Although one of the smaller and less well-known cities in Thessaly Halos in Achaia Phthiotis has played an important part in history. Tradition attributes its origin to Athamas, and its position guarding the coast route between Othrys and the sea into the Spercheios valley, brought it on several critical occasions into prominence. In 480 B.C. together with the rest of Thessaly it submitted to Xerxes without a struggle, but in 346 B.C. it withstood a long siege by Philip and Parmenio. Some mediaeval and Turkish fortifications on the ancient Greek acropolis show that its strategic importance continued down to the last century. The walls which surrounded the city in the plain and the citadel on the hill to the west can still be traced, but of the city itself nothing is now visible. The acropolis is the last peak of the projecting spur of Othrys, which running down towards the bay of Halmyros shuts off the plain of Sourpe from that of Halmyros. This is now a bare limestone hill covered with scrub, and whatever may exist in the plain is hidden beneath the cultivated fields.

Modern archaeological effort, in its zeal to exhibit every surviving vestige of antiquity, has removed from most ancient buildings all the accretions of later ages, and although much has been gained for our knowledge of their original condition quite as much has often been lost to our realisation of history. The buildings of the ancients, when no longer needed for their first purposes, were not always or even generally destroyed; they were adapted to the needs of the newer world, and of this process, by which the Parthenon became first a church and then a mosque, and the theatre of Marcellus at Rome is still an inhabited block of shops and dwellings, a small but interesting example is to be found on the island of Sikinos, where the temple of the Pythian Apollo, at some period converted into a church by the addition of the features necessary to the Greek rite, still remains in that condition as the church of the Episkope. It is, therefore, not the cleaned-up ruin to which our eyes have grown so accustomed, but an untouched historical document of the vicissitudes undergone by so many of the buildings of antiquity.

It is well known that in pre-Greek time a large part of Asia Minor was portioned out in theocracies, i.e. priest-kings representing the god, at great sanctuaries ruled over a considerable district whose population were servants and subjects of the central hieron. Such were Pessinus, Comana Pontica, Comana of Cappadocia, Venasa, Tyana, Antioch of Pisidia, the hieron of Sabazios in the Milyadic country, etc. It would appear to be a necessary characteristic of such a theocracy that there should be only one centre, one hieron, one sanctuary. In the case of Antioch, however, this seems not to have been the case. Strabo, p. 577, indeed describes the hieron at Antioch as if it were a single centre ruling a wide tract of country peopled by a large population; but in p. 557 he says that there were two sanctuaries in the Antiochian country, ‘the hieron of the Askaian (Men), which is beside Antioch-towards-Pisidia, and the hieron (of Men) in the region of the Antiochians.’ The meaning of ‘the region of the Antiochians’ as a geographical term I hope shortly to discuss in the Journal of Roman Studies, and will only say here that it applies to the entire Phrygian region of the Galatic province, of which Antioch was the metropolis. But why has Antioch apparently two hiera? Why has this ancient theocracy two seats of the god?

The village of Senirdje is situated some 15 km. to the N.N.W. of Isbarta (Baris), in northern Pisidia, in a gap in the hills dividing the plain of Isbarta from the plain of Ketchiborlu, through which the line of the railway-extension from Ketchiborlu to Egerdir now passes. Close to the village is a low, flat mound, in marshy ground, which, when I visited it in 1911, was entirely flooded owing to the severity of the previous winter. The mound, the northern part of which is traversed by the railway-cutting, rises to a height of 13 feet above the level of the plain, and 11 ft. 6 in. above the rail, at a point 150 feet to the right of the centre-line. The top of the northern bank of the cutting is about five feet above the rail, the southern bank about 9 feet. Some 18 inches down to the level of the plain remain unexcavated.

Among the latest acquisitions of the Cyprus Museum are seven pieces of bronze which, when put together, form the handles and circular rim of a large vessel.

