The unusual proportions of the architrave and frieze of the pronaos and opisthodomos of the second temple of Hera (‘Poseidon’) at Paestum have long been known, and the design has been variously used as evidence for the original form of the Doric frieze and for the unsophisticated design methods of Greek architects. Full measurements of this entablature, on which to base explanations of its design, have not, however, been available. By the kindness of Prof. M. Napoli, Superintendent of Antiquities for the province of Salerno, I was enabled to take some of the necessary measurements in August 1973, and the first aim of this paper is to make them public. Standing on the abaci of the two antae and the two columns of the opisthodomos, I was able to measure the architrave and frieze which they carried, but the next course, the epikranitis, was unfortunately just beyond my reach; my rough measurement made its height 0·30 m, agreeing with that given by KP 29, fig. 28 for the corresponding moulded course behind the pteron frieze, which carried the other end of the ceiling beams. The dimensions of the various elements of the frieze and architrave of the opisthodomos are given in Fig. 1.

It seems clear from an article by C. H. Kahn in JHS xc (1970) 99–116 that there are still prevalent numerous misconceptions concerning early Greek astronomy. To attempt to correct all these in detail would require a lengthy exposition of elementary points which would be extremely tedious for the discerning reader. There are, however, two matters a lack of understanding of which leads to such erroneous conclusions that one may perhaps be forgiven for a final attempt to clarify the issues.

Europe in the last two thousand years has three times passed through an experience which may fairly be called a Thirty Years War; in Greece from 432 to 404 B.C., in Central Europe from A.D. 1618 to 1648; and over the whole continent from 1914 to 1945; in all of them there were intervals in which the fighting ceased, but the interval hardly amounted to true peace; it was more like what a certain scholiast calls it, ἐχεχειρία ὕπουλος, ώδίνουσα, πόλεμον. In all three cases one notices a certain rhythm; an increase of brutality and demoralisation persisting to the end of the war and after, and later on a sort of revulsion of thought, an attempt to make sure that such evils shall not happen again. In our time it is the League of Nations movement; after the Thirty Years War it is the effort to distinguish between just and unjust wars, and establish international law, which centres in Grotius' De Jure Pacis et Belli. After the Peloponnesian War it is the magnificent conception of World Citizenship made specially articulate in Zeno's ideal Republic.

In the present paper I have tried to analyse a little more closely the actual reactions of Greek thought and practice to the first of these long strains of embittered war.

R. Lattimore's translation is neat and accurate:

There is a rocky island there in the middle channel halfway between Ithaka and towering Samos,

called Asteris, not large, but it has a double anchorage

where ships can lie hidden. There the Achaeans waited in ambush.

I assume that Homeric Ithaca is the island now called Ithaki and that Samos is Kephallinia. The channel will then be the Ithaca Channel, and here there is only one island, now called Daskalio (FIG. 1). So Daskalio = Asteris. So far, so good; Homer has deftly pinpointed the location of the ambush by associating it with the only small island off the west coast of Ithaca.

Daskalio is certainly πετρήεσσα; indeed it is nothing but a narrow shelf of rock about 200 yards long, and rising only about 15 feet above water level (Plate IIIa). No one can deny that it is οὐ μεγάλη; the phrase may well be a litotes. It is not strictly in ‘mid-channel’, being 3,000 yards from Ithaca and only 800 yards from Kephallinia, but this may pass in a poetic description. It is with the ‘double anchorage’ that Homer's description appears to lose touch with reality.

The silver statuette which is described in the present paper, and which is represented in the accompanying Plate (A.), acquires a peculiar interest both from its subject and from the circumstances of its discovery. In the first aspect it belongs to an exceedingly numerous class; a boy struggling or playing with a goose seems to have been a very favourite subject with Greek artists of certain periods; the popularity of such representations and the frequency with which they were reproduced are testified by at least fifty extant examples in various galleries and museums throughout Europe. But though belonging to so numerous a family, our specimen differs considerably, both in character and in composition, from all its other members; not more, however, than many of these differ among themselves. Then again, this statuette was discovered together with a hoard of coins, and thus we are able to fix at least a posterior limit of date for the invention not only of the type we find in this figure, but also of all others which show an affinity to it so close as to compel us not to assign them to any very distant period. It is clear, therefore, that we have here an additional clew of no small importance, which may help in the solution of a problem that has already given rise to much controversy among archaeologists.

