1. At Lydae, on the western edge of the horizontal slabs of a tomb, on the side of which is Mr. Hicks' No. 12.

This may be compared with the inscription No. 16 of Mr. Hicks, which it very closely resembles. The builder would seem to be the same Heliodoros who is numbered 6 in the genealogical tree. Letters ·04m.

Below the three lower heroa and further south we found two inscribed fragments. One had the letters ΑΥΤΟ (·06m.) and obviously had an imperial connection: the other showed ΩΡΟΥΤΟΥ ΝΙΑΗΛΙΟ and must have referred to the Diophantus family.

‘You will be unable to comprehend strophe, antistrophe or epode; it will read like a piece of continuous prose:’ the question has been long debated, whether Dionysius' claim is justified.

Experiment has proved that brute force will be required to hammer the following quotation from Simonides into the shape of a complete strophe and complete antistrophe, with or without all or part of an epode. Specimens may be seen and judged elsewhere. They need never again be repeated; they demonstrate that either the text is corrupt beyond the possibility of a scientific restoration, or there is no complete strophe and antistrophe present.

It is at least natural to suppose that when Dionysius says, ‘You will not recognise strophe, antistrophe and epode,’ he must, in this context, imply that all three of these elements are represented; not necessarily that all three are complete, but that parts at least of all three are included. It appears therefore prima facie reasonable to look for metrical correspondences between strophe and antistrophe; but of all such investigations one only has led to a result which is widely approved.

Through the kindness of Professor K. T. Erim of New York University I have the opportunity to offer the following note on a fragment of a Lydian inscription found recently during his excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria. The description and details of the archaeological context I owe to Professor Erim and to Miss Joyce Reynolds.

The fragment (inv. no. 68.357) came to light in July 1968, re-used in one of the ruined modern houses on the northern slope of the so-called acropolis when they were being demolished in preparation for the full-scale excavation of the Theatre there. It is of medium- to coarse-grained marble, greyish in colour, probably from the Aphrodisias quarries themselves, and measures 0·11 × 0·75 × 0·165 m.; no original edges survive, but it is likely that the original left edge was very close to the surviving left edge.

What remains of the inscribed surface is approximately trapezoidal in shape and carries traces of three lines of text; in the first only the lower tips of the letters survive and these cannot be securely interpreted, but in the second five complete letters (ave. 0·025 m. high) can be read, although they have suffered from slight surface chipping, and in the third the upper two-thirds of five letters survives and these also can be read perfectly well. The inscription was firmly and deftly, if lightly, cut, with trenches c. 0·001 deep, very slightly triangular in profile and showing some tendency to broaden a little on the base line. Judging from the position of the last letters in Il. 2, 3, it seems probable that each line ended with a completed word.

Shortly before Darius abandoned his futile pursuit of the elusive Scythians, there came to the Persians a messenger from the Scythian chiefs (iv 131, 132):

When the mummy-portraits from Rubayyat and Hawara were first brought to Europe, amid the general interest which they aroused there was a wide diversity of opinion as to their age. Georg Ebers, who had an enthusiastic admiration for them, tried hard to prove that the series began in the second century B.C. and that the best specimens belonged to the Ptolemaic period. Th. Schreiber may be mentioned as another distinguished authority who took the same view. On the other hand many archaeologists maintained that the portraits were all Roman work, dating for the most part from the second century A.D. Mr. Petrie in particular brought forward definite evidence to show that they range from about 130 A.D. to about 250 A.D., and he also divided them into successive groups. There is still much uncertainty on the subject, as I have had occasion to notice of late. To those who are in doubt about it the following brief paper, which is based on a study of the Cairo collection, may be of some little help. I regret that I do not know much of the material in Europe at first hand.

The term Proto-Attic, which is our equivalent to the German Frühattisch, and is formed on the analogy of Proto-Corinthian, is of course only a loose definition, intended to apply exclusively to a small class of Attic vases which fall between the periods represented on the one hand by the Dipylon, and on the other by the vases of the stereotyped Attic black-figure style.

For this later limit the François vase would naturally be the typical representative, were it not that, as we now know, the white on that vase is laid direct upon the clay instead of in the true Attic manner upon a prepared black surface. Within these two limits we should strictly speaking place the Vourva, Marathon, and the Menidi vases, as well as the large series of ‘Tyrrhenian amphorae’; and possibly yet other classes of the same kind may be found among the Acropolis fragments; but for our purpose these may be regarded rather as tributaries of the main stream, and not as proto-Attic in the limited sense.