Their history is as follows. They were found (together with a gold enamelled sceptre and two bronze tripods, a description of which I hope to give later) in a field near the Church of Hagios Armenis, at the village of Episkopi, the site of the ancient Curium. All the objects together were sold to an Armenian merchant of Limassol and were seized by the police of Larnaca in December, 1903, when they were about to be secretly exported from the Island. They have been kept at the Custom House at Larnaca till lately when they were transferred to my custody and deposited in the Cyprus Museum.

The object of the following articles is to set forth as briefly as possible the epigraphical evidence at our disposal for determining the numerical systems employed in the various cities of Greece, and to state afresh some of the conclusions which we are entitled to draw from it. I am not sanguine enough to believe that I have overlooked none of the available materials, but I hope that my essay may contribute something towards a fuller understanding, at least in this country, of a department of Greek epigraphy which has, as it seems to me, been unduly neglected by recent scholars.

The following inscriptions were copied by Mr. A. J. B. Wace at Verria (Beroea) in the course of his travels in Macedonia in 1911 and 1912. Thirty-four seem hitherto unknown, and are here published, followed by ten which have been published with varying degrees of accuracy, mostly in the comprehensive collection of Macedonian inscriptions, and archaeological and topographical notes of Demitsas. References to this work are numerous in the following pages, for it is the only publication which approximates to a Corpus of Macedonian Inscriptions. Of the newly published stones twenty-three are grave-stones, and of the remainder two (Nos. 10, 11) are so fragmentary that it is impossible to class them; four are statue-bases of the Imperial Age (Nos. 5–8); No. 1 is a copy of three letters written by Demetrios II while acting as regent for his father Antigonos Gonatas; and the remainder (Nos. 2, 3, 4, 9) are votive inscriptions of various sorts. No. 2 is a dedication of a manumitted female slave, accompanied by a commendatory letter from the brothers of the dedicatrix; No. 3 records the dedication in the 2nd century B.C. to the Healing Divinities of a stone-built dormitory and exedra, no doubt in connexion with the custom of incubation; No. 4 is the base of a votive statue to Hermes erected by the board of ἀγορανόμοι, and almost contemporary with No. 3; and No. 9 is a mutilated dedication accompanied by reliefs of the soles of two human feet, which it is natural to interpret in connexion with the cult of the Healing Divinities.

Upper Macedonia is the upland country which lies at the back of Mount Bermius as regards Macedonia properly so-called, which is the Campagna between the hills and the sea at the head of the Gulf of Salonica. Beyond the hills Olympus, Bermius, and their continuation northward, lies Upper Macedonia about the valleys of the Haliakmon and Erigon and round the lakes of Ochrida, Presba and Kastoria. This was the fourth region of Macedonia according to the Roman division after the defeat of Perseus at Pydna in 168. This region according to Livy included Eordaia, Lynkestis, Pelagonia, Stymphalis (sic), Elimiotis and Atintania. The country to-day falls naturally by its geographical features into several divisions and these correspond, as far as our information goes, with the ancient districts. Going westwards from Edessa along the line of the Via Egnatia, near the lakes, of which Lake Ostrovo is the chief, the traveller first reaches some hilly country which forms the watershed between the valleys of the Erigon and Haliakmon. To the north in the valley of the Erigon is a long, narrow plain stretching from Fiorina past Monastir to just beyond Krushevo and Prilep. The northern part of this plain is itself separated from the rest by a low range of hills about the villages of Tsepik and Topoltsani.

Ephoros remarked in his history that Boeotia was unique among Greek lands in having a coast well provided with harbours and fronting three seas, open to the West, the North, and the East, to Italy, Sicily, and Carthage, to Macedonia and the Euxine, and to Egypt, Cyprus, and the islands; and that it thus had ample opportunities for education, and was marked out by nature for rule over others. Strabo quotes this with approval, adding a remark of his own about the permanence of the success of the Romans due to the education they had received from contact with civilized countries: if only Boeotia had known how to educate her sons! The author of the Periplus which passes under the name of Skymnos of Chios (about 90 B.C.) says the same in almost the same words; and Stephanos of Byzantium repeats it.

