The two cultus monuments whose existence is bound up with the solid rock on which the Erechtheion stands have always been eagerly sought for in the hope that they might be used as fixed points from which to determine the complicated plan of the temple.

Perhaps the ‘salt spring’ has attracted less attention than the ‘trident-mark.’ Boetticher supposed it to lie at the lowest part of the middle chamber, where a hollow in the rock, communicating with a still deeper cleft, even now collects water after a shower. As Pausanias states that the ‘spring,’ was ἔνδον this is perhaps the most likely spot, unless we prefer to locate it in the West Hall, and to suppose that it was destroyed when the cistern was built. It is true that J. Fergusson placed the ‘spring’ in the north-west angle of the West Cella, but this is quite an arbitrary hypothesis, and appears untenable, because the rock has here a fall towards the outside through the opening which pierces the north wall and leads into the crypt under the north porch.

With the publication recently of two valuable studies on Attic demes, we are now more fully aware of what we know, and do not know, of the deme. With Osborne's work, we now have some idea of the tendency of Athenians to own and maintain property in the deme of origin, but the role of marriage in consolidating property in that deme is more difficult to assess. In contrast to Osborne's focus on the ancestral deme, this brief study will concentrate on the deme into which the woman married; such a deme will be termed the deme of marriage or the marital deme. The study will focus particularly on the families who contracted more than one alliance for their kinswomen into the same outside deme and will emphasize the importance of siblings in securing and maintaining these alliances in the marital deme.

The sole reliable text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei is H. Frisk's, published in 1927. He not only re-examined the one important manuscript that has survived but brought to bear his knowledge of the language of the Greek papyri of Egypt, which is close kin to that written by the plain-spoken captain or merchant who composed the Periplus. As a result, he was able to eliminate in passage after passage the freewheeling emendations introduced by nineteenth-century editors and return to the wording of the manuscript.

On rhythm amd metre Aristoxenus always talks the plainest common sense—which is more than one can say about certain other ancient metricians. On Time, in its rhythmical aspect, he remarks: ‘Time is articulated by each of the three ῥυθμιƷόμενα, λέξις, μέλος and κίνησις σωματική.’ The Greek choral lyric was a triple partnership of poetry, song, and dancing, and Aristoxenus here points out that they share a common rhythm. (He goes on to develop the idea, but that need not concern us here.) We could safely infer for ourselves, even if Plato and Aristotle had not told us, that the music and the dance were far from being merely decorative or casual additions to the poetry. The poetry may have been Queen, as Pratinas maintained, but the philosophers took the other two partners very seriously as ‘imitators’ of moral ideas and the like; and there is every reason to suppose that the dramatists did the same. But writers on Greek Tragedy have had much to say about the λέξις of the odes; nothing about its two partners—for the good reason that we know nothing about them. Yet it does seem possible, here and there, to say a little about the dance. Whether it is worth saying, the reader must judge.

The audience, sitting in the theatre, saw some kind of ordered physical movement in the orchestra as it listened to the singing or chanting of an ode. If in any given case we were asked what this movement was, our only answer is that we cannot possibly tell. Nevertheless, there are moments where we can infer, with more or less probability, the sort of thing that was being done by the dancers, and occasionally—notably in the Agamemnon—this dim and doubtful picture will contribute something to our appreciation of the drama.

The best start in the attempt to understand Aeschylus is Professor F. M. Cornford's clearsighted explanation of his method. On the stage of Aeschylus, great forces are broadly symbolised, working, according to the Pythagorean scheme, through antagonism to a new harmony. It is also important to see the life-work of any great poet as a single process; Aeschylus solves problems in early plays, and afterwards surpasses them in more complex problems, which find their solutions in their turn. His material is a great range of political, moral, intellectual, and religious conflicts, all active in his own world. By symbolising them on the stage, he found a way from small things such as party quarrels to a sublime comprehension of the work of God and man, interacting together, within the framework of time. This is not so strange as it appears. The grandest and truest achievements of humanity often look like by-products.

I suggest that a poet may, and perhaps always does, first assimilate his world in time, and next create from that world a universe not limited to time and known actuality. A great poet's world is like ours, full of everyday things, but he likes them more, fascinated alike by the good and the evil. What he makes is not an everyday affair, but something more eternal. The transition from the poet's world to the poet's universe is like a transition from politics to religion and mysticism.