This article uses recent findings about the diversity of political organization in Archaic and Classical Greece beyond Athens, and methodological considerations about the role of civic Hestia in oligarchic communities, to add sharpness to current work on the political contextualization of Classical enkomiastic poetry. The two works considered here remind us of the epichoric political significance of such poetry, because of their attunement to two divergent oligarchic contexts. They thus help to get us back to specific fifth-century political as well as cultural Realien.

It has become habitual to approach Homeric man's mental functioning with the categories used today, only to show how different this man was from the later Greek and, moreover, from the modern individual. The studies in Homer's mental terminology begun by Bruno Snell and other German scholars before World War II illustrate this tendency. Although the scholarly value of these studies, which have led us to realize that the Homeric vocabulary lacks terms explicitly designating the person as a whole, is incontestable, in everything concerning the better understanding of Homeric man their effect has been, paradoxically enough, rather negative. Indeed, insofar as such ideas as ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘character’ are said to be irrelevant to Homer, and what is proposed instead is a loose conglomerate of the so-called ‘mental organs’, Homeric man is turned into an incognizable entity altogether estranged from everything understood as human today or in classical Greece. At the same time, the essential humanity of Homeric man is immediately felt by every reader of Homer, and the incompatibility of this experience with the image created by terminological speculations about Homeric man is strong enough to call in question the relevance of the results obtained through the terminological approach.

My object in the following paper is two-fold; first, to comment on two hitherto unpublished vases relating to the myth of the Judgment of Paris; secondly, to discuss the typography of the myth generally, and in particular to offer some suggestions as to the origin of its early art form.

First as to the unpublished vases. Both the amphora and the pinax are now in the Graeco-Etruscan Museum at Florence. The drawings and photographs were executed under the kind supervision of the Director of the Museum, Sig. Milani; he was however unable to tell me where the vases were found: they are manifestly both of Attic work. It is fortunate that they both are now in the same Museum, as they present certain well-marked analogies in treatment, evident at the most cursory glance.

A detailed description of the two vases is superfluous, as accurate reproductions lie before the reader, but I would call attention to one or two points. The amphora (Plate LXX. and Fig. 1) I should class as belonging to very early black-figured manner—before the regular B. F. Attic style is fully established—with reminiscences of the so-called ‘Chalcidian’ and of the ‘Corinthian’ styles. We note especially the curiously cut cloaks of the women, which appear frequently on Corinthian vases, of which there are numerous examples in the Louvre; and we note also the rosettes on the animal frieze and the very ‘Chalcidian’ horror vacui, e.g. the little owl between the feet of Hermes.

In the Archaeological Institute of the University of Tübingen there is a lekane that was acquired by the late Professor Watzinger too late for inclusion in his Griechische Vasen in Tübingen It has recently been published in an article ‘Zu einigen böotischen Vasen des sechsten Jahrhunderts’ in the Jahrbuch des römisch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz iv by Dr Konrad Schauenburg, who regards it as Boeotian. This lekane (plate IX 1–5; Schauenburg, pl. 8) and one in Munich which goes with it (plate X 1–3, XI 1, 2; CV iii pl. 146.3, 5–7) are similar in many respects to Boeotian lekanai, but I hope to show that they are in fact of the same fabric as the three great grave amphorae from Eretria. The most recent discussion of these amphorae and full bibliographies are to be found in Mr John Boardman's article ‘Pottery from Eretria’, BSA xlvii (1952) 30 ff., to which I shall frequently refer.

In shape the two vases are near to Boeotian lekanai of the orientalising class except that the flat ribbon handles are ‘continuous’, that is, they are formed from a continuous strip of clay which is applied to the rim externally in such a way as to leave a rather pinched loop in the centre and a centimetre or so of the ribbon projecting at each end. The ribbony strip keeps its identity all along and nowhere does it merge into the rim; see plate X 2, 3, XI 1. By contrast, in orientalising lekanai (the largest single Boeotian class) there is no connexion between the projections and the handle, from which they are separated by about a centimetre of normal rim. For a typical example see CV Heidelberg i pl. 27.5. Both the Tübingen and the Munich lekanai have on the rim a row of reversed zeds similar to those which decorate the lip of the Wedding amphora and the Herakles amphora. Immediately above the foot there is a broad black band edged at the top with a red line painted over the black. The base within the foot-ring is decorated with a large black spot inside a small circle. The interior has a tondo framed by a red ring superimposed on the edge of the surrounding black, and two red circles are painted over the black a short distance below the rim. The surface of the Munich lekane has been coloured a deep red, well preserved under the foot. The black glaze on both vases is thinly applied and streaky.

