There is no denying that Theophrastus ranks among the most prolific Peripatetic philosophers. Diogenes Laertius lists 225 items in his bibliography, some of them perhaps twice—first as an independent treatise, then as part of a larger work. As time went on, this vast oeuvre suffered the usual vicissitudes: the overwhelming majority of it has been partly or entirely lost. In sharp contrast to the Frankish West, where, despite great losses, more texts were in circulation under Theophrastus' name than was justified, in the ever shrinking Byzantine world we find comparatively few references to him. But this surely does not mean that the small number of references are unreliable.

A singularly small contribution has been made by Aetolia to the vast and steadily growing mass of our epigraphical treasures. This seems to be due to two reasons,—a real dearth of inscriptions traceable in part to the character of the Aetolians themselves, and, secondly, the comparative neglect that Aetolia has suffered at the hands of travellers and archaeologists. The inscriptions given here are the results of a detailed exploration extending over part of each of the two years 1892 and 1893.

A large proportion, and those the most interesting of the inscriptions found, come from Naupaktos, or its immediate neighbourhood. This valuable maritime station was, as is well known, put by Athens into the possession of the exiled Messenians and with the downfall of her Empire it passed into the hands of the Achaean allies of Sparta: they seem to have kept it in spite of all the efforts of the Aetolians and it was not until 338 B.C. that its natural owners finally regained it by the gift of Philip of Macedon. From that time onwards Naupaktos played an important part in the history of the League. Pausanias visited the town and among its antiquities he mentions the ruins of a temple of Asklepios of some reputation. The site of this temple has been identified from the inscriptions cut in the face of a rock forming the back of a terrace near the springs called Kephalóvrysis, a few minutes' walk to the east of the town. The few fragments which are all that can now be deciphered of the numerous inscriptions which once covered the rock are given by R. Weil in his paper ‘Das Asklepieion von Naupaktos,’ Mitth. des deutsch. Inst. vol. iv. p. 22.

The vase which is the subject of the present paper is no new find. It has been for many years in the British Museum (Cat. No. 810), and was mentioned by Overbeck in his Heroische Bildwerke in 1851. It has not however hitherto been figured, and it may be well to take advantage of its publication in these pages to make a few observations on the general subject of vase-paintings which are connected with the myths of the Iliad.

The present vase is an amphora from Vulci, height nineteen inches. The form and decoration are given in the woodcut. On one side is a warrior standing to the left, clad in a chlamys, and armed with helmet, spear, and shield adorned with serpent. On the other side is a lady to the left, clad in Ionian chiton and overdress, her head enveloped in a kerchief; she raises her right hand; in her left hand is a baby boy, who turns and stretches his hands to the right. The main outlines of the figures are traced in black, but the folds of the Ionian chiton with light red; there are three incised circles on the warrior's shield. Under each figure runs a line of maeander pattern; an anthemion adorns the bottoms of both handles.

In the archaic room of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome there is a fragment of a colossal foot wearing a high sandal of the type known as Tyrrhenian. (Fig. 1, from photographs for which I have to thank the authorities of the British School at Rome.) The measurements, as given by C. L. Visconti, are:—length ·26m., breadth ·37m., indicating a total length of ·86m. It is important to notice that the fragment is not broken at the back, but is made in a separate piece. From this fact we may conclude with certainty that the foot belongs to a female figure, and protruded originally from long drapery, so that it was unnecessary to carve more than the front of the foot in a separate piece; and with great probability, since there are no dowel holes or other visible signs of attachment, that the statue to which the foot belonged was acrolithic, i.e. it had the trunk and limbs made in wood, while only head, hands, and feet were carved in marble.

There are few truths that are more forcibly impressed on the attention of any one engaged in restoring the lost monuments of antiquity than the painful one—that no form of written words is sufficient to convey a distinct idea of a building which has been destroyed. No adequate reproduction of its form can be made unless the words are accompanied by a diagram or drawing of some sort, or when these cannot be obtained, unless some sufficient remains of the building still exist to make its restoration possible, or if neither of these be attainable, unless it proves to be part of a known series—in other words, unless some edifices exist, either before or after it in date, so similar in form and purpose as to enable us from a study of their peculiarities to appreciate the meaning of the terms applied to the one we are attempting to restore.

The Temples of the Jews are a conspicuous illustration of this truth. Though so minutely described in the Bible or by Josephus, nothing can be more discrepant than the notions entertained by restorers of their forms and dimensions, and it is only very recently that we have begun to perceive that they form a part of a series (though it must be confessed not of familiar or well understood types), and that we begin to realize their forms with anything like distinctness. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, were important buildings of which we knew nothing till very recently, except from written descriptions; and nothing could be more various than the restorations that were proposed to reconcile their features with the verbal texts. Thanks to the excavations conducted by Messrs. Newton and Wood, we now know what the real appearances of these celebrated buildings were with sufficient exactness for all practical purposes.

