There is no denying that Theophrastus ranks among the most prolific Peripatetic philosophers. Diogenes Laertius lists 225 items in his bibliography, some of them perhaps twice—first as an independent treatise, then as part of a larger work. As time went on, this vast oeuvre suffered the usual vicissitudes: the overwhelming majority of it has been partly or entirely lost. In sharp contrast to the Frankish West, where, despite great losses, more texts were in circulation under Theophrastus' name than was justified, in the ever shrinking Byzantine world we find comparatively few references to him. But this surely does not mean that the small number of references are unreliable.

In view of the great interest which has been expressed in the Theatre at Megalopolis, now in course of excavation by members of the British School at Athens, and of its real importance in connection with the question of the Greek Stage, it has been determined to publish, provisionally, a plan and section of it, without waiting for the completion of the work. The excavation will, it is hoped, be finished in the spring: and a full account of our results, with the necessary plans and illustrations, will be published in a future number of this Journal. For the present, therefore, a very few words of explanation must suffice.

The following is an explanation of the woodcuts, made from Mr. Loring's drawings:—

The three inscriptions included in this paper belong to the well-known class of records containing the lists of sacred objects dedicated in the Parthenon during the fifth and fourth centuries. None of them sheds any new light on the difficult problems connected with the exact history of the various changes of the régime under which these records were drawn up. The best authority on these points after 400 is Lehner's treatise Über die athenischen Schatzverzeichnisse des vierten Jahrhunderts. To this work constant references are made in this paper in connexion with the second and third inscriptions contained in it, which give us several new items of interest and enable us to fill conclusively some of the many lacunae in these lists. The first fragment belongs to the period previous to the year 405/4, when a change was made in the organization of the treasurers who drew up these lists, which does not concern us here.

In past numbers of the Annual of the British School at Athens and elsewhere I have tried to deal with some of the questions connected with Byzantine Music, and, having brought to a close my studies of the Round or Later Mediaeval System, I am unwilling to leave the subject without giving my views on the abstruse and difficult problem of the older notation.

The later forms of the Linear or Neume System have a visible likeness to the earlier forms of the Round System already familiar, and hence all investigators seem to have started with the idea that the general principles of decipherment could be transferred from the later to the earlier stage, or, in other words, that the task simply consisted in the interpretation of certain interval-signs possessing fixed value. But of the two scholars who have published their researches in this field, Gastoué and Riemann, neither has been able to carry this principle through, and their proposed solutions fail to give us such a chain of interval-signs as we are tempted to expect.

In the Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxxv. 1 (1915), Mr. Ellis Minns has given an interesting account of three documents found at Avroman, west of Hamadan, and has deciphered two of them which are in Greek. The third is written in an Aramaic alphabet which has hitherto remained undeciphered. Mr. Minns was good enough to send me a photograph of it, but I postponed an examination of this until I could have an opportunity of seeing a second text, also in Aramaic letters, but attached to one of the Greek documents and therefore presumably relating to the same transaction. When a photograph of this second text arrived, however, it was not distinct enough to be of any use; the ink of the original had been too much rubbed to allow the forms of the letters to be fixed with certainty.

Anceps is not so free that either a long or a short syllable may be used on equal terms. In fact, some strong tendencies are observed in lyric iambics in tragedy. Long syllable is avoided especially at the final anceps in dimeter/trimeter, for instance. Frequencies are statistically calculated each in turn in various combinations of iambic metra, and irregular occurrences are examined in contexts. In contrast to iambics, anceps tends to be long in D/e. Sophocles employs long anceps more frequently than the other two tragedians because his iambics sometimes verge on D/e. In general, long anceps is used in different ways from short. The effect it brought about would not have been felt unless long anceps was delivered differently from short, that is, at the same length as a true long.

Modern studies have emphasized the contradictory nature of the ancient traditions concerning the aftermath of the Battle of Sepeia (494 BC), in which the Argive army was destroyed by the Spartans. This article tackles the most significant point of agreement in these traditions: the theme of Argive ‘oligandry’, the demographic crisis caused by the battle. An analysis conducted on the basis of Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny’s Model Life Tables shows that the real impact of the demographic crisis was felt in the age structure of Argos’ population rather than in the sheer size of its citizen body. Consequently, this article argues that the political ramifications of the battle originated not from the demographic crisis alleged by the tradition, but from the state of powerlessness and regional isolation into which Argos was plunged by the defeat of 494. This argument, which supports a reappraisal of Plutarch’s (De mul. vir. 4) version of Argos’ response to Sepeia, also helps explain why Argos embraced a markedly aggressive foreign policy towards the towns of the plain in the following decades.