In the work known as Khitab Al ‘Uyun, or Book of Springs, pp. 24–33, is contained a long narrative of the disastrous siege of Constantinople by the Arabs in 717–8, which, owing to its great length, I was unable to include in my article on the ‘The Arabs in Asia Minor’ in J.H.S. xviii, p. 182 ff. This work dates from the latter half of the 11th century, and in its present state appears to have been written in Spain, but is clearly drawn from early Eastern sources. Unfortunately the author does not, like most Arabic historians, mention his sources; but from a comparison with the narrative of Al Tabari it is clear that his chief, if not his only, authorities were Al Wakidi and Al Madaini, both of whom wrote in the early part of the 9th century and are earlier in date than any extant Arabic chroniclers.

There are in the British Museum two groups of Greek vases, from two burials, which may for convenience be called the Burgon and Blacas tombs, after their finders. The present article gives the evidence for their discovery and an account of the individual vases; for those which have already been published in the Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum and in the Corpus Vasorum, I confine myself to major additions to the bibliography and to supplementary comment, while the unpublished pieces receive fuller treatment.

Thomas Burgon (1787–1858), a Turkey merchant who lived in Smyrna till 1814 and returned to the Aegean on various occasions after that date, made good use of his opportunities for excavating and collecting antiquities; he was no dilettante but a knowledgeable and careful worker, and when his business failed in 1841 he and his collection found a refuge in the British Museum. His name has long been familiar to the student of Greek vases from the Burgon amphora, the earliest known Panathenaic amphora, which is conspicuous both for its own merits and for its importance for the chronology of black-figure vase-painting; very conveniently, the Burgon amphora came from the Burgon tomb, in which it was associated with six much smaller vases.

In a ‘Note on Sea-birds’ [JHS xcii (1972) 172–3] Miss Sylvia Benton comments on Mr J. K. Anderson's preceding Note, Θρᾷξ, Δυτῖνος, Καταρράκτης. But if we are to identify the species to which ancient names refer we must limit ourselves to those species which are now, or can be shown to have once been, present in Greece, and for this both accuracy of observation and a knowledge of the literature on the ornithology of Greece seem desirable. Miss Benton says: ‘A ship on which I was sailing was dive-bombed by Gannets just east of the harbour of Tinos: no doubt they were defending their nests on the cliffs’. But the Gannet (Sula bassana) is a bird of the North Atlantic which does not now nest, if it ever did, in the Mediterranean nor indeed south of 51° N. on the eastern coasts of the Atlantic, so that these dive-bombers, whatever they were, could hardly have been Gannets. There are only two authentic records of Gannets in Greece at all, in May 1853 and in April 1965 (A. Kanellis: Catalogus Faunae Graeciae; pars II Aves ed. W. Bauer, O. v. Helversen, M. Hodge, J. Martens. Thessaloniki, 1969).

In the paper on ‘Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Worship,’ (above, pp. 99 foll.) and in the various discussions of the Cretan discoveries, several theories and interpretations are put forth which have been too hastily accepted. I do not propose to deal with the whole question here, but to call attention to the fact that a great part of the evidence has been overlooked. It is not unnatural that, in the enthusiasm of a great discovery, the happy discoverer should be taken by an interpretation which is ingenious and in many respects alluring, since it offers a key to mysteries long unexplained. Nevertheless there are other facts to be reckoned with.

The theories I refer to are these: (1) that the double axes carved in the Cnossian palace have a religious significance; (2) that they are the symbol of Zeus; (3) that the pillar upon which several of these signs are carved was worshipped; (4) that the Labyrinth derives its name from the word the Carian name for an axe of this kind, and (5) that the palace of Cnossos was the Labyrinth, which means the House of the Double Axe. These theories are supported by the following evidence: (1) that the statue of Zeus at Labranda in Caria was described as holding in his hand a double axe, the local name for which was (Plutarch, Quaest. Gr. 45); (2) that double axes of bronze were found in the Dictaean Cave, where Zeus was worshipped; (3) Mr. Evans also collects a large number of facts to illustrate the worship of pillars, and apparently of axes also.

