The following inscriptions were discovered in Thasos in the winter of 1886, by Mr. J. Theodore Bent. Owing to the opposition of the Turkish authorities he was prevented from conveying to England the original marbles and monuments, and had to be content, for the present, with his memoranda of the sites explored and impressions of the inscriptions. One of these paper impressions has supplied the text of the Thasian Decree discussed in the preceding pages. The other Thasian impressions were placed by Mr. Bent in the hands of Mr. A. H. Smith of the British Museum, to be prepared for publication in this Journal. Mr. A. H. Smith however found the task he had undertaken in preparing an Index to the Hellenic Journal was making such demands upon his time, that he invited me to relieve him by editing the whole of Mr. Bent's Thasian impressions. Mr. Smith had already made transcriptions of a number of the texts, which he kindly placed at my disposal. I am however myself responsible for the arrangement and restoration of the texts as here given. Their interest and value will be considerably enhanced by the memoranda which Mr. Bent himself has furnished respecting the sites and buildings wherein the various inscriptions were discovered. None of them, so far as I know, have been published before.

The cylix which is the subject of the following paper has a double claim on the interest of archaeologists; first, it presents a peculiar, and—so far as at present known—for art a unique form of a familiar myth, the slaying of Itys; second, it is inscribed with the love name Panaitios, and therefore is readily classed with an already familiar group.

The vase in question is first reported by Dr. Helbig in the Bullettino, 1878, p. 204. It was found at Cervetri in the Boccanera excavations. It is now in the museum of Munich, and it is to the kindness of Professor Brunn that I owe the permission to publish the vase and the superintendence of the necessary drawings. A vase of so great interest could hardly have escaped publication but for the fact that it made its reappearance in the world saddled with what seems to me a mistaken interpretation. Dr. Helbig, without any hesitation, says (loc. cit.): ‘Una tazza … la quale nell’ interno rappresenta un mito molto raro cioè quello di Prokne ed Itys,' and cites as a parallel the well known Paris vase (Ann., 1863, tav. d'agg. C.) Dr. Klein, who had not seen the vase, describes from report (Meistersignaturen, p. 145): ‘Prokne im Begriffe dem auf einem Bette, u.s.w.’) My own view is that not Prokne, but her mythological prototype Aedon, the original nightingale, is represented, and that the vase-painter embodies the Homeric, not the later Attic form of the myth. The Munich cylix gives us the earlier (Aedon), the Paris cylix the later (Prokne) tradition. It is solely to draw attention to this point that the remarks that follow are addressed; the interesting question of the origin, development, and various transformations of the myth I reserve for a future occasion.

Of the vases figured on Pl. LXXXIII. nos. 1, 2, 4, and 5 come from the island of Calymnos. Nos. 1, 4, 5, and the large amphora of which a cut (Figs. 1, 2) is given below, belong to a series which has been described by Cecil Smith in the Classical Review, i. p. 80. The Bügelkanne (no. 2), was obtained by me subsequently, and was found on another site. The sponge-fishers of Calymnos have, by little and little in the last hundred years or so, come to regard the probability of invasion as more remote, and have consequently devoted their spare time and money to bringing their houses nearer the sea, until they have at length taken their lives in their hands and established themselves close to their native element. When Ross visited the island the only town was that which is still known as ‘ἡ χώρα.’ It is situated about two miles from the harbour and immediately underneath the still older medieval fortified town, now quite deserted. There is no evidence that there was an ancient city on this site, but the chief sanctuary of the island, the temple of Apollo, was in the immediate neighbourhood, on a ridge which overlooks two of the most productive valleys in this barren island. Most of the inhabitants have now moved down to the modern town which is close to the harbour and which bears the name of an ancient deme—Pothia. This name is probably genuine, as that tender regard for antiquity which finds a home for an outcast ancient name in the face of inseparable difficulties is not so developed here as in the kingdom of Greece.

The study of the Phrygian cities, the concluding part of which is here published, claims to be complete in the sense that it enumerates and places every polis, i.e. district, which had at any period a self-centred municipal existence; besides this it enumerates and discusses many villages and towns which formed part of the territory of these πόλϵις. The hope of the writer is to make a study of the local history of the whole central plateau of Asia Minor, tracing from the beginning of recorded history to the Mohammedan conquest the varying fortunes of every district, collecting the scanty indications of its social condition at different points in this long time, and essaying a picture of the growth and decay (which sometimes recur in a second cycle) of its civilization. The present study is restricted by the conditions of available space to the narrowest limits of a preliminary survey of the entire country of Phrygia. This survey is founded on certain principles, some of which are here enunciated for the first time, while others have been to a certain degree recognized and stated by M. Waddington and Professor Hirschfeld, though they have never been consistently applied and carried out to their logical conclusion. I may here briefly state them.