and the quantity and quality of monumental evidence available. A glance at the Wiener Vorlegeblätter for 1888, Plate XII., where the successive restorations attempted of the Iliupersis of Polygnotos are reproduced side by side, will illustrate this; and even since that year a further step in advance has been taken by Robert's publication of his admirable restorations of both the great frescoes of Polygnotos, which may be held to represent the nearest approximation to the style of that painter which the discoveries and investigations of the last few years have enabled us to make.

I accept the general consensus that the transmitted end of Septem is not by Aeschylus; his play, as he wrote it, ends by giving an overwhelming impresssion that, while the brothers have killed each other, the city of Thebes has been saved. There are, however, three passages which seem to contradict that impression, by alluding to the usual version of the story in which the city will be destroyed by the Successors of the Seven in the next generation. I argue that all attempts by scholars to explain away this contradiction have been unsuccesssful. Aeschylus deliberately reminded his audience of the alternative version, and the question to be considered is why he did so.

‘Then the son of Peleus took an unwrought metal mass which anciently the mighty Eetion was wont to hurl.’ This σόλος αὐτοχόωνος, which was at once the weight to be thrown and the prize in the Homeric competition, was apparently a mass of pig iron just as it came from the furnace; probably, as Mr. J. L. Myres suggests to me, ‘the contents of one of the old open-hearth furnaces of the Mediterranean world, the natural unit quantity for the purveyor and buyer of the metal, the classical analogy to which is the mass of iron (μύδρος σιδήρεος) which the Phocaeans threw into the sea before their voyage westwards.

Over a century ago C. Müller published two fragments from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Codex Parisinus inter supplementa Graeca 607). One fragment (fol. 103v) is entitled ‘From the ninth book of the histories by Eusebius: the siege of Thessalonike by the Scythians’. Another folio of the same manuscript (17r) contains an untitled and longer excerpt which describes counter-siege tactics invented or implemented in a city in Macedonia, followed by an unfinished description of the siege of a Gallic city (Tours).

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.

The three ‘notorious echoes between Kleon and Perikles’ in Thucydides all go back to Pericles' last speech made in 430 BC (Thucydides ii 60.1–64.5). The concepts and language of two successive Periclean statements from ii 63.2, viz.

ἦς οὐδ᾿ ἐκστῆναι ἔτι ὑμῖν ἔστιν εἴ τις καὶ τόδε ἐν τῷ παρόντι δεδιώς ἀπραγμοσύνῃ ἀπραγμοσύνῃ ἀνδραγαθίζεται ὡς τυραννίδα γὰρ ἤδη ἔχετε αὐτήν ἤν λαβεῖν μὲν ἄδικον δοκεῖ εἶναι ἀφεῖναι δ᾿ ἐπικίνδυνον

(on the relationship between action and virtue and on the Athenian empire as a tyranny) reappear in two statements by Cleon at iii 40.4 and iii 37.2 respectively. Even more striking–at least on the surface–is the claim of both men to consistency. In ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν ὁ αὐτός εἰμι τῇ γνώμῃ Cleon virtually repeats at iii 38.1 Pericles' καὶ ἐγὼ μὲν ὁ αὐτός εἰμι καὶ οὐκ ἐξίσταμαι (ii 61.2). As if to confirm that the echoes are not accidental, Cleon's words all belong (like those of Pericles) to a single speech–that made by him during the 'Mytilcnean debate' of 427 BC.

Mardonius reoccupied Athens, Herodotus tells us (ix. 3), in the tenth month after Xerxes had taken it, that is to say not earlier than June of the next year. The pause in the war lasted therefore far beyond the winter. Both parties were no doubt anxious to gather the new harvest, but there were also other reasons for their delay.

Mardonius had been left in a difficult situation. The forces at his disposal were, it is true, still formidable. First, he had his own division, which we have seen reason to suppose was one of the six Persian corps ď armée, 60,000 strong. In confirmation of that estimate it may be noted that Herodotus assigns to him one sixth of Xerxes' army, which he conceives to have been the levy of the whole empire; and that if we compare the details of Mardonius' division (viii. 113, ix. 31.) with the catalogue of Xerxes' host (vii. 61–5), and reckon a myriad for each contingent of infantry (Immortals: θωρηκοφόροι: Medes: Sacae and Bactrians: Indians), we get 50,000 infantry, which with 10,000 cavalry gives the exact composition conjectured for a Persian army corps. The small drafts incorporated according to Herodotus from other contingents may be assumed, to have filled up the gaps made in the ranks by the first campaign. Second, Mardonius had his Greek auxiliaries, say 20,000 men, including the valuable Thessalian and Boeotian cavalry. Herodotus (ix. 32) estimates the Greek contingents at 50,000 men, but he expressly says that he has no authority for their numbers, and both probability and analogy (e.g. vii. 185, viii. 66) are against so high a computation.