The article by Mr. J. Wells in a recent number of this Journal, in which he endeavours to disprove the genuineness of the Γῆς Πϵρίοδος commonly ascribed to Hecataeus, comes as a timely warning against the prevalent tendency to treat Hecataeus as if his contribution to the scientific development of Greek thought could be estimated with any degree of certainty. The poverty of content of the extant fragments purporting to be from Hecataeus, and the scantiness of allusions to this author by other ancient writers, leave but a precarious basis for generalisation on the scope and value of his work; and they certainly do not suffice to determine his influence upon Herodotus and the chroniclers of the fifth century. Furthermore, they quite bear out Mr. Wells' contention that the claims recently made out on behalf of the scientific eminence of Hecataeus have been exaggerated.

This article reviews a selection of books published over the last decade that explore the relationship between humans and the environment in the ancient Greek world. These publications represent a new phase of the ecological turn in classical studies, in which ancient environmental studies has emerged as a distinct subdivision of the environmental humanities. Their contributions can roughly be divided into two groups according to their approaches and goals: one applies ecocritical analyses to Greek literature, presenting alternative ecologies to those that have produced contemporary environmental crises; the other applies historical methods to written and material evidence to illuminate the realities of ancient Greek human–environment relations. The three subsections of this review provide overviews of scholarship addressing sustainability and the conservation of natural resources; ecology and religion; and societal resilience in the face of ecological stress. I suggest productive avenues for further research in each area, arguing that interdisciplinary communication and collaboration are becoming increasingly important in this evidentially, methodologically and theoretically variegated field.

My address this year deals with much the same subject as the Presidential Address of 1944, but from a slightly different and, I fear, less practical point of view. Dr. Pickard Cambridge knows the schools, the universities and the whole educational system far better than I do, and was able to make practical suggestions of real value. I am falling back upon the more general and preliminary question why we should pursue Greek studies at all, and indeed why this Society should not peacefully cease upon the midnight with as little pain as may be convenient. The worst of it is that I know that I am prejudiced; and probably almost everybody in the room shares my prejudices. My appeal is really being made to-day to those who do not need it. I am an old man, and therefore probably attached to the old system. I am speaking on behalf of my own studies, and can hardly help feeling that ‘there is nothing like leather.’ To take a broader and more political line, I belong to the old peaceful world, which could afford to be cultured and liberal and to support a class whose interests were in the pursuit of the higher values, and who, while they lived for the most part industriously and modestly, were not in any feverish anxiety about salaries and wages. That cultivated middle class has been exterminated in many parts of Europe and weakened everywhere, everywhere with disastrous consequences. Even in this country a Minister of the Crown has told us that our day is over; a new and more powerful ‘governing class’ is in the saddle. We do not know how much patience it will have with pursuits that are not economically justified.

The presentation of Lokris and the Lokrians in the Iliad is problematic. The entry for Lokris in the Catalogue lists an unusually large number of towns for such a small area, but many of those towns are obscure. Despite the small size of the region of Lokris, it has given the epic not one but two major heroes of very different characters: the Lokrian commander Oilean Aias and Patroklos, Achilles' friend and warrior companion. Although Aias is praised in the Catalogue entry as the greatest of Homeric warriors, elsewhere in the Iliad he is only a second-rank hero and his men, the Lokrians, are relatively insignificant archers. Seeking a resolution of these difficulties, this paper integrates information derived from the text of the Iliad with what is known of the topography and archaeology of Lokris between the Late Mycenaean and Archaic periods. It is concluded that Aias, the more traditional hero, is firmly embedded in Lokris, whereas Patroklos, who appears to be ‘reinvented’ by the poet of the Iliad, has no traditional connection to the land. The contrast between these heroes may reflect the division between the mountainous Epiknemidian and the urban Opountian parts of Lokris. Oilean Aias encapsulates the ancient virtues of the mountain warrior and is linked with Epiknemidian Lokris; Patroklos, with his gentle disposition, is representative of the citizen of the polis and as such is linked to Opous, the capital of Lokris.

The islands of the Marmara group, of which the largest are Marmara, Pasha Liman, Aphisia, and Koútali, lie north and west of the Cyzicene peninsula in the sea to which they give their name. The following account is derived from my own gleanings during a short stay in Marmara and Pasha Liman (1907), supplemented from the detailed monograph published by M. Manuel Gedeon of the Greek Patriarchate, who visited all the islands of the group in 1894, studying chiefly the Byzantine and later antiquities.