The opinion of Captain T. A. B. Spratt that the ruins at Datcha represent the Dorian city of Akanthos has naturally been adopted by subsequent cartographers as being that of the one man who has thoroughly explored the Knidian peninsula. The identification rests, like so many others, on slight evidence owing to the meagreness of ancient records concerning the city in question: added local knowledge makes another identification seem preferable.

The inhabitants of Syme, on the authority of M. Chaviaras, himself a Symiote, to this day refer to the site as Stadia (Σταδία), of which Datcha is in reality only a dialectic variant with the Σ elided, as so often, by false analogy. The existence of a town called Stadia on this coast can be traced from Pliny downwards. The latter places a town variously called Pegusa or Stadia near Knidos—Est in promontorio Cnidus libera, Triopia, dein Pegusa et Stadia appellata: the name Pegusa is readily explained by the springs in the plain of Datcha, and the comparative obscurity of the town by the fact that it was in ancient times subordinate to Knidos.

The only extant vase with the love-name Eucharides is a red-figured stamnos of severe style in the National Museum at Copenhagen. Twenty-three vases must be assigned to the painter of the Eucharides-stamnos, among them such well-known pieces as the Danae-stamnos in St. Petersburg, the Tityos-vase in the British Museum, and the krater with Sarpedon or Memnon in the Louvre. His work, though not of the highest quality, is interesting in many ways; so I propose to make a list of his remaining vases, to describe the more prominent characteristics of his style, and to indicate very briefly the place he occupies in the history of Attic vase-painting.

When reading through Professor Phillimore's admirable preface to his translation of the Apollonios of Tyana of Philostratos, the discussion of the authenticity of the memoirs of Damis suggested to me a parallel in which literary history appears to have repeated herself. Although it possesses no intrinsic importance the coincidence is perhaps sufficiently a curiosity of literature to be worth recording. Philostratos' statement about the alleged memoirs is as follows (1,3):—

‘There was one Damis, a man not without accomplishments, who at one time inhabited Old Nineveh. His studies drew him into intimacy with Apollonius, and he has left a written account of the Sage's travels (in which he claims to have shared), his maxims, his discourses, and his prophetic sayings. A person who was related to this Damis brought the originals of these memoirs, hitherto undiscovered, to the knowledge of the Empress Julia. And since I had a place in her majesty's circle (she was a great admirer and patroness of all literary studies), she laid on me the task of transcribing and editing these papers. It was her wish also that I should be responsible for the form of expression; for the Ninevite's language, though clear, was anything but a model of literary art.’

The practice of acclaiming the Emperors with certain set forms of words is mentioned by the Byzantine chroniclers in their account of the court ceremonies. Both Constantine Porphyrogenitus and the writer of the handbook which goes under the name of Codinus Curopalata give the proceedings in some detail, whereby we learn the names of the court officials, their gorgeous robes, and symbols of office, the various sections of the Imperial guard and the solemn pageantry enacted by them on state occasions, and can easily imagine the pomp, tiresome perhaps, but certainly impressive, that surrounded the Eastern Throne.

The long-established popularity of the Venetian gold ducat or sequin as a medium for international trade in the Levant, is easily accounted for by its unvarying fineness and constant types from its first appearance in the thirteenth century to the end of the Republic in 1797. Throughout this long period it held its own as the standard gold coin of the Levant trade. Imitations of varying date, standard, and work-manship are an inevitable consequence of this popularity: they are found so far afield as India, and are even at the present day manufactured for jewellers' purposes in Alexandria.

A conspicuous mediaeval example of these trade imitations is to be found in a series of more or less barbarous imitations of the sequin of Andrea Dandolo (1343–54), which, though attributed to no definite mint, have long been recognised as a Levant currency. The designs are imitated closely from the Venetian original, the name of the doge and the motto of the reverse—Sit tibi, Christe, datus quern tu—regis iste ducatus—being blundered or distorted in various ways.

