Among the many genuine works of Greek Sculptors in the Museums of Athens there are three colossal heads and a piece of richly sculptured drapery, more striking perhaps in their originality than any others to be found there. Shortly after their discovery they were published with photographs by the Director of Antiquities, M. Cavvadias, under the title Fouilles de Lycosura, Athènes, 1893, and carefully described and appreciated. My excuse in venturing to bring them again to notice is the undeserved neglect with which works of such fine and unexpected quality have been treated.

‘Theocritus'’ Idyll xxvii describes how a neatherd progressively undresses a girl and then makes love to her. The progress of the neatherd's hand is accurately and humorously depicted. First the maiden says (19)

μὴ ᾽πιβάλῃς τὴν χεῑρα καὶ εἰσέτι; χεῑλος ἀμύξω.

‘O Sogenes of the Euxenid clan, I swear that I did not, having stepped up to the line, hurl forth my tongue like a bronze-cheeked javelin which sends the neck and strength of limbs without sweat from the wrestling before the limb falls in the glare of the sun.’ Nem. vii 70–3)

In the passage given above, Pindar employs the image of the javelin thrower to describe the kind of poet which he is. Within the simile there occurs the participial phrase, τέρμα προβαίς, which I translate as ‘having stepped up to the line’, the line here being the one from which the athlete throws the javelin and over which he cannot step without being penalised. However, before I present my reasons for this interpretation of the phrase, it will be helpful to explain more fully the meaning of the simile.

First the image itself. The poet compares himself to a javelin thrower in order to assure the audience that his pronouncements do justice to the merits of the victor. In Greek athletics the javelin throw was one of the five contests which comprised the pentathlon, the other four event being the foot race, discus, long jump, and wrestling.

Few monuments of ancient art possess either a more obvious beauty and attraction, or a greater interest for the archæological student, than the sarcophagus painted with various scenes of an Amazonomachia, which was discovered in 1869 in a grave at a little distance from Corneto, the ancient Tarquinii, and was a few years afterwards acquired for the Egyptian and Etruscan Museum at Florence. Its date is probably not much after 300 B.C., and the pictures which adorn it, even if not the work of a Greek hand, offer us the best example we possess of the manner of Greek polychrome painting in that age. They have been already described by several highly competent writers, including Dr. Helbig and Otto Donner (Bull. dell' Inst. 1869, p. 198 sq.); the late Dr. Klügmann, who for years made representations of the Amazons in ancient art his especial study (Ann. dell' Inst. 1873, p. 239 sq.); Mr. Dennis (Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 2nd ed., 1881, p. 96 sq.); and Dr. Woermann (Woltmann and Woermann, Hist. of Painting, English ed., 1880, vol. i., p. 100). But hitherto no adequate illustrations of them have been published. The sketches in slightly shaded outline engraved, (Mon dell' Inst., vol. ix., pl. lx.), to accompany Dr. Klügmann's article above referred to, furnish, indeed, a useful key to the shape and dimensions of the sarcophagus, and to the arrangement and subject-matter of its pictures. But of the style of the work they give little notion, and of its colouring, from the nature of the case, none at all. Coloured facsimiles of some selected portions of these most interesting paintings are published for the first time with the present number of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (Pls. XXXVI., XXXVII., XXXVIII.).

In his recent article ‘The Old Temple Terrace at the Argive Heraeum’, J. C. Wright discusses the date of the platform supporting the remains of the earliest Argive Heraeum—in other words, the uppermost terrace of the Hellenic (viz. Classical) Heraeum. Is it itself a Classical structure, or a late Bronze Age platform re-used to accommodate the first peripteral temple of the seventh century BC? Wright would connect both the platform and the temple upon it with the first stages of proper Hellenic culture, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. On pp. 191 ff, he denies that I can possibly be right in following the oldest investigators and assigning this platform to the Bronze Age. But I must confess that his arguments, however learned, have so far failed to shake my conviction.

In Herodotus iii. 90, in the second satrapy, along with the Mysians and Lydians, are included the Lasonians and the Cabalians and the ’ϒγϵννϵȋς. A distinction is made between the Lasonians and the Cabalians. In vii. 76–77, three tribes are commanded in the army of Xerxes by Badres, son of Hystanes. The first name has dropped out, the second people are the Maeonian Cabalians who are called Lasonians, the third are the Milyae. The words Καβηλέϵς οἱ Μηΐονϵς seem to make a distinction between the Lasonians and other Cabalians who are not Maeonians. Probably therefore the missing name in ch. 76 is Καβηλέϵς, omitted by copyists under the impression that the same people were being counted twice over. But the historian really meant to distinguish between the native Cabalians and the Lasonians who were of Maeonian origin and presumably immigrants. Accordingly in iii. 90, instead of Λασονίων καὶ Καβαλίων καὶ ’ϒγϵννέων, we should perhaps read Λασονίων καὶ Καβαλίων ἐγγϵνέων.

In the Archaeological Seminar at Upsala is a vase, presented by Dr. Nachmanson, the design on which is illustrated in Fig. 1. I forbear to discuss it in any other respect than that of the design, as Prof. Sam Wide, to whose kindness I owe the permission to use the illustration, reserves to himself the right of dealing with the vase fully in a subsequent publication.

