I propose in the following article to inquire what can be determined concerning the procedure of the Gortynian Inscription. It is scarcely necessary to insist on the importance of the subject. This is the only document that we have that gives us an authentic record of the earlier stages of Greek law. The history of Greek law is little known; knowledge of it is most valuable for the light that it throws on the social and political life of Greece, and especially because it supplies a most important element in the comparative study of law. The legal side of history can never be neglected with impunity. Even though the Greeks never became such accomplished lawyers as the Romans, their legal and political institutions were closely connected, and our ignorance of their laws often prevents us from understanding their politics.

It is however for its relation to the laws of other nations that Greek law deserves chiefly to be studied. Our knowledge of the early legal antiquities of European races is still very limited.

It has long been recognised as a puzzling fact that in Ptolemy's map of the British Isles Great Britain is turned abruptly to the east from about latitude 55° north (corresponding roughly to the area of Scotland) so as to make a right angle approximately with the southern part of the country. It may be of interest to review briefly various tentative explanations of this peculiar fact which have been advanced during the last three-quarters of a century, and to add yet another to the list.

In 1885 H. Bradley suggested that either Ptolemy or one of his predecessors had before him three sectional maps representing respectively England, Scotland, and Ireland, and that in fitting the three maps together Ptolemy or his predecessor fell into the mistake of turning the oblong map of Scotland the wrong way. T. G. Rylands next put forward his view that the error was due to a faulty observation of a lunar eclipse at Duncansby Head causing an error of longitude, together with a faulty gnomonic observation at the same place causing an error of latitude. In 1894 H. Kiepert was clearly getting nearer the truth when he wrote: ‘The only coherent, though often deficient source for the knowledge of the [British] islands that has come down to us from the most flourishing period of the Empire, is the map of Ptolemy, the result of a combination of the lines of roads and of the coasting expeditions during the first century of Roman occupation. One great fault, however, has crept into the map by his having made use also of a totally different source, namely the astronomical fixations of latitude executed by Pytheas in the time of the earliest Greek mercantile expeditions to these regions of high latitudes.’ In a footnote to this observation he added: ‘These fixations stop at a borderline at the highest point reached in the north, which according to the itinerary sources would have been crossed in a northward direction, and thus the Alexandrian scholar was forced to give the northern half of the island a bend towards the east, the only possible direction, in consequence of which all the localities of Caledonia have been shifted from their proper positions by about a quarter of a circle.’

It might seem waste of labour to examine minutely an account of the battle of Marathon and the Parian expedition so late as that contained in the brief life of Miltiades ascribed to Cornelius Nepos, more especially as I must confess that the results of my enquiry are in the main negative, and that such positive conclusions as I reach have not the charm of novelty, but serve merely to strengthen theories already well known, and in England at least widely accepted. But this late epitome is almost the only consecutive narrative of these events outside the pages of Herodotus. Marathon was sung by poets, and bespattered with rhetoric by patriotic orators, but such historical accounts as there once were of the battle have perished, save for the still later epitome of Trogus Pompeius made by Justin. Again there is good reason to think that Cornelius Nepos is here following the fourth-century historian Ephorus. This is manifestly the case in his account of the Parian expedition, the kernel of which is little more than a translation of the fragment of Ephorus preserved in Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Paros. That Nepos drew his story of Marathon from the same source is the general, and as I shall hope to show, the right opinion, though it has been denied by Dr. E. Meyer. Further, the view of the campaign and the conception of the battle to be found in Nepos have been accepted as historical by many of the highest authorities in Germany, e.g., by Drs. H. Delbrück, G. Busolt, and in the main by Dr. E. Meyer.

The object of the present essay is to bring together whatever fragments of evidence we possess which may throw light upon the cults of Olbia, the colony founded by the Milesians at the mouth of the Borysthenes about 647 B.C. But by way of preface it may be worth while briefly to indicate the claims that Olbia has to be the subject of special study. All the Greek settlements on the North coast of the Euxine must have had in common many traits which marked them off from Greek colonies elsewhere, but Olbia, while in many respects it may be regarded as a typical city of the locality, was also undoubtedly possessed of an individuality of its own.

The white lekythoi represented on Plates IV.–VII. and Figs. 1 and 2 are members of a series, twelve or more in number, all bearing a marked family likeness in style, subject, and inscription. They are of interest to the historian as presenting pictures of Athenian domestic life in the years of peace which followed the Persian War: to the student of sculpture as anticipating in a curious way many of the types and motives of later grave-reliefs: and to the student of vase-technique as bridging the interval between the white-ground kylikes of the ‘severe’ school and the ‘Lécythes blancs attiques à représentations funéraires’ on which M. Pottier has written. Here is the list. For the sake of clearness I have placed the inscriptions of the white-ground lekythoi on the left-hand side of the page, those of the red-figured on the right.

