In the summer of 1949 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired an Attic black-figured pelike which is published here for the first time (figs. 1–3, pl. XX). It was bought from a New York dealer, and nothing is known of its provenance. The vase is 33·3 cm. high and unbroken; its surface, however, was chipped and flaked in places (cf. figs. 1 and 2), blemishes that have since been removed by the restorer at the museum. The potting of the pelike is normal—torus mouth, spreading foot, segmental handles—and the ornamentation—palmettes lying on their sides above the panels—occurs on other pelikai. One feature, however, is unusual: the lip is reserved and two broadish black stripes run around the inside of the neck (fig. 3). A graffito appears on the underside of the foot:

The obverse of the pelike depicts a dramatic moment in the capture of Silenos. The two hunters sent out by Midas crouch in ambush near the fountain in the garden of the king. They wear white petasoi, short chitons, and chlamydes wrapped around their left arms in the manner of big-game hunters and shield-less warriors. Each of them carries two spears; in addition, the one on the rock has a sword in a scabbard suspended from a double baldrick. There was a tradition that Midas had mixed wine into the water of the fountain to lure and capture Silenos: the New York pelike shows how the ruse is about to succeed. Here Silenos approaches, sniffing the familiar odour of the wine and dancing with joy. As yet he hasn't drunk and one fears he will be cheated out of his anticipated pleasure, for the hunters will presently close in, overpower him, and bring him before the king. The vase-painters usually show the moment immediately after the capture, the bringing-in of the prisoner, and his presentation before the king. The ambush proper is represented on only three other vases.

In the opening lines of the Eumenides Aeschylus' Pythia says that the first prophetic deity at Delphi was Gaia. She was followed by two of her daughters in succession, Themis and Phoibe. Phoibe gave the oracle to Phoibos as a birthday present, and it is from her that he had his name.

In the first book of Hippocratic Regimen, an unclear excursus explains how the technai imitate, and thus allow us to understand, human nature. It is argued here that the new polysemy of the word organon at the beginning of the fourth century is utilized by the author in his comparison, that this observation allows new understandings of some difficult passages and that such polysemy applies to a specific organon, the glotta (‘tongue’ and ‘reed’).

The Niobid krater in Paris (Louvre G341) is not one of the masterpieces of Greek vase painting. The vase is not even one of the best works of the artist, who receives his name, the Niobid Painter, from the rare depiction of Apollo and Artemis killing the children of Niobe on the reverse. The vase is, however, one of the touchstones of the history of ancient Greek art. The Niobid krater has this distinction because it is the earliest contemporaneous witness to the new developments in mural painting in the Early Classical Period, developments best understood from the descriptions of the traveler Pausanias six centuries later. The actual quality of the Niobid krater is therefore secondary to its documentary value.

Since the krater's discovery in 1881, most discussion has focused on the iconography of the scene on the obverse, showing a group of warriors with Athena (PLATE IIa). The ambiguity of the scene comes from the large number of figures and the lack of action or iconographical evidence to help in their identification. Of the 11 figures, only Herakles (figure 6 on PLATE IIb), with his club and lionskin and Athena (4) in her aegis and helmet are clearly identifiable.

According to a theory which has been very commonly accepted by archaeologists in this country, the local names of Greece prove that a single language was once spoken there and in Asia Minor which was totally different from Greek, Thraeian, Illyrian, or Phrygian. It was neither Aryan nor Semitic, and resembled that of the Lycian inscriptions. At a later date, whether before or after the arrival of the Greeks, certain Thraeian and Illyrian elements were added, but they contributed little to the sum of geographical names.

This belief is founded on the occurrence in Greece of local terminations in -σσ- and especially in -νθ-, which are considered to be foreign, and on their identification with the suffixes -σσ- and -νδ-, which are well known in Lycia, as well as in other districts of Asia Minor, and are derived from the native Lycian language.

