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purpose of this note is to suggest a possible solution of a notorious difficulty in that curious and interesting historical document, the Thalassocracy-list quoted by Eusebius from Diodorus; and, secondly, to trace the historical implications following on the adoption of that suggestion.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

When Alexander turned back at the Hyphasis (Beas), how much did he know about what lay before him? And why, in the vulgate tradition, does he know of the distant Ganges and the distant kingdom of Magadha, but not of the next great river to the Beas, the Sutlej (a question often asked), or of anything else between the Beas and the Ganges? The answer is not difficult, once the elements of our tradition are sorted out chronologically; that, as in so many questions, is the real problem.

We possess one contemporary document bearing on the matter which has escaped notice, a satrapy-list or gazetteer of ‘Asia,’ i. e. Alexander's empire, dating from the last year of his life; very possibly Hieronymus used it by way of introduction to his history of the Successors, and it now forms the basis of Diodorus 18, 5 and 6. We can date this document with certainty. It includes the Indian provinces, and so is later than Alexander's return from India. The ‘Hyrcanian sea’ (not Caspian) is still a lake, so it is earlier than Patrocles. Chandragupta is unknown, so it is certainly earlier than Megasthenes and probably earlier than circ. 302. Porus is still alive, so it is earlier than 317.

In my Attic Black-figure: a Sketch I gave a short account of the Amasis painter, and a list of his works. Since then, I have published a vase by him, and fragments of six or seven others; and Dr. Kraiker has prefixed an important study of him to his Epiktetos. One or two of the following vases are mentioned in my A.B.S. list: but most of them are new.

My thanks are due to Senator Marchese Giorgio Guglielmi di Vulci and to Captain E. G. Spencer-Churchill for their kind permission to publish vases in their collections; to Captain J. E. Acland, Dr. L. D. Caskey, Prof. A. von Salis, Dr. A. Maiuri, Dr. P. Marconi, Mr. H. W. Maxwell, Mr. A. Merlin, Dr. A. Minto, Dr. B. Nogara, and Mr. E. Stefani for their kind permission to publish vases in Dorchester, Boston, Heidelberg, Naples, Palermo, Bristol, the Louvre, Florence, the Vatican, and the Villa Giulia; to Mrs. Ure for sending me photographs of the Dorchester fragments and allowing me to publish them; to Prof. C. Albizzati for generously waiving his claim to publish the Vatican fragments; to Mr. G. R. Stanton for help at Bristol; to my wife for all the photographs reproduced except fifteen.

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.

At the outset of the parallel lives of Alexander and Caesar, Plutarch warns his readers that what he offers them is biography, not history, and that consequently he will attend more to details which reveal character than to the great events. These he will either treat summarily or even omit entirely. Both the plan and the matter of the Life of Alexander are in harmony with this preface. The first ten chapters, which bring the story down to Alexander's accession, teem with anecdote and characterisation; then, after a rapid sketch of the wars in Illyria and Greece, the main narrative begins in ch. 15, with the crossing of the Hellespont. From thence to the end the biography is a historical sketch with digressions at intervals to illustrate various sides of Alexander's character. Thus the appointment of Aristotle as tutor to Alexander is followed by a disquisition on his attitude to learning and philosophy in general (7–8); the treatment of the captive women at Issus provokes a discussion (21, 5–23) on Alexander's continence, and subsequently on his temperance and habits of life. The journey to Siwah is followed by a general discussion of Alexander's views on his own deification (28), while the longest of such digressions, occasioned by the burning of the palace at Persepolis, deals with Alexander's generosity and his attention and loyalty to friends (39–42, 4). The common characteristics of these digressions are their disregard of chronology, their anecdotic content, and the prominence of the Letters of Alexander among the sources named in them; indeed, the only other sources appearing by name are Onesicritus (8, 2), Aristobulus (21, 9) and the official diaries (23, 4), each once.