In JHS xcvii (1977) 54–63 I argued against the view that the prevalent Spartan attitude towards Athens throughout the Pentekontaetia was aggressive and that in the First Peloponnesian War Sparta was eager to engage and crush her, being prevented only by the barrier of Mt. Geraneia with its Athenian garrisons. There seemed to me to be four main difficulties in this view:

(a) The Corinthians succeeded in crossing Mt. Geraneia with their local allies early in the war, even though the Athenians were already present: so why not Sparta?

(b) A full Peloponnesian army was able to reach central Greece by sea after the war had been in progress for some three years, and their reluctance on that occasion to cross the northern frontier of Attica even after they had defeated the Athenians seems inexplicable on this view.

In the first stasimon of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the estranged Helen and Menelaus share the second strophe. Beginning with an account of Helen's departure from Argos and her arrival in Troy, the chorus shifts its focus, moving back to the city deserted by the Queen, and to Menelaus grieving in the palace. With Helen no longer there, and Menelaus prey to the pathos that her absence inspires, ‘a phasma shall seem to rule the house. And the charm of beautiful kolossoi is hateful to the husband, and in the absence of eyes, gone is all Aphrodite’ (415–19). The difficulties of the stanza are legion.

This well known passage has given rise to some discussion in recent years, the words being the centre of the fray.

The Scholiast says

Most modern commentators have followed the Scholiast. But Mr. J. A. Stewart in the Classical Beview (Vol. vii. 3–59) follows the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in stating that the Scholiast was led astray by the proverb and that there is really no reference at all to the game ot Polis, and compares with it the passage from the Meno, 77 A.

The collection of antiquities which forms the subject of this paper was presented in the year 1863—4 to the Museum of the Leeds Philosophical Society by the Rev. John Gott, D.D., then Vicar of Leeds and now Dean of Worcester. He tells me that it came into his hands in the following way. Mr. Benjamin Gott, elder brother of the Dean's father, made a tour in Greece about the year 1815, in the company of an intimate friend, Mr. Rawson. They visited Smyrna, and returned through the islands to Athens, purchasing, in the course of their travels, a number of ancient marbles. Mr. Benjamin Gott died of fever at the Piraeus, and was buried at Athens in the Theseium. Many years afterwards, when an English cemetery was opened at Athens, his body, with two others, was removed from the temple to this more fitting resting-place.

Upon Mr. B. Gott's death, the marbles passed into the possession of his fellow-traveller Mr. Rawson, in whose house at Halifax they remained for years. Here six of the inscriptions were copied and sent to Böckh for insertion in the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum which he was then preparing.

All students of Eusebius will feel grateful to Mr. J. L. Myres for his attempt in the last volume of this Journal to discover the original text underlying the list of thalassocracies, preserved in the Chronica of Eusebius, and to reassert its value as historical evidence. The problem that Mr. Myres has set himself is rendered difficult not only by the general obscurity in which the sources of early Greek history are shrouded and by our almost total ignorance of the history of many of the thalassocrats during the period assigned to them in the list, but by the complicated questions of textual criticism which surround the Chronica, and which this problem raises in a particularly aggravated form. While not venturing to follow Mr. Myres through the wealth of historical learning, which he has brought to bear upon the subject, I have thought that I might be able to contribute something by bringing my own studies in the Chronica into relation to the general question.

This report, in which the usual arrangement is adopted, includes all the excavation-accounts which have reached me up to September 30th, 1929. Those concerning the work of the French School, the German School and the Greek Archaeological Service relate to work done in 1928; the rest mainly concern the campaigns of 1929.

American School

During the season of 1929 the American School, under Professor Rhys Carpenter, have continued their work on Old Corinth, selecting three areas for excavation:—the first, just north of the Peribolos of Apollo and east of the Lechaeum Road, revealed a large though much-destroyed Roman thermal establishment, where the well-preserved floor-piers of two hypocaust rooms and a deep marble-lined pool leave no doubt as to the purpose of the building, identified by Professor Carpenter with the famous Baths of Eurykles, described by Pausanias. The second area lies between the Temple of Apollo and the village road on the north. In antiquity the rocky hill on which the Temple stood had been cut away to a vertical rock-face, some 20 feet high, and Professor Carpenter's purpose is to restore the ancient isolation of the Temple.

