The American excavations in the Athenian Agora were resumed in February 1933, and continued till the middle of July. An account of the work up to May 1 has been published in AJA. 1933, 305 ff. The work is being carried on in four sectors (see AJA. pl. 35)

The wells and cisterns cleared during the latter part of the summer of 1932 are described by Homer Thompson in AJA. 1933, 289 ff. These provide clear evidence of the existence of houses where all traces of walls and foundations have disappeared, notably along the north foot of the Areopagus and north-east of the Theseum, and their contents shew that the inhabitation of this area goes back at least to the early sixth century B.C. In some cases (wells closed in the late sixth and early fifth centuries) the pottery found in the wells seems to indicate the proximity of potters' workshops or warehouses, and pots have been found which had contained miltos. This is further proved for the fourth century by the presence of misfired vase-fragments and lamps. Several pieces of archaic pottery found in these wells are illustrated in the article mentioned above— notably a large one-piece amphora of the earliest class, decorated with a massive sphinx (loc. cit. fig. 3), and from the same shaft an exquisite plastic vase (loc. cit. fig. 5, here Pl XVI)—Ionian, or Ionising, work of about 540 B.C., and without question one of the finest of all existing plastic vases.

In the following pages I offer a brief survey of books and articles published in 1931 and 1932 which relate solely, or mainly, to Greek inscriptions. Their importance and their number have rendered the undertaking peculiarly difficult and have necessitated, if not the exclusion, at least the most rigorous compression of the paragraphs dealing with the Minoan and other pre-Hellenic scripts. To those scholars who have facilitated my task by sending me off-prints of their works I tender my heartiest thanks.

Death has in these years robbed epigraphical studies of a number of their most eminent representatives, among them H. Dessau, F. Durrbach, a leading authority on Delian inscriptions, C. Fredrich, editor of IG. xii. 8, M. Holleaux, outstanding in the Hellenistic field, O. Marucchi, an expert in Christian epigraphy, J. H. Mordtmann, Salomon and Théodore Reinach, and U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, for many years the director of the colossal enterprise of the Inscriptiones Graecae.

The identification and origin of this early type of Artemis, in which the goddess is represented standing erect and with wings on her shoulders, while in either hand she grasps an animal or bird, has long been the subject of much discussion, chiefly due to the fact that the archaeological evidence hitherto available, although consisting of some fifty representations, has come from various localities. The literary evidence likewise gives no sure clue, for the only certain mention of this type occurs in the description of the Chest of Cypselus, where Pausanias admits that he knows no reason why Artemis should be winged. Recently, however, at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta numerous examples of this type have been found, which, besides including several new and interesting variants both winged and unwinged, also extend the chronological range beyond the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Moreover, the numerical superiority of this series over the total number of examples previously known, together with the fact that the earliest representation was found with geometric pottery, seems to show conclusively that Sparta is a prominent early centre of this most interesting type. Consequently in the present paper the question of the identification and origin of the ‘Winged Artemis’ will be considered in the light of the recent evidence from Sparta.

In preparing for the press an edition of Aeneas Tacticus, which was left in manuscript form by the late Mr. L. W. Hunter, I have had to consider a good deal the details of the fastening of the Greek city gate. The general principles are familiar to everyone: a gate with two wings (σανίδες) opening inwards only, with a wooden bar (μοχλός) placed horizontally across it on the inside, secured by a metal bolt (βάλανος) which passed through a vertical hole bored in the μοχλός and into a socket (βαλανοδόκη) in the stone beneath, the top of the βάλανος, when pushed home, being well below the top of the μοχλός. The βάλανος must have been a heavy iron pin, thick enough to stand a big strain, since if anyone tried to force the gate everything depended on the resistance of the βάλανος: I imagine it something like twelve inches long and two to three inches thick. It will be remembered that at Plataea in 431 B.C. a soldier fastened one of the gates στυρακίῳ ἀκοντίον ἀντι βαλάνου χρησάμενος ἐς τὸν μοχλόν (Thuc. ii. 4. 3).

In AJA xcviii (1994) 609-16, F.B. Faklaris discussed the location of Aegeae, founded by the first Temenid king of the Macedonians and famous thereafter as the burial-place of the Macedonian kings (Pliny NH iv 33 ‘Aegeae in quo sepeliri mos reges’). He located it at Kopanos and not at Vergina, where I had put it in 1968. The geographical difference between the two sites is considerable. Kopanos is east of Mt. Bermion, and being some 19 km south of Edessa and 5 km east of Naoussa, it looks towards the plain of Pella. Vergina lies at the northern end of the Olympus massif, which consists of the Pierian mountains and Mt. Olympus; and it faces the Haliacmon and the western end of the plain. The choice between the two sites is to be determined by the interpretation of the literary evidence and by the ongoing flow of the archaeological discoveries.

Penelope's ‘stout hand’ (χειρί παχείηι) in Odyssey 21.6 has troubled readers with its implication that the 20 years Penelope has spent waiting, worrying and weaving have sapped her beauty. Attempts to redeem the verse have only been partially successful at best. By applying semiolinguistic models for jokes to both Odyssey 21.6 and Penelope's increase in stoutness at Odyssey 18.195, this paper pursues the possibility that both passages are humorous. Rather than deride Penelope, the humour celebrates her quintessentially human susceptibility to age and suffering, as well as the virtues she develops in parallel with her husband therefrom. The Odyssey regularly uses humour to similar effect by applying traditional epic formulaic structures to a broader range of subjects than they normally accommodate and thus redefining the heroic virtues that those structures encode so that they exalt mundane human experience.