In 1886 the excavations conducted by the Greek Archaeological Society on the Acropolis at Athens laid bare the foundations of a large ancient temple immediately to the south of the Erechtheum. It was at once recognized that this temple must have been the one burnt by the Persians when they sacked Athens in 480 B.C. This conclusion has been generally accepted and there is no ground for questioning it. But Dr. Dörpfeld, who superintended the excavations and to whom we are indebted for a detailed plan and description of the existing remains, has propounded a theory that the temple was rebuilt by the Athenians shortly after the Persian war, and that it continued to exist as late certainly as the second century of our era and probably much later. If Dr. Dörpfeld had based this theory on the nature of the existing architectural remains, his judgment might well have been regarded as final, since no man living is better qualified than he to pronounce an opinion on all questions relating to Greek architecture. Certainly I for one would not have presumed to differ from him. But although Dr. Dörpfeld believes that the temple was twice burnt and twice rebuilt by the Athenians, he does not maintain that a single stone of the existing remains is of later date than the Persian sack. His theory of the restoration of the temple rests almost wholly on considerations of historical probability and on literary and epigraphical evidence. It is therefore one which every scholar is free to examine and estimate for himself.

The main object of the third season's work of the Cyprus Exploration Fund was the excavation at Salamis, of which the results were published in the last number of this Journal. But, as was there mentioned, a small additional sum of money was procured to continue the previous season's work at Polis tes Chrysochou. It was especially important that the field known to us as Site T should be excavated, both because it promised to yield objects of rare beauty and interest, and because the results of the previous operations were, as was pointed out in last year's report, of little scientific value owing to the character of the evidence on which they were based, and required to be tested by further excavation on more trustworthy sites. Before leaving England, therefore, I had written to Mr. J. W. Williamson asking him to negotiate a contract, which (our departure having produced a good effect on the owner's mind) he was fortunately able to secure. To him and to Mr. Cecil Smith, who was most active in procuring the funds, the execution of the project is largely due.

It was near the end of June before work was started at Poli. H. A. Tubbs had been called home by other engagements, so that I was deprived of his cooperation for the remainder of the season. Poli is not to be commended as a summer residence. The heat in the valley is intense, fevers are more easily caught than avoided, and every drop of water fit to drink has to be brought an hour's journey on a donkey. The excavation was uneventful. The only incident which interrupted its course was an attempt by the joint-owner of one of the sites to conclude a contract on his own behalf and defraud his partners of their share of the price, a malpractice which was at once detected by the ever watchful Commissioner, and cost us a couple of days.

In a recent article, J. K. Davies suggested that there were no choral events at the festivals of the Hephaestia and Promethia. He rested his case on the fact that ‘the basic document concerning the festival [sc. the Hephaestia], IG i2 84 of 421/0 refers (probably) to gymnasiarchs (lines 20–21) and nowhere to choregoi or choruses’, and he went on to say that ‘the general heortological tradition [sc. about the Hephaestia]…knew nothing of musical contests’. On this basis, he rejected the contrary evidence of [Xenophon] Ath.Pol. iii 4 which specifically mentions the Hephaestia and Promethia in a list of five festivals to which choregoi were allotted. He suggested that either the author of Ath. Pol. was mistaken, or an emendation of the text proposed by Kirchhoff should be accepted; the emendation inserts seven words into the text, and so switches the reference from choregoi to gymnasiarchs.

It is generally admitted that Bekker's Kb—Laur. 81, 11—is the best, as it is the oldest, authority for the text both of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Great Morals. It is desirable therefore that the testimony of that manuscript should be presented to the learned public as accurately as possible. So far as concerns the Nicomachean Ethics, the reports of that testimony which are now available are chiefly the following: (a) Bekker's, as given in his academical edition of 1831, (b) Schöll's, as given first in Rassow's Forschungen über die Nikomachische Ethik, Weimar, 1874, at p. 10, sqq., and subsequently in Susemihl's editions, of which the third and last was edited by Otto Apelt and published in the Teubner series in 1912, and (c) Bywater's, as given in his Oxford text. Bywater's apparatus criticus is unfortunately what is called a select apparatus criticus.

