The literature dealing with the so-called ‘Cyrenaic’ vases is comparatively so huge that some excuse is needed for a fresh approach to the subject. That excuse is to be found in the new light shed on these vases through the recent excavations at Sparta by the British School at Athens, of which one result has been the discovery that Laconia was the home of the school which produced them.

At Sparta this distinctive Laconian style is presented in good chronological sequence, and its course can be traced from its rise in the early seventh century, through its development and decline in the sixth and fifth centuries, to its end in the latter part of the fourth.

It is true that the finds of pottery at the shrine of Artemis Orthia at Sparta consist of fragments of dedicated vases, the refuse, in fact, thrown out from time to time from the temple, so that what is presented by the stratification of the site is the chronological sequence not of the manufacture of the vases but of their destruction. Yet the development of the style as a whole, even when judged by the stratification, is so regular that it may be assumed that in most cases the order of destruction corresponded with that of manufacture. In any case the destruction of the older temple at the close of the seventh century gives at least one point where such correspondence is certain. Vases thrown out from the new temple must have been dedicated after the destruction of the older building. To divide the style with much certainty into six chronological periods called, and approximately dated

In the last pages of the Theaetetus Socrates is made to present four versions of a final attempt to define knowledge, as true opinion accompanied by logos, and to reject them all; yet in earlier dialogues ‘ability to give account’, λόγον ἔχειν or λόγον διδόναι δύναδθαι is closely associated with knowledge, not always, or not necessarily, knowledge of Forms, and in the Republic it is said to be the essential mark of the dialectician. These facts are exceedingly hard to interpret. In recent years the passage has been read as an indirect defence of the earlier theory of Forms, as the statement of a problem answered in the Sophist by a revision of that theory and as a piece of radical self-criticism. No one of these interpretations seems tome without difficulty, and in this article I shall attempt to argue for yet another solution which owes something to all three.

Professor Cornford, pressing the fact that Socrates draws all his illustrations from the world of concrete things, believes that Plato intended by criticism of the different versions to point the way to an old and invulnerable sense of λόγον διδόναι, which implies that the proper objects of knowledge are Forms. This is the statement or understanding of grounds for judgments which in the Meno is said to turn true opinion into knowledge. A rather similar line has been taken by Professor Cherniss. Professor Stenzel thinks that the earlier theory of Forms is vulnerable to Socrates' criticism of what I call ‘the first version’, the ‘dream’, but he believes that all three of the later versions ‘recover their meaning’ when the problem of definition has been solved in the Sophist with the help of the method of diaeresis; and so restated they can be shown to apply to particulars as well as to Forms.

That Rome's victory at the Aegates insulae in 241 B.C. put a definite end to the sea power of Carthage has long since been recognized, for subsequently the Italian fleets sailed unmolested wherever they pleased in the Western Mediterranean. It has not, I think, been realized with equal clearness that thereafter Rome was the only first-rate naval state in the entire world of ancient politics, for the more complex relation of the eastern powers has obscured the fact that after 241 B.C. Egypt, hitherto the Carthage of the Orient, followed the example of her African neighbour and rival in the West, neglected her fleet, and left it to her garrisons and money to maintain the empire and protect the commercial interests which the navy and diplomacy of the first two Ptolemies had won. The fall of Egypt, moreover, as I shall try to show, was the result of a coalition of Rhodes and Macedon, which left the control of the eastern Mediterranean in the possession of a group of second-rate naval states. This condition Philip V. sought to end in the year 201 B.C., but Rome at once interfered and prevented him from carrying out his plans; nor did she allow Antiochus III. and Hannibal time to reopen the question of maritime supremacy. The sea-fights won at Side and Myonnesus in 190 B.C. with the aid of Rhodes and Pergamum over the extemporized and disunited fleets of Asia settled it once and for all that no new first-class naval power was to arise in the East. The events of 241 B.C. were thus decisive for the unification of the ancient world into a single state. I shall try in this paper to establish with some precision what they and what their antecedents were.

At the Library of the University of Michigan there is a waxed diptych from the Fayoum, secured for the University by Professor Kelsey while in Egypt in 1919. The leaves of the diptych are of wood, about ll¼ inches long and 8¼ inches wide, slightly hollowed out and coated with black wax on the inner sides. These inner sides are shown in the photographs which accompany this article (Pls. X., XI.). In explanation of the photographs, it should be said that they were taken with the aid of a strong artificial light coming from the left at an angle of 45 degrees. This has caused the incisions and depressions on the wax to reflect the light in such a way that they seem to stand out above the general surface of the wax. Thus the white blotches which appear on the first leaf are really hollows and not projections, as they seem to be in certain lights. It should also be stated that a transcription was made of this leaf before the wax crumbled away, probably owing to unfavourable atmospheric conditions, along the edge of the crack in the lower part of the leaf.

