The epitaphs and other verse inscriptions which are preserved for us in literature impose on us a certain caution. The good-will which our authors have brought to the reading of monuments is like what we bring to the singing of hymns: when lulled by the authority of the verse-form and of the occasion, we can accept things which the poet cannot have intended. I take as example the ‘green hill far away Without a city wall.’ The poet does not say that the hill is unwalled but that it is outside Jerusalem: yet to understand him to say the former is both easy and common.

The moral is important. What generations of intelligent piety can acquiesce in is one thing: what the poet can have meant is another. We must not, therefore, be shocked to find Herodotos also acquiescing in what the poet never meant him to believe. Recording the Battle of Thermopylai, and concluding with the action in which (he says) only Spartans and Thespians fought, he then names the bravest of the Spartans, and then of the Thespians.

In his notice of my edition of this play, your reviewer questions the emendation, which Headlam proposed and I adopted, of v. 370 (Τυφῶνα θοῦρον, θεὸς ὅς ἀντέστη θεοῖς for MSS.Τυφῶνα θοῦρον, πᾶσιν ὅς ἀντέστη θεοῖς), and says: ‘Even if we suppose that Typhon could be called a god, yet the word comes awkwardly after the accusative θοῦρον.’

The first point was fully dealt with by Headlam himself in C.R. 1900, pp. 106–7, where he notes that Typhon is called a god by Hesiod (Th.824, κρατεροῦ θεοῦ, 871ἐκ θεόφιν γεϝεήand by Hesychius (Τυφωεύς θεός τις γηγενής) and that his divinity is implied by Aeschylus in Theb. 497–501. In the same article he refers to copious examples of the insertion of πᾶσιcontra metrum.

Cyprus has in many ages been famed for artistic achievement of many kinds, but the excellence of its mural painting from the twelfth to the sixteenth century is only now being recognised. The Asinou frescoes, probably the most remarkable of all, have recently been described, and elsewhere in the island are many others deserving attention not merely as documents but as monuments of art. Among them are the paintings here reproduced, about seven-eighths of the collection in the Theotokos church near Galata. When visiting it in October 1932 I was unable fully to note all its decoration and other features, but the present incomplete account may perhaps encourage experts to study these well-preserved examples of work in the Byzantine tradition executed by Greek artists during the period of Venetian rule (1489–1570). The church (Fig. 1) stands isolated in a grove of trees beside a mountain brook on the left of the main road leading to Galata about half a mile below that village. No houses or farm buildings are near it, but about eighty yards away is a similar and larger church (Hagia Paraskeue) erected in 1502.

To the review in the last number of this Journal of Mr. Philip Argenti's The Massacres of Chios, described in contemporary diplomatic reports I would like to add a note on a little book published at Chios in 1921 by Mr. Stylianos G. Bios, a professor in the gymnasium of Chios. This book is called Ἡ σφαγὴ τῆς χίου εἰς τὸ στόμα τοῦ χιακοῦ λαοῦ, ἤτοι διηγήσεις περὶ τῆς σφαγῆς, ἱστορικαὶ σημειώσεις καὶ ποιήματα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν σφαγήν, and the title very exactly describes the contents. In the first part we have in ninety-five pages forty-three stories of personal experiences of the massacre. Some few of these stories and anecdotes must have been written down some time before the book was published, because they are taken down from the mouths of very old people, who were children at the time and in one way or another escaped with their lives. The majority of the stories, however, are at second hand, but at good second hand; that is to say, they are the words of people who had themselves heard of the events from actual eyewitnesses. In the second part of the book full details are given of the ages and names of those who told the stories, and for those who were not themselves eye-witnesses the names of their informants. The third part contains a few poems and some popular ballads about the massacre. All the stories are written out in dialect, with explanations of the harder words.

In a review of Mr. M. G. Mikhailidis-Nouaros' Λαογραφικὰ ∑ύμμεικτα Καρπάθου, published in Vol. LII (1932) of this Journal, p. 335, I noticed as remarkable and interesting his statement that people in that island, when writing to their friends and relations abroad, will often compose the letter, either entirely or at all events for the most part, in μαντινάδες, those distichs which, half improvised and half traditional, are sung at most of the greater occasions of village life in the Greek islands. That is to say, they avoid prose composition. Such a letter can hardly contain much news in our sense of the word: it serves, however, to transmit the feelings of the writer in the only form in which he or she has learned to express them. Of these letters the author gives a couple of recent examples. The point has a certain interest, because it has been remarked that the most primitive literary composition is apt to be in verse, and that prose is an art coming later.

Whoever advances a theory in opposition to the common opinion cannot expect to meet at once with consent. Therefore I value it highly that the review of my paper Die Artemistempel von Ephesos (JHS. 1932, 130) inclines to accept my chronology of the Ephesian archaic finds, this chronology having been the main object of the paper. I would welcome the statement that ‘few would nowadays be unwilling to follow Rumpf in bringing the ivory figurines down into the sixth century’ (I myself indicated this date in AM. 1925, 30, note 4); but this assertion seems rather optimistic, considering the widespread approval extended to V. Müller's Frühe Plastik.

In a notice of my edition of the Agamemnon which appeared in the last number of the Journal (1932, 323), the reviewer says: ‘As an example (i.e. of Lawson's many conjectures) we may mention ὄμβροι δέ in 560, which gives good sense and saves the grammar, but the original error cannot have been palaeographical: ἐξ οὐρανοῦ γάρ of the manuscripts is therefore said to have been a gloss on ὄμβροι. But why should anyone want to tell us that rain comes from the sky?’

In IG. iv. fasc. i, which comprises the inscriptions of Epidaurus, H. von Gaertringen published on p. xxv of the prolegomena a revised version of the stemma published by Fraenkel on p. 264 of IG. iv.

There is a small group of reliefs from late Etruscan urns which are identified as representations of the Gaulish raid upon the sanctuary of Delphi in 279 B.C. The reliefs vary a good deal in detail and no general type for the subject can be traced, but but the narrow shape indicates Volterra; the material is tufa (Fig. 1).