The journey which Aelius Aristides made in the year 167 A.D. from Smyrna to Pergamus, and which he relates with much detail in the opening of the fifth book of his Hieroi Logoi, is the most valuable evidence left as to the relative situation of Smyrna, Larissa, Cyme, Myrina, and Gryneion: and a careful study of it is the best foundation of a knowledge of Southern Aeolis. The main facts are as follows (Arist. ed. Dind. i. p. 534). On the first day his baggage was sent on in front to Myrina to be ready when he arrived in the evening. When carriages had been got ready and he himself was prepared to start, noon had arrived. In the great heat he did not like to undergo the fatigue of travelling at this hour, and waited at his house in the suburbs of Smyrna till the heat passed. The comfort of his villa was seductive, and some matters of business detained him, so that he lost a great deal of time, and when he reached the khan before the Hermus, the sun was setting. He deliberated whether he should spend the night there, but the discomfort consequent on passing the night in a bad inn without his baggage made him resolve to go on. As he was crossing the Hermus, night had just set in, which shows that it was about one hour after sunset. A cool wind invigorated him, and he was glad on reaching Larissa, ἤδη βαθείας ἑσπέρας, that the baggage was still in front, and that the inn was no better than the previous one. A little after midnight he reached Cyme. Every place was shut up, and he encouraged his followers, who apparently were anxious to stop here, to go on. On the journey the cold became more severe. About cock-crow he reached Myrina, and found his baggage in the street, as it had reached the town after every place was shut. After in vain trying to get admission to any inn, they at last were received into the house of a friend. As they entered it was still quite dark, but after a fire had been kindled the morning star had arisen, and the light of day began to appear. He resolved, therefore, not to go to sleep by day. His road then lay through Gryneion, where he stayed some time to sacrifice to Apollo, to Elaea, where he spent the night; but in these cases no indication is given of the time required for the journey.

It must sometimes have occurred to readers of Byzantine literature, after they have perused a number of the occasionally valuable, but almost always dreary, works of which it is composed —lifeless chronicles, polemical and other theology, inflated panegyrics, and grammatical treatises—to ask the question, whether this was really all; whether a quick-witted and intelligent people, such as we know the inhabitants of Constantinople at certain periods to have been, were contented to subsist entirely on such dry mental food. No doubt, religious controversy often ran high, and this, when it fills men's thoughts, is apt to supply the place of intellectual interests; but such discussions did not last for ever, and could not have occupied the minds of the whole of the educated population. A certain source of relief was provided in the numerous poems, songs, and romances in the popular language—some of native growth and dealing with subjects of local or traditional interest, some imitated from the romances of Western Europe—which have been brought to light by the industry of such men as MM. Sathas and Legrand at Paris, Prof. Lambros of Athens, and the late Dr. W. Wagner of Hamburg. But even these do not furnish that element of liveliness, which we should expect to manifest itself in some shape or other in a great centre of activity.

In JHS LXXIV 36-43, under the above heading, M. White argues from Hdt. Ill 47-9 that the offences cited as provoking the Sparto-Korinthian expedition against Samos ought to have been committed either by Polykrates himself or by a predecessor of similar policy ‘whose sins could justly be visited upon his head’. These offences were: (1) the interception of the Kerkyraian boys sent by Periandros to Alyattes; (2) the seizure of the corslet sent by Amasis to Sparta; and (3) the seizure of the bowl sent by the Spartans to Kroisos. Of the boys, Miss White says (p. 37) that they must have been sent ‘at latest before the death of Alyattes ca. 560-555 B.C.’. The corslet was seized a year before the bowl, which ‘was a gift on the occasion of the alliance made between Sparta and Kroisos shortly before the latter's fall’. As to the date of this event, Miss White is not prepared to adjudicate as between the various years proposed, from 547 to 541/0: ‘even at the latest it is well before the time of Polykrates’ (n. 10). Eusebios' date for the accession of Polykrates is c. 532; and, even if this tradition is set aside, a date much earlier than 540 is impossible, because Peisistratos' establishment of Lygdamis as tyrant of Naxos, some time after his own final establishment at Athens (547/6), must come first. Therefore Polykrates himself cannot have been responsible for the seizure of either the corslet or the bowl —much less the interception of the boys. Miss White suggests that these and other considerations favour the view that the tyranny began in the sixties, and that Aiakes, Polykrates' father, was the first tyrant.