By the kind permission of Professor Sieveking and of Mr. A. M. Woodward, who has informed me of the existence of these objects and has sent me the photographs here reproduced and the necessary notes, I am able to publish a few small objects in ivory, bone, and bronze which were acquired in 1911 by the Museum der Kleinkunst in Munich. A summary account of them by Professor Sieveking has already appeared in the Münchner Jahrb. der bildender Kunst, 1912, p. 73. The channel by which they reached Munich is naturally obscure, but there can be no doubt that they were found at the Orthia sanctuary at Sparta, the excavation of which was finished in 1910, the year before the objects were acquired at Munich. Even before this information reached me, I had learned by a curious accident that there had, in fact, been some small pilfering from the Orthia excavation by one of our workmen.

I. The Problem.—The purpose of this note is to suggest a possible solution of a notorious difficulty in that curious and interesting historical document, the Thalassocracy-list quoted by Eusebius from Diodorus; and, secondly, to trace the historical implications following on the adoption of that suggestion.

The list of ‘those who held the empire of the sea, from the fall of Troy to Xerxes' crossing into Europe,’ was evidently given by Diodorus in the lost ‘second volume’—Books VI to X—of his Historical Library in forty books. That work, we know, was arranged in sections of five books each, the second of which covered exactly that period—from the Τρωικά to the Μηδικά—and this no doubt gives us the reason why the list does not continue so as to cover the thalassocracy of Athens. The latter fact cannot therefore, unfortunately, be used as evidence for an early fifth-century origin for the document. This, however, obviously need not deprive the list of all interest for us, especially since it appears to be corroborated by such evidence on its subject as we have from other sources.

In a recent paper (JHS LXXII 1 ff.) is set out the distribution of speeches in the Odyssey, and the principles of their arrangement within its principal episodes. It is an obvious and necessary counterpart, to apply the same method of study to the Iliad. Though much has been done by Sir John Sheppard in The Pattern of the Iliad (1932), he has not made express use of the grouping of the speeches; and the present paper is designed to supplement his analysis of their contents by the special examination of their positions in the general design. I am still acutely aware of my debt to The Pattern of the Iliad; and it seems to me only possible to set out my own suggestions in full, at the cost of some repetition from a work so closely linked in its general theme.

Speeches in the Iliad (over 670) are more numerous than in the Odyssey (629 + 8 in Demodocus' second lay), but their distribution is similar:

The largest number, fifty, is in Odyssey XVII; forty-five are in Iliad XXIV.

One of the most curious series of Anatolian inscriptions known to me has been published by Mr. Hogarth in this Journal, 1887, pp. 376 ff. Their importance lies in the fact that they show us the manners and religion of one district hardly affected by Greek civilisation, and almost purely native in character. As the use of the Greek language and knowledge of Greek civilisation spread, the native manners were proscribed as barbarous, and even native mythology was discarded and Greek tales adapted to suit the locality. I have frequently given instances of this. At Magnesia ad Sipylum, for example, if we may judge from the references of Pausanias, the mythology of the district was re-modelled under the influence of the Greek literary tradition of Niobe, and localities had to be found to suit the details of the story.

As to the inscriptions published by Mr. Hogarth, Nos. 12–20, probably no one who reads over the texts can doubt that Greek was strange to the writers. They were native Phrygians, speaking their own language with a smattering of Greek, quite uneducated, but impressed with the belief universal over Asia Minor that Greek was the one language of education, and trying to express themselves in Greek. In every part of the country where the inscriptions enable us to penetrate below the Graeco-Roman varnish, the same inference is forced on us. Greek did not succeed in forcing itself on the native population of Phrygia, Galatia, Lycaonia, and Cappadocia (except in the large cities which were centres of Graeco-Roman civilisation) until Christianity gave it the additional power of being the language of the Scriptures.

It will probably be a surprise, even to readers of the Journal of Hellenic Studies, to learn that there are at the present day twenty thousand persons in the south of Italy who speak Greek as their native tongue. These people form two separate groups, composed of a number of villages or townships, one of which is found in the heel of Italy or Terra d'Otranto, the other in the toe of that country, towards the extremity of the modern Calabria, in the neighbourhood of Cape Spartivento, and about twenty miles to the south-east of Reggio. The language which they speak, as might well be supposed, is not ancient Greek; nor is it in any sense a lineal descendant of that which was spoken in the colonies of Magna Graecia; but, though it is essentially modern Greek, it differs considerably from the Romaic of Greece, and these differences are of such a nature, that it must have required the lapse of many centuries to produce them. There can be no doubt that at one time it was spoken over a much wider area than at present; indeed, within the memory of man it has died out, and has been superseded by Italian, in places where it had previously been in use. Any traditions which may have existed with regard to the origin of this people and the fortunes of their ancestors they have now entirely lost; and their history, as far as it can be discovered at all, must be reconstructed from casual notices in historical documents and from intimations contained in the language.