One of the more complicated problems that confronts the art student to-day is that of maintaining touch with all the material relative to the sphere of his own researches that is published in numerous periodicals. For this reason a short note, referring to a recent article in Ars Islamica (Michigan, 1938, Vol. V, Pt. I, pp. 55–86) may be of service to Byzantinists. In the article, which is entitled ‘ Mediaeval Graves in Cyprus ’ and is by Miss du Plat Taylor, associated curator of the Nicosia Museum, a quantity of late Byzantine pottery is published. Excellent outline drawings and photographs are given, and our familiarity with these later polychrome sgraffito wares, common over the whole Mediterranean world, is considerably widened. Most important, the vessels come from graves, where they were in many cases found in association with coins. They can thus be definitely dated to quarter centuries or even to decades during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Miss Taylor is to be congratulated on her excavations and on this full publication of them.

The northern coast of the Black Sea has produced an abundance of documentary texts dating from the sixth through fourth centuries BC. Of great value to the epigraphist and historian are dozens of Greek letters, receipts and curses inscribed on lead and ceramic media. When placed in dialogue with one another, these texts yield new insights into daily life and literacy in communities for which literary sources are scant or absent. They document the bustling trade in saltfish, enslaved persons and textiles, and the web of relations between Greek and non-Greek individuals in north Pontic cities, from marriage to commercial ties with indigenous groups of the Pontic interior. This article demonstrates how trade could drive literacy in non-elite communities of the northern Black Sea. Literacy and mercantile activity were very much entwined, and developed in parallel with one another and with other civic and social institutions within these port communities.

The interesting thing about the word for ‘palace’ in Homer is that there is no such word. All the words that mean ‘house’ (δόμος, δῶ, δῶμα, μέγαρον, οἶκος, οἰκία) may be applied to a royal palace, but all of them (and their plurals) may equally well be used of the house of an ordinary citizen, μέγαρον is often translated ‘palace’, or some other word with connotations of kingly majesty. But it too, when it is not more narrowly localised to the living-room, means just a house in general.

Just as there is no separate word to designate a palace in Homer (τὰ βασίλεια occurs first in Herodotus), so a qualifying adjective is never used to indicate that a particular house is ‘royal’ (the first occurrence of such a periphrasis is βασίλειοι οἶκοι Aeschylus, Ag. 157). In fact, to Homer there is no sharp distinction between a palace and a house, except that a king is likely to have a bigger and better home, more sumptuously furnished.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are much concerned with kings. So it is odd that no word serves to designate the king's palace and no other dwelling, especially when the poet so delights in describing the splendour of royal homes (for example, the description of Alcinous' palace and its grounds in Od. vii 81 ff.). The major archaeological sites of the Mycenaean period, in which the main stories of the poems are set, all contain a palace which is easily recognised, even in its ruinous state. Can one imagine a new arrival at a great Mycenaean site needing to be shown which was the palace, as Odysseus was shown at Phaeacia? It seems highly unlikely that the Mycenaeans should have had no special word for a palace, though there is so far no firm evidence for (or against) the existence of such a word in Linear B. If a ‘palace’ word existed, its special significance, if not the word itself, must have been forgotten by Homer's time, when a great many houses might be found within the city wall, as at Smyrna. There may, however, be traces of the ‘palace’ meaning still detectable.

In Table 1, which has been compiled from the concordances of Prendergast and Dunbar, I have tabulated the frequency with which each of the regular words for ‘house’ is used to denote a dwelling occupied by gods, lesser divinities, mortals or animals. Various interesting points arise from this table.

It is apparent that there is a far higher proportion of gods' houses mentioned in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. The figures for δόμος and δῶμα show this particularly clearly. But the difference is probably due entirely to the subject-matter: far more of the action is taken up with scenes among the gods in the Iliad than in the Odyssey.

In his generally admirable account of the poets of early Byzantine Egypt, Alan Cameron reconstructs some of their (in his words) journalistic warfare on the basis of a supposed distinction between the use of εἰς and πρός in the titles of books and poems: εἰς denotes a work written in someone's honour, πρός something by way of discredit or refutation.

The Βοσπορανοί said to be located in S.W. Caria in the Rhodian Peraea have given rise to some discussion in connection with the location of the demcs of the Rhodian Peraea. The evidence for them rests on one inscription of the Imperial period (wrongly stated by Fraser and Bean, Rh.Per. 61, to rest on two inscriptions: the same inscription was first referred to in one place, and then published in another), namely that mentioned by the brothers Michael and Niketas Chaviaras in Arch.Eph. 1907, col. 217, and subsequently published by them in Arch.Eph. 1911, 64 no. 58.