The recognition of Plato by the Arab philosophers, and consequently by the Seljouks of Roum, has long been the accepted explanation of the fact that his name is popularly associated with a remarkable spring (Eflatoun Bounari = Plato's spring) with ‘Hittite’ ruins some fifty miles west of Konia, the Seljouk capital, and with a spring at Konia itself: the connection has not hitherto been made clear. Stray references to Plato in the description of this part of Asia Minor by the Turkish geographer Hadji Khalfa (1648) seem to throw some fresh light on the subject.

These references are three in number. The first records the existence of a ‘tomb of Plato the divine’ in the citadel at Konia. This is also mentioned earlier by the thirteenth-century geographer Yakut, one of Hadji Khalfa's acknowledged sources: Yakut adds that the tomb was ‘in the church by the mosque.’

The British Museum drawings indexed below, though in almost all cases admirably catalogued, are scattered through the four departments of Prints and Drawings (P. & D.), Greek and Roman Antiquities (G. & R.), Manuscripts (MSS.), and Printed Books (P.B.). They are here arranged alphabetically under artists' names. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. A. H. Smith, Keeper of the Greek and Roman Antiquities, for much information concerning the drawings in his care.

In the last number of the Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache Max Burchardt publishes two swords lately acquired from Egypt by the Berlin Museum. The first (Inventory Number 20447), (Fig. 1), almost perfectly preserved, is a fine example of Naue's Type II. It is a cutting sword with edges almost parallel and the end bluntly pointed. The handle is made in one piece with the blade. Its edges are raised on either side and it is fitted with eight rivet holes. Down the blade, whose faces are slightly convex, run on either face four fine furrows parallel to the edges. The total length is 715 mm. The sword was found at Zagazig (Bubastis) in the Delta.

The second sword (Inventory Number 20305) is unfortunately badly damaged but probably belongs to the same type. It certainly has the same section and the same almost parallel edges. There is, too, the same thickening of the handle at the point where it joins the blade and the disposition of the rivets is similar in the case of such as remain. I have not yet had the opportunity of examining the original and so must be content with quoting Burchardt's opinion on this point.

The name of Gergis appears first in Herodotos, and is applied to a tribe said to be the descendants of the ancient Teukrians; ῾γμέης . . .εἶλε μὲν Αἰολέας πάντας, ὅσοι τὴν ᾿Ιλιάδα νέμονται, εἶλε δὲ Γέργιθας τοὺςὑπολειφθέντας τῶν ἀρχαίων Τευκρῶν (v. 122). Where they dwelt is made clear in vii. 43. After his visit to the temple of Athena at Ilion, Xerxes marches to Abydos, keeping Rhoiteion, Ophryneion and Dardanos on his left, and the Teukrian Gergithes on his right; ἐπορεύετο ἐνθεῦτεν ἐνἀριστερῆι μὲν ἀοέργων ῾Ροίτειον πόλιν καὶ ᾿Οφρύνειον καὶ Δάρδανον, ἤπερδὴ ᾿Αβύδωι ὄμουρός ἐστι, ἐν δεξυῆι δὲ Γέργιθας Τευκπρούς. The Greek colonists, the Aeolians, had occupied with their towns the whole of the coast; the older inhabitants had been driven into the hill-country a short distance inland.

The text for this paper is taken from a review of my Troy in the Pall Mall Gazette for December 21, 1912. One does not usually take notice of anonymous reviews in the daily press, or answer them at large; but in this case the article is signed by the initials H. A. O., which are transparently those of a serious scholar, entitled to all respect even when he is wrong; and his views have further been adopted and enforced in another review of Troy published in the current number of the J.H.S. under the equally transparent initials of T. W. A. This raises the question above the level of ordinary journalism, and may, I hope, justify further discussion. For both articles involve problems which go to the very root of the whole question of ancient trade routes; and the views of both scholars seem to me so fundamentally erroneous and misleading that they should not pass without challenge. It is my intention to leave out of sight all mere matters of detail in both reviews, and to confine myself to what is really vital. It is, I presume, the wish of both gentlemen that I should retain the pretence of anonymity, so I shall refer to them under the initials which they have themselves preferred.