Philostratus relates that Apollonius of Tyana, a sophist of the early Empire, was once at Peiraeus trying to find a passage on a ship sailing for Ionia. The skipper refused to take him, saying that she was a cargo-ship and did not carry passengers. Apollonius then asked of what the cargo consisted, and was told it consisted of statues of the gods, in gold and stone, or gold and ivory. Then there was some bantering, in which Apollonius chaffed the skipper for refusing to take him on board. ‘Are you so ignorant,’ he asked ‘as to drive away like this from your ship philosophers, men for whom the gods have a special fondness, and above all at a time when you are making a business out of the gods? This was not the way they made statues in olden times. They did not canvass the cities selling them the gods. They used to carry nothing but their own hands, their masons' and ivory-workers' tools; provided the raw material and fashioned the works of art in the temples themselves.’

From this, then, it appears that in olden times the craftsmen travelled freely about, carrying with them nothing but the secrets of their craft, a few tools and their materials. Apollonius does not say to what period he refers; but what he describes exactly fits the facts in the early history of the ivory craft from the Mycenaean period to the seventh or sixth century B.C., as far as we can make out the facts. In the Mycenaean period, the sites where ivories have been discovered are numerous.

Among the sherds found at Gela in what must have been the sanctuary of the hero Antiphamos—the Rhodian co-founder, with the Cretan Entimos, of the city itself—was a fragment of a large Attic skyphos representing the Assassination of Hipparchos. It was described, though not figured, by Orsi in Notizie degli Scavi 1900 p. 276. He compared it with the well-known picture of the same subject on the stamnos by the Copenhagen Painter in Würzburg (515: AZ. 1883 pl. 12 and pp. 215–8, Boehlau; Klio 20 pll. 1–4; Langlotz pll. 182–3 and 210: ARV. p. 193 no. 5). Petersen noticed the fragment in R.M. 16 (1901) p. 103, and there are one or two bare mentions elsewhere. In 1923 it was still in private hands at Gela, where I saw it, but not long afterwards it passed to the Villa Giulia, and was figured, with a hasty description, by Cultrera in Bollettino d'Arte 7 (1927) p. 319, above, 2. This publication seems to have escaped general notice, at least it is not quoted in recent studies of the Tyrant-slayers. The fragment has such exceptional interest of subject that I may be excused for returning to it.

Passing through the rotunda of the Berlin museum before the war, many visitors have probably paused to look at a graceful statue of a young woman in a pose of adoration. Much of its elegance the statue owes to the graceful attitude of the hands, which are modern, and to the small head, which does not belong; but even if we think away these and other features which do not appear original, it remains a statue of quality. This femina orans does not stand alone, and more than one scholar has given lists of replicas.

The site was identified by Spratt and Forbes at the village of Arsa on the strength of an inscription (TAM II, 539) and of the evident survival of the ancient name. Their brief description remains the only one hitherto published. The village lies high, hardly less than 3000 ft. above the Xanthus valley; like many of the villages in the neighbourhood, it consists of scattered houses, having no shop, café, or other communal centre. Akdaǧ (Massicytus), which seems from across the river to rise in a steep continuous slope from the valley, in fact conceals a number of upland plains, often of surprising extent; Arsa is situated on one of these.

In his Presidential address to the Hellenic Society in 1914, Walter Leaf expressed the hope that a study of the history of ancient Corinth might be undertaken. He directed special attention to the economic history, to be interpreted mainly from the material remains of Corinth and of Corinthian industry. This task has not yet been carried out. Much has been written on Corinthian art and industry, but the historical conclusions of these archaeological studies remain still to be drawn. The Corinthians, more than other Greeks, had an individual way of life, recognised by their contemporaries, which can be used as a point from which to survey the Greek world; it is expressed by Herodotus in a single phrase, ἤκιστα δὲ Κορίνθιοι ὄνονται τοὺς χειροτέχνας. The economic approach should therefore be especially suited to the history of Corinth. But before this interpretation can be written, we must acquire a solid body of fact about Corinthian history and economic life, drawing chiefly on the material remains. What follows is the first chapter of such a study, dealing with the beginnings and early history of Corinth down to about 750 B.C. Most of my conclusions are not new, but I hope that some of the arguments are. The basis is the archaeological evidence uncovered by the Americans at Corinth, by Payne at Perachora.