The vase which is the subject of the present memoir is a pyxis or small round box of a light yellow clay with a smooth surface, decorated with designs in a blackish brown, which is here and there varied with a patch of purple laid upon the black, or with a detail occasionally incised. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1865, and forms one of a set of eighteen which were ‘guaranteed’ as having been found at Phaleron near Athens.

The lid is decorated with a circular frieze of animals, representing five lions or panthers; the most important representation, however, is that upon the body of the vase, which is encircled with a single frieze of figures, consisting of four lions, a bull (recognisable by the shape of its hoof and its horn), and a group which is obviously a rendering of the well-known myth of Herakles and Geryon—beside Geryon is a further group of three bulls.

Aristotle relates that during his second exile Pisistratus joined with others in the colonization of Rhaccelus on the Thermaic Gulf: πρῶτον μὲν συνῷκισε περὶ τὸν Θερμαῖον κόλπον χωρίον ὅ καλεῖται Ῥαίκηλος. The context of this foundation is very obscure. J. W. Cole nevertheless proposed to consider this enterprise as ‘a combined Peisistratus-Eretria settlement’: this is a very attractive hypothesis which I should like to explore, adding some further considerations.

The subject, or subects, of the scenes on the Portland Vase is an old problem which has teased art historians for long enough. There have been fairly long periods when the interpretation seemed to be generally agreed, or when scholars' ingenuity waned, and the last suggestion reigned unchallenged for some time. There have also been short periods when the vase evoked avid scholarly activity, as for instance 1957–68.

For a recent debate one should consult the article by B. Ashmole, and the reply to it made by D. Haynes (JHS 1967 and 1968). In both editions of his British Museum booklet, The Portland Vase (1964 and 1975) Haynes gives an amusing appendix, listing ‘other interpretations’, which from 1642 to 1967 amounted to twenty-three more or less different theories. If one adds to these the articles by Brown and Clairmont published subsequently in AJA (1968, 1970, 1972) and a recent paper by Evelyn Harrison in a German Festschrift (1976), then the vase has knocked up more than its quarter century of rival interpretations. It is no wonder that many modern general works state simply that the scenes have not been satisfactorily interpreted, but that one of the sides may represent a sea goddess.

In summary it may be said that previous theories have taken one of two main paths. They have either linked the scene with a Greek legend, or have sought in the vase a reference to contemporary Roman history, albeit a history dressed up in a Hellenic and classicising style.

The following inscriptions, one from the realm of the Attalid kings, the other from that of the Ptolemies, came to light last year. Both are city decrees issued in the second century B.C., and affinity in date, if not in matter, seems to justify their being here published together.

I. Decree from Apamea-ad-Maeandrum

Dinar. Two fragments of a marble stele excavated in 1934 near the ‘Therma’ spring (Ramsay, C.B. p. 401), soon afterwards copied, photographed and measured by W. M. Calder. At the top a plain moulding; broken at base and on both sides, no part of edges preserved; h. 0·39 m., w. 0·37 m., th. 0·08–0·10 m.; letters 0·007 to 0·0125 m.

Although the coinage of Alexander the Great has of late years been intensively studied, and an immense advance made, almost entirely by the efforts of Mr. E. T. Newell, in its classification and dating, little attention has been paid to one detail which seems to me worthy of more careful consideration. This is the decoration of the bowl of the helmet of Athena on the gold coinage (Fig. 1). Müller (Alex, le Grand, p. 3) says merely that the bowl is most usually adorned with a serpent, sometimes with a running gryphon, rarely with a sphinx, and sometimes with nothing at all. He makes no attempt to explain these emblems, regarding them doubtless as purely decorative. There is no doubt that from quite early times such creatures had been used for purely ornamental purposes to support the crests of helmets. Between using them actually to bear the crest and as decoration in relief on the bowl there is no significant difference. If, therefore, no plausible explanation of the meaning of these emblems on the coinage of Alexander is forthcoming it is not unreasonable to suppose that they are purely decorative; but that position should not be assumed until the possibility of their having a meaning has been thoroughly explored.