In 1949 Jeffery wrote of the Proto attic stand from Aegina once in Berlin, A 42: ‘… the dialect and letter-forms used by the painter of the stand indicate that he was himself an Aeginetan.’ Her suggestion was taken up by scholars who favored the idea of an immigrant painter in Athens, and eventually led to the hypothesis that a group of vases in the Black and White style— namely the ones by hands represented in the treasuretrove bought by the Berlin Antiquarium in 1936—were made in a workshop on the island. Since it is the one apparently sound piece of evidence that at least one painter of the Black and White style was Aeginetan, the stand and its painted inscription deserve another look.

The casts of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge were treated and repaired recently by M. B. Laymann, now of Heidelberg. During his final visit, in 1975, he also restored a cast of the Peplos kore (Fig. I ), supplying the missing parts by analogy, colouring it according to published indications and adding a meniskos, which is conjectural in form, size and height. As for its height, the meniskos cannot have been much lower, to judge by what remains of the spike of other korai (Acropolis 670, 673, 682); and if it had been much higher, it would have given less protection against bird droppings and from experiment my impression is that the effect, particularly of the longer spike, is more disturbing. The size decided on was that just large enough to protect the head; though Aristophanes (Birds, 1114–7) may imply that it protected the whole of a statue, such an extension seems to me awkward visually and in practice would have made the contraption liable to damage in a high wind.

The ordinary silver coinage of Athens from B.C. 480 to 400 is almost unvaried. By the former date a head of Athena and an owl of fixed and conventional archaic type had been adopted for the coin (Pl. XIII. 1). The olive-wreath which adorns the helmet of the goddess seems to have been adopted during the glow of triumph after Marathon. At the end of the century there were certain issues of gold coins, of which we shall speak later. But the great mass of the coinage was in silver. The Athenians obtained silver in abundance from the mines of Laurium and those of Thrace, and it was part of Athenian policy to circulate the coins as widely as possible, and to make them the standard currency of the Aegean. Silver was to Athens what gold was to Persia, the backbone of the finance of the state, and, together of course with the tribute of the allies, the source whence came the plentiful wealth which Athens used for great building-works at home and for expeditions abroad.

§ 1. Pindar is a classic of whom the study may be expected to grow with the growth of an interest in Greek archæology. Not, indeed, because it is indebted to him, so largely as to many other authors, for direct illustration. Rather because his ‘Odes of Victory’ are lit up in a new way by a fuller knowledge of the places with which they are concerned, of the contests which they celebrate, of the art and religion by which they were inspired. To take a single instance—the discoveries at Olympia, which have restored for us the main features of the altis, have given a new meaning for every modern reader to the beautiful, but hitherto indistinct, picture suggested by Pindar's description of ‘all the holy place resounding with festal joy,’ when ‘the lovely light of the fair-faced moon shone forth’ after a day of contests. Pindar's odes are poems of occasion, magnificent expressions of Hellenic life in its most distinctively Hellenic phases. Hitherto the real drawback to his popularity has not been obscurity of language, but the strain which he was felt to place on the modern imagination.

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).

There is a fundamental problem in Aristotle's metaphysics which has received a good deal of attention ever since Eduard Zeller emphasized it in his book on Aristotle in the nineteenth century. The difficulty has often been expressed as an inconsistency between three propositions to each of which Aristotle is committed:

(1) No universal is substance.

(2) Knowledge is of what is most real.

(3) Knowledge is of universals.

The text of the alliance between Athens and Sicilian Egesta is partially extant in IG i2 19 and IG i2 20.1–2. Crucial for the dating of the inscription and the alliance which it records is the third line of the first fragment, for it contains what remains of the name of the eponymous archon who held office at the time. Only the last two letters of the archon's name are clear and undisputed: they are ON, and appear in stoichoi 37 and 38. (See Plate XXIII a). On the basis of these two letters, only five fifth-century B.C. archons appear as possibilities: the name must be restored to read ηάβρον (458/7), Ἀρίστον (454/3), Ἐπαμείνον (429/8), Ἀριστίον (421/0), or Ἀντιφο̃ν (418/7).

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.

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.

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 statue reproduced on Pl. II. was found two years ago in the village of Atfih which lies about forty-five miles south of Cairo on the edge of the eastern desert. Atfih preserves the name and occupies the site of the ancient Per nebt tep aht, the city of the cow-headed goddess Hathor. The Greeks, who identified Hathor with their own Aphrodite, translated the name into Aphroditopolis. The ruins of the town are covered by the modern village, but in the adjoining desert is a large cemetery, mainly of the Ptolemaic period, which Mr. Johnson has recently excavated in search of Greek papyrus.

The statue was found accidentally by a labourer digging in the village and was secured for the Cairo Museum by the local Inspector of the Antiquities Department. It is made of a block of rather soft limestone and is considerably more than life size, the height of the figure without the plinth being 2·5 m. Both forearms are missing. The right leg from knee to ankle and parts of the left leg are restored in plaster. The features are badly damaged. There are no remains of paint or gilding on the surface of the limestone.

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.

My remarks about the Mithraeum at Capua in J.H.S. 1925, p. 100, require correction in view of Professor Minto's excellent publication of his discovery in Notizie degli scavi, 1924, p. 353 ff. It is not true that ‘the initiate … appears to be represented as a child, not as a man.’ In the stucco decorations of the podia the initiate is in fact represented as smaller than the mystagogue and the officiating priest (see figures 10–15 in Minto's article). It is possible that the officiants were supposed to act the parts of divine personages and were therefore represented as larger than human in accordance with a common artistic convention. In any case there is in the stuccos no additional evidence for Mithraic belief in the rebirth of the initiate as a child.

This article examines four connected aspects of Phemius' performance in Odyssey 1. The first section examines the poet's unusual technique in relating Phemius' music to other, simultaneous sounds in the ‘soundscape’ of Odysseus' hall. The second argues that the suitors' initial dancing develops into a theme of appropriate and inappropriate nimbleness which, in particular, creates significant connections between books 1 and 22. The third section shows that the poet is suggestive but studiedly vague on the politics of Phemius' first song which, in the final section, I interpret as a self-reflexive and open-ended ‘lesson’ in how to read epic.

In the first book of Hippocratic Regimen, an unclear excursus explains how the technai imitate, and thus allow us to understand, human nature. It is argued here that the new polysemy of the word organon at the beginning of the fourth century is utilized by the author in his comparison, that this observation allows new understandings of some difficult passages and that such polysemy applies to a specific organon, the glotta (‘tongue’ and ‘reed’).

The Turkish conquest of Greece produced four Greek historians—Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Doukas, Phrantzes and the Turkophil Imbrian, Kritoboulos. I have already dealt with the first; the present paper treats of the second and third of the four. Doukas' history has been preserved not only in the Greek text but also in an old Italian version, which in some places supplies materials lacking in our Greek original. Doukas is an author worthy of study; for he was truthful and in several instances an eye-witness—qualities which, in the opinion of historians, far outweigh the barbarism of his style, which so much offended his supercilious editor in the defective Bonn edition.