The biography of Anaxagoras (500–428 BC), the most brilliant scientist of antiquity, contains many unresolved contradictions, which are best explained as follows. After he ‘predicted’ the fall of the meteorite at Aegospotami in 466, he lived nearby at Lampsacus as the protege of its ruler Themistocles. In 460 Pericles became his patron at Athens, where he lived for the next 30 years. In 431, Pericles was taking part in an expedition to the Peloponnese when the sun was eclipsed; he tried to dispel his helmsman’s fear by covering his face with his cloak, illustrating Anaxagoras’ correct account of eclipses. In 430 he led a second such expedition, which failed badly; its return coincided with the plague. The seer Diopeithes brought in a decree that targeted the ‘atheist’ Anaxagoras by banning astronomy. This enabled Thucydides son of Melesias and Cleon to attack Pericles by prosecuting Anaxagoras, on the ground that Pericles’ impiety had angered the gods, thereby causing the plague. Pericles sent Anaxagoras back to Lampsacus, where he soon died; Pericles was himself deposed and fined, in a first triumph for the Athenian populist reaction against the fifthcentury Enlightenment.

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.

As regards Aristotle's Περὶ φυτῶν ᾱβ mentioned in Diog. Laert.'s list (nr. 108), Alexander's Statement is decisive: … ἔστι περὶ φυτῶν Θεοφράστῳ πραγματεία γεγραμμένη ᾿Αριστοτέλους γὰροὐ φέρεται and though Simplicius and others occasionally refer to a πραγματεία περὶ φυτῶν there is no indication that they ever saw the book with their own eyes. Aristotle's treatise On Plants, therefore, seems to have disappearedat an early date, and since the quotations in Antigonus, Athenaeus and others are concerned with insignificant details, they cannot give any hint as to its contents.

It has often been asked whether there exists any relation between this lost treatise and the two books Περὶ φυτῶν which are incorporated into all editions of the Corpus Aristotelicum (pp. 814–830 Bk.), but the question has never received a definite answer. There are good reasons for this reticence, for though these books were identified more than a century ago as a work of Nicolaus of Damascus, the text is in such a deplorable condition that it seemed to resist every attempt at interpretation. However, since in 1841 E. H. F. Meyer published the Arabic-Latin translation made by Alfred of Sareshel (the exemplar of the clumsy Greek rendering whichwas already known), the material has considerably increased.

This article argues against the traditional dating of the attack of Prusias I of Bithynia on Heraclea Pontica to the 190s, that is to the time before the Apamean settlement (188). The following re-examination of the only surviving literary source to refer directly to this event (Photius’ excerpts of the history of Heraclea Pontica by Memnon), together with relevant information from several other literary and inscriptional texts, allows us to connect the attack of Prusias with the war between the Bithynian and Pergamene kingdoms, which would then be dated to c. 184–183. The other major conclusion presented is that this war had no direct relation to the outcome of the Apamean settlement, as has been the majority opinion.

Polybios, in the course of a long fragment on the knowledge necessary for a general, preserved in the Codex Urbinas (IX, 17), has an account of an ineffectual attack on the town of Cynaetha in North Arcadia by Aratos during one of his early generalships. Aratos, he tells us, had made full arrangements for a simultaneous attack on the town from traitors within and Achaean troops without, and as a signal to the latter a man was to go and stand on a certain hillock dressed in a cloak. Unfortunately a sheep-owner, while looking for his shepherd, went and unwittingly stood on this very hill, whereupon the Achaeans attacked too soon and were disastrously repulsed. What was the cause of the failure asks Polybios, and answers ‘῾τὸ ποιήσαοθαι τὸν στρατηγὸν ἁπλοῦν τὸ σύνθημα, νέον ἀκμἡν ὄντα καὶ τῆς τῶν διπλῶν συνθημάτων καὶ παρασυνθημάτων ἀκριβείας ἄπειρον,᾿’ because the general was still young and ignorant of the principle of signals and counter-signals.