Among the many intrigues described by Thucydides in Book viii one of the strangest and most obscure is the episode in which Phrynichos, while serving as one of the commanders of the Athenian fleet at Samos, twice sent messages to Astyochos, the Spartan ναύαρχος. Because the intrigue was conducted with the utmost secrecy, detailed information about it cannot have been easily obtainable, and the motives of all the persons involved, who included Alkibiades and Tissaphernes, were perhaps fully known to nobody. The account given by Thucydides (50–1) leaves much unexplained: it gives the impression that he has recorded what he has ascertained from a single informant without adding much comment or interpretation of his own. Had he lived to revise Book viii, he would scarcely have left these chapters as they stand. The object of this paper is to examine these chapters and to suggest that the intrigues of Phrynichos described in them were less exclusively personal in aim, and had somewhat more important consequences, than is generally believed.

The picture of Phrynichos drawn by Thucydides presents him from the outset as a man of exceptional shrewdness who held strong views and did not hesitate to press vigorously for their acceptance even where they were not shared by others. The arguments whereby he dissuaded his colleagues, immediately after their victorious land operations at Miletos, from risking a sea-battle against the newly reinforced Peloponnesian fleet are recorded in some detail (27. 1–4) and with explicit approval (27. 5). Shortly before the episode of his communications with Astyochos he opposed in outspoken terms the plan of the Athenian trierarchs and others who were negotiating with Alkibiades with the intention of overthrowing the democracy and obtaining Persian support. Thucydides devotes a long passage of oratio obliqua to the objections of Phrynichos (48. 4–7). He maintained that Alkibiades was indifferent to the proposed change of constitution and was interested only in securing his own recall; that to Persia the existing alliance with the Peloponnesians was more advantageous than an alliance with Athens could be; that the establishment of an oligarchy would not improve, and might well damage, Athenian relations with the allies. Thucydides expressly concurs with the first of these arguments (48. 4, ὅπερ καὶ ἦν), and his approval of the other two may perhaps be inferred from his subsequent narrative, which confirms their validity.

Lunar mansions are twenty-eight constellations or single stars on the route of the Moon during the twenty-eight nights of its visibility. As a mere astronomical curiosity they could neither attract nor reward much attention. Accordingly learned discussions have been limited to descriptions, to controversies where and when they were first established, in Babylonia, India, or China, or to catalogues of the medieval evidence. But if it is realised that they were not observed for their own sake but because the revolution of the Moon was the basis of early time-reckoning which led to the creation of the first calendar, conclusions of more than limited interest can be produced by relating astronomical to religious problems. And this interest will be further increased by the realisation that our zodiac is nothing but the successor of the mansions as it served first the lunisolar, and then the solar, year, of which the former was a device to bring the monthly revolutions of the Moon into harmony with the annual revolution of the Sun, and the latter was based on the revolution of the Sun alone.

But how can we find material to reconstruct a system which was superseded in the remote past, seeing that even the victorious system remains in important respects mysterious, e.g. the reasons for the strange selection of the signs and the presence among them of animal and human figures? We are helped by two circumstances. One is the natural conservatism of our calendars, astrological prognostics, and magical texts: these often preserve traces of earlier stages of human thought. The second circumstance is less natural.