The basic contention of this article is that, contrary to a widely held and influential view, the Chalkis Decree does not constitute evidence that Athens tried to impose democracies on rebellious allies after their subjugation. It contains an exchange of oaths between Athens and Chalkis, confirming an ‘agreement’ (homologia), the contents of which are lost. The oaths show Athenian concern for the protection of the Athenian democracy and its friends at Chalkis, and impose some judicial but no political restrictions on Chalkis to secure Athenian domination and assure the priority of Athenian interests. In fact, the Athenians acknowledge the right of the Chalkidians to insist on the performance of civic duties in Chalkis on the part of aliens (xenoi) resident there. The Athenians among these resident xenoi, who are exempted from these obligations, are neither colonists nor kleruchs, as is sometimes alleged, but most probably individual settlers who had been given land in Chalkidian territory by Tolmides in the 450s.

During the latter part of the summer of 1936 I spent some six weeks in Cyprus, studying the Greek and Roman inscriptions of the island, with the intention ultimately of producing a small Corpus. The following article is the first of a series in which I hope to publish the more interesting portion of my results.

The romantic tale of the beautiful princess Andromeda, and how Perseus freed her from the dragon, has been treated by two of the great tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides. Here, if anywhere, Sophocles is thrown into the shade by his rival, so much so that the most important elements of Sophocles' version have been given to the drama of Euripides. Therefore if we wish to restore to Sophocles what justly belongs to him, we must first define as clearly as possible what belongs to Euripides. For although a great deal has been written about this brilliant achievement of Euripides, yet conclusions that seemed settled are constantly being called in question or denied, while questionable or erroneous views are once more put forward as correct. Only after the genuine remains of Euripides' play have been separated out can we hope to form any conception of the Andromeda of Sophocles, or to give any reasoned answer to the question which is the earlier, Euripides' play, which was performed with the Helena in 412 B.C., or Sophocles' play, the date of the first performance of which has not come down to us. The poetry of Euripides was Latinised by Ennius, but the fragments of the Latin tragedy do not give substantial help towards the reconstruction of the Greek one.

Along with Pindar, Aeschylus is doubtless the user of the most spectacular and colourful imagery among classical Greek authors, and like Pindar he is not afraid to mix his metaphors. These lines from the Agamemnon would probably be placed in such a category by most readers who attend to the combination of images, ἄνθος Ἀργϵίων being taken as the rather commonplace and ‘dead’ metaphor of the ‘flower of the host’, etc., found elsewhere in Aeschylus and other writers before and after him; and I have the impression that none of the commentators seems to have thought it worth asking in what sense a flower could be spoken of as ‘carded by rubbing’. Now I do not think Aeschylus chose his words so carelessly—or with such deliberate incongruity—as this, and propose that with ἄνθος he was at the same time alluding to another sense of the word which more effectively sustains the image when juxtaposed to the words τρίβῳ κατέξαινον. Although this sense is not well attested, nor recognized in the lexica, it seems that ᾄνθος might be used of the flock or nap on wool, like ᾄωτος.

Lunar mansions are twenty-eight constellations or single stars on the route of the Moon during the twenty-eight nights of its visibility. As a mere astronomical curiosity they could neither attract nor reward much attention. Accordingly learned discussions have been limited to descriptions, to controversies where and when they were first established, in Babylonia, India, or China, or to catalogues of the medieval evidence. But if it is realised that they were not observed for their own sake but because the revolution of the Moon was the basis of early time-reckoning which led to the creation of the first calendar, conclusions of more than limited interest can be produced by relating astronomical to religious problems. And this interest will be further increased by the realisation that our zodiac is nothing but the successor of the mansions as it served first the lunisolar, and then the solar, year, of which the former was a device to bring the monthly revolutions of the Moon into harmony with the annual revolution of the Sun, and the latter was based on the revolution of the Sun alone.

But how can we find material to reconstruct a system which was superseded in the remote past, seeing that even the victorious system remains in important respects mysterious, e.g. the reasons for the strange selection of the signs and the presence among them of animal and human figures? We are helped by two circumstances. One is the natural conservatism of our calendars, astrological prognostics, and magical texts: these often preserve traces of earlier stages of human thought. The second circumstance is less natural.