The incident has been inexplicably neglected: Beloch, Tarn and Ferrabino omit it entirely; Niese omits it from his article on Aratos in Pauly-Wissowa, and in his large work writes simply ‘Aratos unternahm einmal einen Versuch, sie (sc. Cynaetha) zu überrumpeln,’ vaguely indicating a date in the neighbourhood of 245–40; Pieske writing on ‘Kynaitha’ in Pauly-Wissowa, has a bare reference, and Freeman, mentioning it in a note, declares that the attack was one of the first of a series of events leading up to Cynaetha's joining the Achaean League. The words νέον ἀκμὴν ὄντα can, he adds, refer only to one of the earliest of Aratos' generalships, or possibly to some subordinate command held before he was general. In short, the incident has been almost completely ignored, and no attempt has been made to set it in its historical context. The purpose of this paper is to shew that it offers important evidence both for the date of Aratos' birth, and also for Achaean and Aetolian policy during the years 245–35.

The Niobid krater in Paris (Louvre G341) is not one of the masterpieces of Greek vase painting. The vase is not even one of the best works of the artist, who receives his name, the Niobid Painter, from the rare depiction of Apollo and Artemis killing the children of Niobe on the reverse. The vase is, however, one of the touchstones of the history of ancient Greek art. The Niobid krater has this distinction because it is the earliest contemporaneous witness to the new developments in mural painting in the Early Classical Period, developments best understood from the descriptions of the traveler Pausanias six centuries later. The actual quality of the Niobid krater is therefore secondary to its documentary value.

Since the krater's discovery in 1881, most discussion has focused on the iconography of the scene on the obverse, showing a group of warriors with Athena (PLATE IIa). The ambiguity of the scene comes from the large number of figures and the lack of action or iconographical evidence to help in their identification. Of the 11 figures, only Herakles (figure 6 on PLATE IIb), with his club and lionskin and Athena (4) in her aegis and helmet are clearly identifiable.

The object of this paper is to examine some of the arguments which have been used to support current reconstructions of the Homeric House, and in particular of the House of Odysseus, as it is described in the Odyssey; and to add a few points of interpretation and of criticism which I have not succeeded in finding already in print. In order to make these latter intelligible, it will be necessary to recapitulate much that has been stated by previous writers on a subject which is ‘always with us’; and not a little that has been established with some degree of certainty. It is perhaps necessary also to add, that the interpretation which I propose is intended to apply, almost without exception, to the Homeric poems in their present state; and to determine the domestic architecture and domestic habits which were familiar both to rhapsodists and to their audiences at the time when the poems, and the ‘Vengeance of Odysseus’ in particular, were being reduced to the form in which, with but slight aberrations, they have survived. It is difficult to believe that men who were endowed with so keen a visualizing faculty as the rhapsodists and their patrons really tolerated unintelligible archaism in the domestic topography of their ballads; and we may fairly assume that the movements of the personages implicated in the ‘Vengeance,’ into and out of the House of Odysseus, were still intelligible, and even familiar, to both singers and listeners. That this was so in the Homeric Age, and that anachronisms in the description were currently corrected, as one custom and another became obsolete in daily life, is made very probable, if not certain, by the analogous case of Homeric armour; where, as Dr. Reichel has argued in his Homerische Waffen, the introduction of the θώρηξ and the consequent changes of drill and fence, are reflected in the poems by interpolated passages, introduced by θώρηξwearing rhapsodists to meet the critisisms of a θώρηξwearing public.

In last year's volume of this Journal (ix. pp. 82, 83) Mr. Theodore Ben described the situation of this Carian town, which he discovered about three miles to the north-east of Loryma. In laying before the reader the inscriptions found on this site, from which we recover its name, I would call attention to the accompanying Map of Casarea and its neighbourhood, prepared by Mr. Bent at my request. He has made it the more valuable by adding the following memoranda:—

‘During investigations on the southern coast of Caria, near the promontory anciently called Cynossema, and now known as Cape Aloupo or Fox, we were anchored in the Bay of Aplotheka, around which are the ruins of ancient Loryma. Whilst here, we heard from the peasants of a curious harbour and ruins at a little distance from the bay. Accordingly we rowed along the coast in our boat past several islets, and soon arrived at this harbour, the entrance of which is not a stone's throw across, though it opens within into a considerable basin surrounded by high mountains.