The question of the location of the Enneakrounos fountain-house is one of the most controversial problems in Athenian topography.* It is known that a spring, which had been called Kallirrhoe, was embellished and given the name Enneakrounos during the Peisistratid tyranny. The location of the fountain-house, however, is disputed. Some references place Enneakrounos in the vicinity of the Ilissos stream to the south-east of the city; other sources state or imply a location in the city centre.

Among the fairly numerous Boeotian kantharoi with decoration in applied white on black there is a small class of mid-fifth century date, some painted with a garland only, others with figures. My husband drew attention to this small group nearly forty years ago when discussing the undecorated black kantharoi of this shape found at Rhitsona. He knew three vases with figures. The first was the well-known kantharos in Brussels published originally by Graindor and now appearing again in the third fascicule of the Belgian section of the Corpus Vasorum. On each side is a σκευοφόρος carrying on his shoulder a yoke from which two baskets are suspended. The painter has shown us the contents of one of the baskets. It is a consignment of pottery—two kantharoi, six kylikes, and two plates are visible. The vase thus provides an apt illustration of the φορτίον that the Boeotian in the Acharnians might have taken back from Athens and of the sycophant's uncomfortable mode of travel. The second, in the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne, shows a hoplite advancing.

Aegosthena, now more generally known as Porto Germano, lies on one of the easternmost bays of the Corinthian gulf, and on the northern frontier of the Megarid. Its remoteness from ordinary routes—for between it and Velia, itself an ultima Thule, rise 2,000 feet of pine-clad mountains—accounts for the fact that it is to this day practically unknown, and also perhaps for the very scanty mention of it in ancient literature. There was a shrine of Melampus there, the Spartans passed it in their retreat from Leuctra, and that is all. But the same remoteness has preserved for us a Greek fortified town in better condition and greater completeness than any other, not even excepting Messene.

The town was divided into two parts, the Acropolis defended on all sides by a line of walls and towers, and the lower town fortified on the north, from the Acropolis down to the sea, by a similar line, still remaining in good condition. We are, I think, both by the exigencies of its position and also by certain scanty remains bound to assume the existence of a corresponding south wall, of which mention will be made later. The style of building both in the Acropolis and the long wall is the same.

The construction of Pythagorean musical theory rests philosophically on the foundation provided by Sectio Canonis. Indeed, the treatise may have performed this role historically too. Andrew Barker has recently contributed to this journal a discussion of the methods and aims of the Sectio—JHS ci (1981) 1—16. In so doing he has pinpointed lapses in the theoretical reckoning of the treatise, especially in the case of proposition 11 (P11). I should like to reply to Barker's article. My remarks concern the authorship and date of the treatise, the introduction, a few propositions, and ultimately the historical and philosophical settings for the Sectio.

At Mycenae in 1876 Dr. Schliemann lifted the corner of the veil which had so long enshrouded the elder age of Hellas. Year by year ever since that veil has been further withdrawn, and now we are privileged to gaze on more than the shadowy outline of the picture of a far back age. The picture is still incomplete, but it is now possible to trace the salient points. Can we in comparing it with pictures of certain peoples who have dwelt in and reigned at Mycenae, pictures preserved for us elsewhere, identify it as that of any previously known? The object of this little essay is to make such an attempt.

The name Mycenean is now applied to a whole class of monuments—buildings, sepulchres, ornaments, weapons, pottery, engraved stones—which resemble more or less closely those found at Mycenae. I think I am right when I say that archaeologists are unanimous in considering them the outcome of one and the same civilization, and the product of one and the same race.