It is an amphora of good b.-f. style to be dated about 550 B.C., and the scene is framed in a border which displays along the top the maeander pattern and at the sides a double row of dots. In the centre of the scene is an altar towards which the priest advances from the left leading the ram he is about to sacrifice. He is a youthful male figure, draped only in his himation, and crowned with a wreath of olive. Beside the altar on the r. rises a slender column surmounted by a statue, the upper part of which disappears from our ken beyond the borders of the field; evidently the statue was not of paramount importance in the scene depicted.

In this paper I propose to concentrate on some few features in the style of Aeschylus. A clear and very readable account of his style in general has already been given by Prof. Stanford in the book published recently, but in that he deals lightly with the things with which I propose to deal now, the variations of style between the plays and the reasons of them.

But before we come to them, a word about the reasons for the character of his style in general. That, as all readers know, is full of ‘grandiloquence,’ or as the Greeks called it, ὄγκος, of various kinds, mouth-filling words and bold mixed metaphors, and so on. Prof. Stanford suggests incidentally that this may be due to convention, but that is hardly likely. There is little ὄγκος in the very scanty fragments of his predecessors in Tragedy, and it is probable that Aeschylus elevated the style, as, according to tradition, he elevated the staging of the plays.

Until the Second World War, the antiquities collection held by the university in Leipzig included a set of four fragments attributed to Exekias, and long recognised by scholars as deriving from an amphora which in the subject of both obverse and reverse scenes was close to the type A amphora signed by Exekias in the Vatican Museum. Unfortunately the fragments were lost during the war; W. Herrmann has recently published them as war losses, listing all the information available on their history— the provenience is unknown. Three of the fragments bear a clear resemblance to side A of the Vatican amphora, which shows Achilles and Ajax intent on a board game, but the Dioskouroi scene on side B was identified only on the very slender evidence of T. 391 (Plate IVa), a small fragment bearing the head of a white dog.

This identification is now supported by the discovery that T. 391 joins cleanly with a hitherto unpublished fragment in Cambridge as may be seen in Plate IVc. The join is substantiated by the portion of the hand of ‘Polydeukes’ appearing on both fragments, by the leash held in that hand, and by the dog's paw, all of which bridge the break.

Archaeological work was carried out by the Italians in the Dodecanese up to September, 1943, and excavations were then still in progress both on Rhodes and Cos. On the Italian surrender at that date the Germans occupied the islands, and their restrictions on movement made all archaeological work impossible. During the British Military Administration numerous finds were made, but work was concentrated on preservation, and excavation was only undertaken when it was clearly essential to do so. In the Walled City of Rhodes the clearance of several large bombdamaged areas presents a golden opportunity to excavate into the levels of the Greek and Roman cities which have hitherto been all too well hidden by the medieval and Turkish buildings. It is to be hoped that something may be done to this end before the areas are covered over again by new buildings. I am indebted for most of the information contained in this article to Professor Morricone of the Instituto Storico-Archeologico di Rodi who also supplied Fig. 2.

I am happy to offer this paper in tribute to the deep range of a dedicated Hellenist's life-work, not least for personal reasons. Professor Dodds first introduced me to the Ion towards the end of those happy twelve years of his career spent in the University of Birmingham. With his respect for Forsterian buckets let down into the subconscious, he may not be surprised that the introduction has had enduring effects. An early consequence was my verse translation of the play, eventually published in 1958 and, more recently (1968), produced on the stage by our Department of Drama and Theatre Arts. Translations of Greek and Latin authors play an increasingly important part in our contemporary cultural life, especially translations of Greek plays for the stage and for broadcasting. This is an area of activity which scholars should not ignore. What Gilbert Murray so successfully practised in his time, Milman Parry emphasized in another context: ‘…scholars must see that they must impose their truths before others impose their fictions’. Over the years I have followed the discussions in books and journals which have added to our understanding of the power and complex meaning of the play. Only some of these can be mentioned in what follows, to enable me to express agreement or a difference of opinion or emphasis.

The simply rationalistic interpretation of the Ion associated with the translation, preface, etc., by H.B.L. in 1889 and with the work of A. W. Verrall in 1890 and subsequently, was temporarily fashionable in certain quarters at the time. This interpretation no doubt stimulated further study of the play in this country, but there has been continuous corrective criticism of its aberrations.

The chief object of this paper is to record and classify the various monuments which on the ground of subject-matter or style may claim to be connected with Pergamene work. It may be well also to notice by way of introduction what we can gather from ancient testimony.

Of most of the existing works that I shall mention I have had personal knowledge, and where I have had to rely merely on published representations of them, I can only bring them forward for the purpose of suggesting to those who have direct acquaintance with them to consider them from this point of view. The theory which I wish to work out—a theory already suggested by others—is that certain fields of Greco-Roman and late Roman art have received a deep and abiding impress from Pergamon. That this should be a priori probable does not need elaborate proof; Rome was the heir of the Pergamene kingdom, and had always friendly intimacy with it, and we hear of many Pergamene works being transferred to Rome by Nero (Dio Chrys. 644 R.): between certain Roman and certain Pergamene myths there was a close analogy, which coloured the artistic representation of them: the struggle of the Pergamene kingdom with the Gauls, or—to speak perhaps more correctly—with Antiochus Hierax supported by Gallic mercenaries, was the most recent counterpart to the struggle of Rome with the barbarians: it was the Pergamene school—as Professor Brunn was the first to demonstrate—who idealized and fixed for artistic representation the type of the northern barbarian and really created historic sculpture, and I think that it can be shown that their rendering of this type became conventionalized and remained traditional throughout many centuries.