The problem of the neutrality of Delos has been the subject of a searching investigation by W. W. Tarn published recently in this Journal. The argument turns mainly on a purely epigraphical question, namely, the interpretation of the formula for the setting-up of a stele in the decrees of the Island League. Its historical importance is great, because, if Tarn is right, we should be justified in utilising the Delian Royal festivals for the reconstruction of the political history of the third century, which has rightly been styled the darkest period of Hellenism. As in the fourth Excursus of his large work Antigonus Gonatas, the distinguished scholar maintains the thesis that Delos became a member of the Island League, and that the varying history of this League is reflected in the establishment of festivals in turn by the Ptolemies, by the Seleucids, and by the Antigonids. The evidence for his theory he finds in the argument that the Islanders, if they wished to set up an inscribed stele in Delos, were not obliged to address a petition to the Commune of Delos, requesting the grant of a site in the sanctuary; the Islanders therefore controlled the site and ground of Delos, which implies that Delos belonged to the League. Although I raised objections to Tarn's thesis, as did Roussel at an earlier date, I would gladly be the first to agree with him, had he succeeded in bringing forward convincing proof of this theory. As this has not been the case, in view of the wide significance of the problem I think it advisable to break silence and to expose my objections to the criticism of experts.

The writer has been recently given the opportunity to study three lead coffins, ornamented in relief, now in the Palestine Museum, Jerusalem. They are as yet unpublished.

No. 1.—Inventory, Dept. of Antiquities (Part M), No. 1080, entry dated January 13, 1928. According to a report made to the Department it was discovered in 1923 during the repair of a road from Acre to Beirut, near the village of Ez-Zîb. It was found in one of a group of fourteen tombs opened up accidentally during the work. The coffin was found in a much-damaged state and conveyed first to the local museum, Acre, and then to its present place.

Description. What remains of the coffin is in six fragments:— (a) A short side, measuring 24 by 35 cm. It is decorated with four columns of the Corinthian order with simplified capitals. The shafts of the columns have parallel spiral flutings for the upper two-thirds of their length (12 cm. fluted, 6 cm. plain).

The first section of this paper argues that Homer's description of the world of Ithaca as it existed before Odysseus ever left for Troy (henceforth ‘the pre-departure world’) is largely Homeric invention. The second section of the paper brings in the world of Ithaca during Odysseus' absence (henceforth ‘the intervening years’), which is also, for the most part, Homeric invention, and considers the literary function of this and the pre-departure world.

At Poetics 1451a, Aristotle argues that Homer is superior to all other epic poets in his method of constructing an epic. The reason he gives is that Homer does not tell everything there is to tell about his subject, but centres his epic round a single action (μία πρᾶξις) and for the purpose of the telling selects only those incidents which make the other incidents ‘necessary or probable’ (cf. 1459a-b, where Aristotle gives examples of what he means from the Iliad).

At Mycenae in 1876 Dr. Schliemann lifted the corner of the veil which had so long enshrouded the elder age of Hellas. Year by year ever since that veil has been further withdrawn, and now we are privileged to gaze on more than the shadowy outline of the picture of a far back age. The picture is still incomplete, but it is now possible to trace the salient points. Can we in comparing it with pictures of certain peoples who have dwelt in and reigned at Mycenae, pictures preserved for us elsewhere, identify it as that of any previously known? The object of this little essay is to make such an attempt.

The name Mycenean is now applied to a whole class of monuments—buildings, sepulchres, ornaments, weapons, pottery, engraved stones—which resemble more or less closely those found at Mycenae. I think I am right when I say that archaeologists are unanimous in considering them the outcome of one and the same civilization, and the product of one and the same race.

The question of the location of the Enneakrounos fountain-house is one of the most controversial problems in Athenian topography.* It is known that a spring, which had been called Kallirrhoe, was embellished and given the name Enneakrounos during the Peisistratid tyranny. The location of the fountain-house, however, is disputed. Some references place Enneakrounos in the vicinity of the Ilissos stream to the south-east of the city; other sources state or imply a location in the city centre.