The student of Greek religion has no more difficult problem to face than that of the Prometheus Vinctus. In previous writings I had always evaded it, because I had not found any solution and I hoped that there might be one. Failing to find anything satisfactory myself or in the writings of others, I have spoken of it in the title of this paper as a paradox rather than a problem. And I am only now setting down my thoughts on it in outline, because I do not find that the religious difficulties of that play are appreciated in their full gravity either by the commentators or by the writers on Greek religion.

The play is unique among (a) the dramas of the Attic stage, (b) the literature of Greece, (c) the religious literature of the world. The truth of the first two statements can be proved by a rapid glance through the existing and recorded literature of Greece, especially through the products of the Attic drama.

This article explores one of the remarkable legacies of the Hellenistic Greek world: the subsequent activity in the Indian Ocean of Greek-speaking Egyptians and certain people of India who called themselves Yavanas. But while doing so, it addresses certain vexing issues. One is whether merchants from Roman Egypt established stable residential communities in the ports of India during the first and second centuries AD. Another is how Yavanas living near the Gulf of Barygaza and the western Ghats in western India came to call themselves by a term borne centuries earlier by Greeks living in regions of northern India. By probing these issues, the article sheds light on how travellers and expatriates from Roman Egypt, and the Greek language and culture that they often carried with them, fit into the multilingual and multicultural web of a connected Indian Ocean. But it also formulates how a commercial network of Egyptians established residential settlements in the ports of India that generated and transmitted local knowledge to other members of the network. The author of the notable Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Periplus Maris Erythraei) was arguably both a participant in the network and a recipient of its knowledge.

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 excavations were directed mainly to four points: the ruins of the Greek temple on the summit and a large Mycenaean house on the east side of the acropolis, an area outside the Lion Gate, and the Treasury of Atreus.

The foundations of the Greek temple were cleared, surveyed, and studied in detail. As they survive to-day they are certainly of the Hellenistic period, and it is clear that neither the Hellenistic sanctuary, nor any earlier temple that preceded it, had a peristyle. Blocks from earlier structures had been built into the foundations, and all round a great variety of tiles from early archaic to Hellenistic times was found. Pottery found below the surface of the northern terrace of the temple area shows that a sanctuary had existed throughout ‘Geometric’ times, and the tiles and architectural fragments indicate that it was succeeded by an early archaic shrine. The temple, with the massive substructures that supported it on the north, lies south and north, and it is possible that it owes this abnormal orientation to the fact that it overlies the shrine of the Mycenaean palace, which faced south. It now seems that the early archaic sculpture in relief previously found did not belong to a temple, but, since it was all found in the southern part of the temple area, may have belonged to some structure, perhaps an altar, which stood before the south front of the sanctuary.

The agora, the nucleus of all Greek cities, was in the beginning simply a convenient open space, around which buildings were irregularly placed. With the growth of systematic planning in Ionia a new type was evolved, and henceforth the old-fashioned agora and the Ionian existed side by side. Several years ago F. J. Tritsch wrote an account of the old type of agora, taking Elis (Fig. 1) as the best example. Since then Athens has yielded richer and more interesting material. The new evidence clarifies and confirms the picture drawn by Tritsch, which may still be accepted as true in principle. One might, however, attempt a brief general account of the new or Ionian agora, which has not perhaps been given the place it deserves in the history of Hellenic architecture. Finally, since remarkable Hellenistic developments have been revealed in the Athenian agora, one is prompted to ask whether the influence of new ideas and methods produced modifications in the older type.

There are four passages in Thucydides (two of them from the same chapter) which have certain features in common: they are all of them explicitly comments by the author himself, they are all demonstrably late, that is, written a good deal later than the events to which they are immediately related (three of them certainly, the other probably, after 404 B.C., and the last named at least not long before the end of the war), and they all show, to a greater or smaller degree, a discrepancy with the narrative of those events. They are ii 65.7, ii 65.11, iv 81.2–3, and vi 15.4. The discrepancies are such that they compel, in my view, the conclusion that they were written at times different from the related narratives; this leads us to the problem of the composition of the History, a problem which has given rise to a mass of controversy, most of it barren to the last degree, but which cannot on that account be ignored. Mme de Romilly in her recent book has adequately defined the problem and described the controversy, and as well contributed most to its understanding; as she says, it is not so much a question of when passages were written, as when they were thought. But I have not seen it observed that these four passages form a group, by reason of their common features; and, because of these features, two of which are certain and the third (the discrepancy with the related narrative), as I hope to show, demonstrable, they should form a somewhat surer foundation for any theory about the composition of Thucydides' work. If the discrepancy be there, then, since the comments are late, the narrative must be early, relatively early. All four passages, it may be noted in passing, have this also in common, that they are comment on the effect of prominent individuals on the course of the war (Perikles, Brasidas, Alkibiades); and all are anticipatory in the sense that, where they now stand in the History, they point forward to future events.