I.—A. Wilhelm has recently republished the inscriptions on an altar at Side in Painphylia, originally published by Van Buren in JHS 1908, 190 sqq. Wilhelm's restorations and commentary, based solely on the photographs printed, without comment, by B. Pace in Annuario III , 33, have very greatly advanced the interpretation of these interesting inscriptions; but the disadvantage of working without seeing either the stone itself or a squeeze of it has led in several cases to readings which are not in fact on the stone. While assisting at the Turkish excavations at Side in September 1948, I had an opportunity of examining the stone in question, and with the kind permission of Prof. Arif Miifid Mansel, director of the excavations, I am able to offer the present note. My purpose is not so much to engage in the controversy concerning the altar and the significance of its inscriptions, as to help to establish the true text.

The four antefixes from Tarentum, shown in Plate XXXII., where they are reduced in size to about half the actual diameter, are only specimens selected from the not inconsiderable number of types found in recent excavations. All that I have seen are marked by great breadth and freedom of execution. Even those which seem to have been originally cast, in the rough, in the same mould have undergone such subsequent touching up and remodelling as makes them distinct works of art. Identical types sometimes occur in slightly varying sizes which implies successive moulds imitative of some established original. The faces when found are covered with a hard and rough lime-deposit, but the removal of this often reveals traces of colour laid as usual on a white priming. The Medusa, head in the plate appears to have been coloured to the life—cheeks pink, lips red, and not only the pupil, but even the iris of the eye painted. The colour of eyebrows and lashes is dark, that of the hair now a dirty brownish-yellow—like the tint of the common yellow lichen—probably modified by time or by the action of the acid used to remove the lime accretion. The modelling of the lips shows that fleshy and life-like firmness which is peculiar to the best time of Greek art. Under the chin of this, or a similar head I notice the marks of the moulder's finger, but instruments seem to have been used also. The lines of the hair, though fine in the plate, lose considerably by the absence of the part by the cheeks, where over each ear there rises a snake curved like a flattened S. The specimens which show these do not come up in features to the one figured. The colour on the snakes is blue-green. The small button above the centre of the brow is a curious feature.

Lucian's Timon accuses Zeus of negligence: even his statue at Olympia has not punished the temple-robbers who despoiled it, although it had a δεκάπηχυν κεραυνὸν ἐν τῇ δεξιᾷ(Tim. 4). But according to Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias (v 11.1), the Zeus at Olympia possessed no such weapon; it held a Nike in the right hand, a sceptre in the left. A. M. Harmon (LCL Lucian ii 331) notes that since Pausanias’ testimony is confirmed by numismatic evidence, Lucian must be wrong and ‘the error is odd in so good an observer’. In fact Lucian could be rather careless over such details; but in this case we can hope to account for his mistake. While he must have seen the Zeus at Olympia at some stage, the statue was also an obvious subject for rhetorical ecphrasis and literary elaboration: one thinks of Dio Chrysostom’s Olympicus (Or. xii); and Lucian may well have been as bookish in his approach to works of art as he was in so many ‘cultural’ subjects. In this case the error would easily have arisen if he had read, misread, or misrecollected an accusative of σκηπτός (‘thunderbolt’) for σκῆπτρον (‘sceptre’) in a previous written source; he would then only have had to supply a synonym κεραυνός for the wrong object. The fact that the thunderbolt is in the wrong hand would then have followed easily from the initial error: one does not hurl thunderbolts with the left hand! The obvious risk of confusion between σκηπτόν and σκῆπτρονσκῆπτρον is illustrated by the problem at Plutarch, de Alex. fort.ii (Mor. 338b), where Clearchus becomes tyrant of Heraclea, takes to carrying a σκῆπτρον and calls his son Κεραυνός. The Teubner editor rightly adopts Valckenaer’s σκηπτόν for MSS σκῆπτρον: a tyrant sufficiently uninhibited to call his son Thunder would also be uninhibited enough to carry a replica of a bolt.

The object of the following pages, the substance of which was read before the Cambridge Branch of the Hellenic Society in 1883, is to examine into the true nature of the land-system of the Greeks of the Homeric age by means of the evidence contained in the poems themselves.

On à priori grounds we might have expected, or at least should not be surprised, to find in the Iliad and Odyssey some traces of that primitive system known as the ‘Open-Field’ or ‘Common-Field’ system of agriculture, which the researches of recent years have proved to have once prevailed over a great part of the earth, and of which many survivals still exist.