Mrs Ure has recalled attention in recent JHS Notes (lxxxviii [1968] 140 f.; lxxxix [1969] 120 f.) to the class of fifth-century Corinthian cups and other small vases studied formerly by Sam Wide (in AM xxvi [1901] 143 ff.) and her (in JHS lxix [1949] 18 ff.). It is surely time the class had a name and, with Mrs Ure's approval, I suggest ‘The Sam Wide Group’. Mrs Ure mentions a cup of the group in Oxford and I take this opportunity to publish it. It is in private possession but at present exhibited in the Ashmolean museum, whose photographs of it are shown here (Plate II 1–2). The fabric and the outside decoration (partly painted handles, tongues on the lip, a band within the concave foot) are wholly normal for this group. The cup interior, which carries the figure decoration, measures 9.2 cm across. The paint is a reddish brown, used with varying intensity from the pale wash for hatching to heavy stippling over painted areas (as the cloak). The scene is of Oedipus and the Sphinx—with a difference which is easier to describe than explain. Oedipus sits at the left, his petasos slung behind his neck, his sword drawn and held upright over his knees. A chlamys fastened round his neck appears to be raised in a protective gesture over his head. Passing from the ridiculous to the sublime we might compare the gesture of a Niobe protecting her child. The left arm holding the drapery is not shown, but this explanation seems the most plausible. The only alternative is that this is the rock on which we might expect the Sphinx otherwise to be sitting, and which can be shown in this form. The monster is perched on a column with a volute capital which is not strictly Ionic but of the type commonly seen on vases for structures or furniture. A high plinth over the volutes serves as base for the creature, rocking back on its haunches, balancing, it seems, on a springy tail.

Beazley, quoted by Fraenkel ad loc., has suggested that τρίτον Άθῷον αἶπος Ζηνὁς alludes to τρίτος (Σωτήρ) Ζεύς. The role played by Ζεὺς Σωτήρ in the religious thought of Aeschylus and in his treatment of the Oresteia myth is important (cf. Fraenkel on 1387), but this is not by itself sufficient to prove the allusion here. The route Ida-Lemnos-Athos shows no signs of having been artificially contrived in order to bring Athos into the third place, and while Aeschylus evidently intends to give the signal a divine send-off, so to speak, with the triad Hephaestus, Hermes and Zeus, the importation of a particular Zeus into the context makes no useful contribution to this end. τρίτον may undoubtedly evoke thoughts Σωτήρ, but Aeschylean evocations of thought usually have point; hence, perhaps, the caution detectable in Fraenkel's approach to Beazley's suggestion. Our doubts may be resolved by the fact that even if we restrict τρίτον to the literal sense, Σωτήρ is already present in the context by implication, in the word Ἀθῷον. No audience could distinguish between Ἀθῷον and ἀθῷον, and three of the manuscripts have not succeeded in doing so either (ἄθωον MFTr). Aeschylus frequently embarks on word-play, particularly with proper names (see, e.g., Suppl. 45–7, 315; PV 732–4, 848–52; Ag. 681 ff.; Αἰτν. fr. 27 Mette), and in some of the cases is probably exercising the poet's prerogative to coin his own etymologies, but this may be an instance drawn from popular usage. Athos, rising to a height of 2033 m.

The only common factor shared by the fragments of vase and votive plaque discussed below is that all are Attic. The plaque fragments seemed to deserve individual treatment outside the general study of votive plaques from the Athenian Acropolis on which I am engaged. The vase fragment with the Marsyas scene which is published here with some comment on the possible literary treatment of the myth is in the possession of Mr. John Leatham. To him I am indebted for permission to study and publish the piece, and to Mme. S. Karouzou, Prof. O. Broneer, the Keeper of Antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum, and the Director of the Thorvaldsen Museum for permission to publish pieces in Athens, Oxford, and Copenhagen.

I. Marsyas and Melanippides

The fragment which is here Illustrated on Plate I, 1, 3 is at present in the keeping of Mr. John Leatham. Unfortunately its provenience can be defined no more nearly than as ‘from Greece’. On the photograph reproduced on Plate I, 3 I have added in white the painted details on the sherd which the camera could not record. It is from the rim and wall of a calyx crater, part of whose lip decoration, a palmette scroll, is preserved. From the figure scene below we see the upper part of an Athena who holds her spear upright in the right hand while her arm hangs at her side, perhaps with the hand on the rim of a shield which rested on the ground beside her. She wears an aegis over her peplos, and an Attic helmet with raised cheek-pieces. She is looking to her left and slightly down towards a figure before a tree with white painted leaves. The figure is apparently seated, and his snub nose shows that he is a satyr or silen, and not a young one to judge by his shaggy white hair.