The study of animal behavior is a newcomer to the interpretation of the rites and symbols of classical antiquity. Here its promise to produce new insights into old questions is fully matched by the threat of ready-made frames, into which scant and fragile fragments of evidence can only too easily be fitted.

In his recent article ‘The Old Temple Terrace at the Argive Heraeum’, J. C. Wright discusses the date of the platform supporting the remains of the earliest Argive Heraeum—in other words, the uppermost terrace of the Hellenic (viz. Classical) Heraeum. Is it itself a Classical structure, or a late Bronze Age platform re-used to accommodate the first peripteral temple of the seventh century BC? Wright would connect both the platform and the temple upon it with the first stages of proper Hellenic culture, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. On pp. 191 ff, he denies that I can possibly be right in following the oldest investigators and assigning this platform to the Bronze Age. But I must confess that his arguments, however learned, have so far failed to shake my conviction.

In Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis the chorus at lines 1036–97 compares the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (1036–79) with the fate of Iphigeneia, brought to Aulis by the deceitful promise of marriage to Achilles in order to be sacrificed to Artemis (1080–97). Of the two scenes on the Portland vase (fig. 1), one has been persuasively identified as the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, with figures A, B, C and D representing respectively Peleus, Eros, Thetis and Poseidon or Zeus. The interpretation of the second scene, however, has proved more difficult. Here J. G. F. Hind has recently stressed the importance of the lowered wedding torch held by the central reclining female figure F. He suggests Dido for this figure with Aeneas as figure E and Venus or Juno as figure G, so that the whole vase becomes ‘an early imperial essay in adapting Hellenic legend to relate to Rome's past, and specially to Rome's Augustan present’. An alternative identification of figures E, F and G with Achilles, Iphigeneia and Artemis would give a simpler thematic unity to the vase's decoration and restore its character as a private object.

In April 1983, the inscription published below was seen outside a house among the cafes along the harbour quay in Marmaris, Turkey, near the Customs House. The block had disappeared in September 1983, and it seems therefore unlikely that the inscription will be published elsewhere.