Furtwängler's reconstructions of the pediments of the temple of Aphaia, though in the main right, can be improved in certain details. The object of these notes is to criticise certain suggested improvements. I take the West pediment first. Schrader has recently advocated a return to something like the Cockerill scheme. His chief objections to Furtwängler are that the blocks of the Geison as arranged by Furtwängler do not agree with the footprints of the figures which they are meant to carry, that Furtwängler's assumption of a fourth prostrate figure is based on a fragmentary arm which may well belong to the East pediment, that the combatants should be divided into friends on one side of Athena and foes on the other, and that it is impossible for the archers to shoot out into space. I take these points in order. Furtwängler, as far as possible, put the Geison blocks in positions corresponding to those in which they were found; Schrader's chief objection is to Block 5, in which, he says, the space is not the right shape for the plinth of the Athena, but there is no doubt that there is room enough, and as no ancient edge of this plinth is preserved, how can we tell what was its shape? Secondly, the only evidence (fr. 62) which Schrader adduces for a piece of one pediment being found among the remains of the other rests, as Pfuhl has shown, on a misprint. The desire to have friends on one side of the pediment and foes on the other is purely modern; the Gigantomachies of the Megarian treasury and the Hekatompedon and the Centauromachy of the West pediment at Olympia all take no account of the sides of the pediment in dividing the combatants. Schrader quotes no parallels for his own reconstruction (Fig. 2) because there are none; it involves far too much overlapping, which Greek sculptors of the archaic period avoided when working in the round; Schrader has to assume that a piece was cut out of the shield of the figure which lies in front of Athena to make room for her legs. Furtwängler, however, can adduce numerous parallels from Greek vases for his reconstruction (Fig. 1): the Geryon cup of Euphronios has just such a battle over a fallen foe with Athena helping one of the combatants. The reason for this similarity of composition is not that both were borrowing from Samian models, as Furtwängler suggests: the West was ahead of the East in such things: there is no cross-influence, but the compositional problem of the pediment is the same as that of the outside of the cup. Studniczka also suggested that the archers should be turned inwards, but this transposition spoils the central groups and puts the caesura too near the outside: the Furtwängler group would naturally be completed by a friend of the fallen man, but this is precluded by the raking cornice. Another transposition is more likely. Wolters wanted to transpose nos. 1 and 13, and correspondingly 33 and 24. There is some evidence for this, because in Cockerell's first drawing, when he was most influenced by the position in which the figures were actually found, no. 13 is placed in the corner. Nos. 1 and 33 are more weathered than no. 13, which would be curious if they had been in the corners protected by the slanting Geison. Nos. 1 and 33, if placed in the middle, obscure the legs of the combatants less than would no. 13 and its fellow. Nos. 1 and 33 are nearer death than no. 13, therefore it is natural to fight over their bodies and to fight with no. 13.

An unsolved problem has a peculiar fascination in archaeology as elsewhere. It compels our interest, and we come back to it again and again to try and find a solution. The Ludovisi and Boston Reliefs have presented us with many such puzzles and have consequently been the subject of much discussion. The two most important publications of these monuments—Studniczka's in the Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, 1911, pp. 50–192, and Caskey's in the American Journal of Archaeology, 1918, pp. 101 ff.—have dealt at length with the numerous points involved and many of these have now been satisfactorily solved. The identification of the subjects represented on the reliefs, however, especially of those in Boston, is still only tentative. As Mr. Caskey says, ‘none of the numerous attempts to interpret the reliefs has met with unqualified acceptance.’ To the many explanations which have been advanced I am going to add still another, which to me at least seems the simplest, the most natural, and for that reason the most probable.

The question when, and by whom, our constellations were invented, will probably never lose its fascination, because it is never likely to find its solution. For those who have allowed themselves to be brought under its spell the name of Cleostratus has a special interest. If we could by any means learn more about the man who is said to have been in some sort the deviser of our zodiac, we might obtain a light upon the history of the celestial globe which at present seems likely to be for ever withheld, unless some Egyptian papyrus should reveal some part of the lost History of Astronomy by Eudemus.

By his careful collection—in the December number of this Journal, 1919—of all the notices that we have of Cleostratus, Dr. W. K. Fotheringham therefore deserves a gratitude which I am the more anxious to express because I cannot at all agree with the theory of Babylonian influence which he deduces from them, nor with the interpretation of Greek and Latin passages which he puts forward in support of that theory. The latter point I could willingly leave to the criticism of scholars abler than myself, whom I cannot think likely to be convinced by Dr. Fotheringham that the passages bear the sense which he has endeavoured to extract from them.