The vases published here are part of the collection belonging to Lt.-Col. W. H. Bromley-Davenport, of Capesthorne Hall, Macclesfield, Cheshire. As far as is known, they all come from Lucien Bonaparte's estates at Canino near Vulci, and were brought to Capesthorne by Edward Davies Davenport (1778–1847), the great-grandfather, and Walter Davenport Bromley (1787–1862), the great-uncle of the present owner.

A black-figure neck-amphora (Plate VII (a), (b)) is by the Antimenes Painter. It is complete with lid, has no restoration and measures 38½ cm. to the mouth; the handles are triple. On one side Herakles is about to slay the Nemean lion; on the other Dionysos stands between two capering satyrs. The added red and white is clear from the photographs. The attribution is of course certain; note the vertical lines on the outside of the legs, the arc describing the calf on the inside of the legs, the knees and elbows, the lines on arms, and the long mouths. But dating is less certain. The drawing is careful and appears at first sight to be rather late. The large strong figures and the feeling for space, the folds of Dionysos' chiton compared with the lack of chiton folds on a neck amphora in London and on one of similar period in Munich, and the elaboration of Herakles' foldless chiton compared with that on the Villa Giulia, Northwick Park, and Naples neck-amphorae, all suggest a late date. But there is no trace of double curve on terminal fold or knee, nor of wavy lines on drapery, as on the late neck-amphora in London.

All Greek religion is haunted by an anxiety, or a hope, which is generally summed up, since the great work of Mannhardt and Frazer, as the yearly worship of vegetation gods. The name is, admittedly, a little too narrow. No doubt in a simple agricultural community the chief anxiety is about next year's harvest. I am told that in Jerusalem the High Priest went out to see how the barley was getting on, and lengthened or shortened the official year accordingly. Of course there is also anxiety about the young of the flocks and herds, about the weather for sailing and the like; but I think we shall find that it extended much further. The phrase ‘Year Spirit’ is perhaps better than ‘Vegetation God’. Jane Harrison was much criticised for preferring the phrase Ἐνιαυτὸς δαίμων; but I think she was right, and perhaps more profoundly right than any of us saw at the time.

Ἐνιαυός is a curious word. The new Liddell and Scott gives its root meaning as ‘anniversary’. It seems to be formed like ἓνιοι, ἐνί-οτε, ‘there are who …’ ‘there are times when …’, and to mean ‘There is (or ‘there is present,’ the same’, ἔνι-αὐτός; or, more analytically still, ‘there is present-again-this’, ἔνι-αὖ-τός. From meaning ‘anniversary’ it comes to mean a recurrent vital day, or the period, however long, between the recurrent vital days. All kinds of events were due to occur περιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν, as in Od. A 16, which seems to mean ‘as the anniversaries recur’, but easily becomes ‘with the passing years’. Children are born (Theog. 493, Asp. 87) meaning, I think, ‘when the regular vital time comes on’, not ‘as the months pass’.

Representations of Helios in his chariot rising above the sea begin toward the end of the sixth century B.C., with a small series of black-figure vases, mostly lekythoi. Five of them have been interpreted as illustrations of the myth of Herakles and the Golden Bowl of the Sun. In Pherekydes' version of the story, Herakles, vexed by the burning rays, threatened Helios with his arrows, and obtained the god's golden vessel to sail the Ocean to the land of Geryon. Although the correspondence of the picture to the story is not literal, in fact largely limited to the cast of characters, such an interpretation is plausible for four vases.

On the lekythos in Athens by the Daybreak Painter, Herakles is crouching on a spur of ground which seems to emerge from the waves; he looks at the Sun in apparent awe. The scenes on the skyphos by the Theseus Painter in Taranto are akin to the Athenian piece: on one side Herakles rushes up the steep ground, on the other he sits on the rocky outline, his right hand gesturing toward the Sun. On a third vase, a lekythos in Cambridge, and on a fourth in Oxford, both Herakles and Athena are depicted on either side of Helios; on the Cambridge lekythos Herakles is actually striding toward the Sun, lifting the bow in his right hand. Only in this case can Herakles' attitude be taken as a threat; on all four vessels, however, the hero and the Sun look at each other, as if an exchange were to take place soon, and so are shown as the actors of the scene.

The evidence considered under D makes it, I think, impossible that the accepted theory can be true as regards the larger polyereis of the first three centuries B.C., which clearly were galleys a scaloccio of some sort. If what is put forward under A be true, the reason why the accepted theory was invented and has been so largely believed disappears. Nevertheless, there is still room for evidence that will support the accepted theory as to triremes generally, the quadriremes and quinqueremes of the fourth century, and the biremes of the first; and the theory may be true, even if the words thranite, zugite, and thalamite do refer to another arrangement.

For a trireme, said Cartault, the evidence is overwhelming. Unfortunately he omitted to mention what it was, and with the best will in the world I have been unable to discover it. Assmann (1610) relied solely on the monuments. Luebeck however gives Schol, on Aelian's Tactica, Schol. on Frogs 1074) (see under A), Arr. Anab. 6, 5, 2 (see under B), Pollux 1, 87 (see under A), and Frogs 1074. Let me add Livy 33, 30, Aesch. Agam. 1617, Luc. Phars. 3, 529 seq.

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

The enemies of classics sometimes say that it is a dead subject. They depict the classical scholar as spending his time in re-reading, re-editing, or re-annotating texts which have been read, edited, and annotated for generations or centuries; and they contrast him with the student of science, before whom the inexhaustible riches of nature are displayed as his quarry. It were strange, if this were true, that classical study should possess—as by the common experience of public schools it does possess—a capacity unsurpassed by any other subject for turning out men of practical ability and aptitude for the affairs of the world. But it is not true. The enemies of classics, in this as in other instances, have erected a dummy in order to knock it over. They may be reproducing traditions of their fathers, or of their own boyhood; but they are showing that they have not kept abreast of their own times, and that they are not competent to criticise a study of which they know so little. Even natural science, with all its wonderful discoveries, has not been a more living subject during the last half century than the study of classical antiquity. Literature and archaeology—which mean the record of the thoughts of man as expressed in words and in art, during a period when that expression was at its highest pitch of perfection—have gone from discovery to discovery, from development to development, at a rate unequalled even at the Renaissance. These years have given fresh life to the study of the heroic age of human intellectual progress; they have shown that the treasures of antiquity are not only to be enjoyed but are to be increased.

At the invitation of Sir William Ramsay, I make public a formal statement of the information acquired by me in 1912 and 1913 (and communicated informally to him and to others at the time) bearing on the statuette published by him in Athenaeum, 1909, p.736, and in The Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey(1909), pp. 214 ff.,

On the afternoon of June 27th, 1913, after Sir William had left for England, I sat with our common servant, Prodromos the Djinnji, in the garden of the Baghdad Hotel at Konia, making arrangements for a journey which was to begin on the following day. The conversation came round to the ‘Mithraic’ statuette (which Prodromos then declared he had never seen, and which he had always maintained to be genuine), and Prodromos told me that he had seen in the bazaar a statuette similar to my description of it.