Ogni strada, we are told, ogni strada men' a Roma. The roads which lead to Homer, an older goal than the Shrine of the Apostles, are nearly as many. One of them, not the most followed, runs through the literature of the historical centuries. When I say historical, I must observe that I use a term and make a distinction unknown to antiquity. To the ancients Homer was as historical as Pindar, the people of whom he sang were as historical as Pindar's patrons, often their descendants. The μυθῶδες or untrue element which the Greeks noticed in their poetry did not touch the individuals or the events; it was detected in violations of ascertained natural laws, such as the divine interference in ordinary life and the three daily tides of Charybdis. It is the modern world which has set a gulf the other side of Archilochus or Terpander beyond which persons are not found and all we descry is Gods in the making, bloody rites, and commercial movements which have come down to us under a false anthropomorphic and individualistic guise. It is difficult to shake off these modern prepossessions, to realise that the Greek world before 700 was not lit by corpse-candles, a dim field of legal fictions, eponymous and heraldic ancestors, but as human and positive as Phidon with his weights and measures and Solon with his code—as human and positive as the buildings, jewels and vessels which that world has left us. We are reluctant to admit that our ignorance of Lycurgus differs only in degree from our knowledge of Pisistratus, increasing in proportion to lapse of time and such accidental circumstances as the absence of written records.

Along with Pindar, Aeschylus is doubtless the user of the most spectacular and colourful imagery among classical Greek authors, and like Pindar he is not afraid to mix his metaphors. These lines from the Agamemnon would probably be placed in such a category by most readers who attend to the combination of images, ἄνθος Ἀργϵίων being taken as the rather commonplace and ‘dead’ metaphor of the ‘flower of the host’, etc., found elsewhere in Aeschylus and other writers before and after him; and I have the impression that none of the commentators seems to have thought it worth asking in what sense a flower could be spoken of as ‘carded by rubbing’. Now I do not think Aeschylus chose his words so carelessly—or with such deliberate incongruity—as this, and propose that with ἄνθος he was at the same time alluding to another sense of the word which more effectively sustains the image when juxtaposed to the words τρίβῳ κατέξαινον. Although this sense is not well attested, nor recognized in the lexica, it seems that ᾄνθος might be used of the flock or nap on wool, like ᾄωτος.

Ἀναξιμένης ἐν ᾶ Φιλιππικῶν περὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου λέγων φησίν ἔπειτα τοὺς μὲν ἐνδοξοτάτους ἱππεύειν συνεθίσας ἑταίρους προσηγόρευσε, τοὺς δὲ πλείστους καὶ τοὺς πέζους εἰς λόχους καὶ δεμάδας καὶ τὰς ἄλλας ἀρχὰς διελὼν πεζεταίρους ὠνόμασεν, ὄπως ἑκάτεροι μετέχοντες τῆς βασιλικῆς ἑταιρίας προθυμότατοι διατελῶσιν ὄντες.

This fragment of Anaximenes of Lampsacus, a historian contemporary with Philip II and Alexander, cited by Harpocration and the Suda to explain the use of pezetairoi in Demosthenes ii 17, alleges that some Alexander not only accustomed the Macedonians of highest repute to serve in the cavalry but also organised the foot in lochoi, decads and ‘other commands’, apparently those of the writer's own day, and entitled them pezetairoi. Since that title already existed, and was known by both Anaximenes and the lexicographers to have existed, in the reign of Philip, the Alexander named cannot be Alexander III. Taking the information offered seriously, most scholars either suppose Alexander I (c. 495–50) or Alexander II (369–8) to be meant, or refer the innovations to Archelaus (c. 413–399) or even to Philip II (359–36). Emendation can of course only be based on the assumption that the excerptors misunderstood the text of Anaximenes before their eyes.

In the first stasimon of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the estranged Helen and Menelaus share the second strophe. Beginning with an account of Helen's departure from Argos and her arrival in Troy, the chorus shifts its focus, moving back to the city deserted by the Queen, and to Menelaus grieving in the palace. With Helen no longer there, and Menelaus prey to the pathos that her absence inspires, ‘a phasma shall seem to rule the house. And the charm of beautiful kolossoi is hateful to the husband, and in the absence of eyes, gone is all Aphrodite’ (415–19). The difficulties of the stanza are legion.