§ 1. Pindar is a classic of whom the study may be expected to grow with the growth of an interest in Greek archæology. Not, indeed, because it is indebted to him, so largely as to many other authors, for direct illustration. Rather because his ‘Odes of Victory’ are lit up in a new way by a fuller knowledge of the places with which they are concerned, of the contests which they celebrate, of the art and religion by which they were inspired. To take a single instance—the discoveries at Olympia, which have restored for us the main features of the altis, have given a new meaning for every modern reader to the beautiful, but hitherto indistinct, picture suggested by Pindar's description of ‘all the holy place resounding with festal joy,’ when ‘the lovely light of the fair-faced moon shone forth’ after a day of contests. Pindar's odes are poems of occasion, magnificent expressions of Hellenic life in its most distinctively Hellenic phases. Hitherto the real drawback to his popularity has not been obscurity of language, but the strain which he was felt to place on the modern imagination.

The town of Prusa, of which Dio was a native, stood in a fertile valley in Western Bithynia near Mt. Olympus. To this day the country round Brusa is remarkably rich and beautiful and here were situated the vineyards and farms which belonged to Dio's family. His grandfather was a distinguished sophist, τὴν γὰρ οὐσίαν ἣν εἴχε πατρῴαν καὶ παππῴαν ἅπασαν εἰς φιλοτιμίαν ἀναλώσας, ὥστε μηδὲν ἔχειν λοιπόν, ἑτέραν ἐκτήσατο ἀπò παιδείας καì παρὰ τῶν αὐτοκρατόρων: and the sophistical or rhetorical bias of Dio's education is clearly reflected in his earlier speeches. It mattered little that the study of the classics formed part of the average education: his reading everywhere would be directed by teachers who held the ordinary sophistical view that exact thinking and deep study unfit a man for practical life and that success is achieved by those who have acquired the art of making a skilful and impressive use of ideas which do not differ materially from those of the ordinary citizen. In the view of this school philosophical epideixis was only a small part of sophistic, and Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, Platonists, and Peripatetics were only dry-as-dust schoolmasters and pedants who, differing in everything else, united in disparaging the universal culture of the Sophists.

In the discussion of Greek dramatic origins, a curious passage of Apuleius has never, so far as I know, been mentioned.

In the second book of the Metamorphoses the hero Lucius describes a feast given at Hypata in Thessaly by his rich relative Byrrhena. After the feast Byrrhena informs him that an annual festival, coeval with the city, will be celebrated next day—a joyous ceremony, unique in the world, in honour of the god Laughter. She wishes that he could invent some humorous freak for the occasion. Lucius promises to do his best. Being very drunk, he then bids Byrrhena good-night, and departs with his slave for the house of Milo, his miserly old host. A gust blows out their torch, and they get home with difficulty, arm in arm. There they find three large and lusty persone violently battering the door. Lucius has been warned by his mistress, Milo's slave Fotis, against certain young Mohawks of the town—‘uesana factio nobilissimorum iuuenum’—who think nothing of murdering rich strangers. He at once draws his sword, and one by one stabs all three. Fotis, roused by the noise, lets him in and he quickly falls asleep.

Reading University has recently acquired two fresh examples of the group of small vases with outline drawing first discussed by Wide, who tentatively connected them with Mykalessos. One is a kylix, formerly in the possession of Mr. John Fothergill and most generously presented by him to the University, showing Herakles with his club (Figs, 1 and 2b). The second is a pyxis, damaged somewhat in an air raid of 1945, with a subject on the lid that is less easy to recognise (Figs. 2a and 3). Reading has also a third vase, belonging to this series but standing rather apart from the rest. It is a kylix of the same kind as the first, but decorated inside with a rosebud between sprays (Fig. 4). These three vases with Wide's original five and one other kylix published in the Russian Compte Rendu de la Commission Impériale Archéologique 1901 (1903) p. 131 Fig. 229 (reproduced here in Fig. 5) bring the total of vases of this class up to nine. Nothing is known of the provenance of any of the three vases in Reading and the kylix in Russia is published in a list of chance finds and acquisitions in the government of Cherson with no information as to how it was acquired.

Wide associated his group with the cult of Demeter of Mykalessos whose temple, according to Pausanias, was shut every night and opened again by Herakles.