The Athenian Archon list can be divided into three periods: (1) from the institution of the annual archonship down to 481/0—a period for which the evidence available for restoration of the list is slight; the names of some sixty-five archons out of the total for the period of about 200 are known to us, and the dates of many of them are uncertain; (2) from 480/79 to 302/1, a period for which a complete list has been preserved for us in the extant portions of Diodoros, apart from abundant confirmatory evidence; and (3) the Hellenistic period, for which as far as 101/0 the list has been reconstructed as fully as possible by the labours of Dinsmoor, Pritchett and Meritt. The present paper lists the archons of period (1) whose names have survived, and assembles in the case of each name all the available evidence for the date. In this it resembles Beloch's excursus ‘Die attische Archonten’ but differs from it in arguing the chronological problems more fully, and in writing out the greater part of the evidence in extenso. Moreover, since Beloch not only have numerous articles on points of early Athenian chronology appeared, but what is probably a fragment of an early inscribed Athenian archon-list has been discovered; and it seemed worth while to discuss the significance of this, as well as to assemble, within the limits of a single article, all the evidence and as many as possible of the opinions expressed relevant to the restoration of the list.

H. T. Wade-Gery and B. D. Meritt have restored the first fifteen lines of the second decree of Kallias as follows:

Both scholars are obviously right when stating that Kallias provides for the completion of work on the pediments of the Parthenon, the Golden Nikai, and the Propylaia, that he limits the expenditure of money on the Acropolis to ten talents a year and exempts from the limitation the Parthenon, the Nikai, and the Propylaia by way of preamble.

I am, however, not convinced that the decree is also concerned with ‘the rehabilitation,’ ‘the general reorganisation of the Acropolis,’ and that the ταμίαι and the ἐπιστάται are ordered to ‘fix bounds on the Acropolis and make repairs, spending ten talents a year until the bounds have been fixed and the repairs made as well as possible.’

It will not be disputed that the relationship between the sexes was a subject of great interest to Aeschylus. His first extant play turns on the question of marriage, willing or unwilling; and this is true, whether the Danaids were actuated by a passionate celibacy or by a horror of what they considered incest. The loss of the succeeding plays renders the interpretation of the Danaid trilogy speculative. But in the Oresteia, Aeschylus returns to similar themes: marriage, wife and husband, the relative status of men and women. This last issue becomes explicit during the trial of Orestes, when Apollo proclaims the superiority of the male, and Athena endorses his judgement with her vote. This scene, if variously interpreted, has been recognised to be important. Equally it has been recognised that Clytemnestra, for whose murder Orestes was on trial, is herself depicted as an anomaly: a woman with the mind and counsel of a man. The connexion between these two aspects of the trilogy deserves perhaps a further examination.

It is first necessary to consider the characterisation of Clytemnestra. Quite apart from the issues raised in the Eumenides, it is doubtful whether the accepted ‘masculinity’ of Clytemnestra has received attention commensurate with the stress which the poet has laid upon it, nor has it been fully considered in relation to the motives of her conduct. Some, indeed, will deprecate the psychological approach to an Aeschylean character. But there are no a priori grounds on which we can decide up to what point the poet's interest in character developed, as develop it admittedly did. Clytemnestra is the test-case, and we must judge by what we find.

Amasis is one of the celebrated names of Attic pottery in the mid sixth century B.C. He signed only as ‘maker’. Stylistic study has shown that the signed vases were painted by a single painter, who also painted other vases that are not signed: he is conventionally named the Amasis painter.

In my publication of the al Mina excavations (JHS LVIII, 7-9) I argued that although al Mina itself, owing to the disappearance of the greater part of the ancient site, produced no remains earlier than the eighth century B.C. yet that it existed in a much earlier period could be deduced from the evidence afforded by the ‘residential’ town at Sabouni where Attic black-figured and Mycenaean pottery were found. Further evidence is now available. In 1947 we found in a pocket in the steep side of the acropolis one of the well-known ’dolly’ Mycenaean figurines; this was important because the few Mycenaean sherds previously discovered might just as well have been of the Xllth century, i.e. posterior to the invasion of the Peoples of the Sea which marked the beginning of a new era in North Syrian history, whereas the figurine is definitely earlier than that catastrophe. This year (1948) two of the peasants who cultivate the hill site brought me three seals found by them when ploughing; all are earlier than 1200 B.C. and one cylinder belongs to the first half of the second millennium. The connection between Sabouni and the port of al Mina is perfectly clear for all the periods represented on the latter site and should hold good for the earlier periods also. If Sabouni, and ex hypothesi al Mina, were flourishing at the time when Alalakh was a royal city we can be sure that al Mina was the port of Alalakh through which the Syrian town had its contacts—amply illustrated by our discoveries—with Cyprus and Crete. I originally chose the two sites for excavation on the theory that such was the case; now for the first time we have direct evidence for their being contemporary.

At Cyrene, during the summer of 1947, the Antiquities Department of the British Military Administration of Cyrenaica cleared fallen debris from some of the Hellenistic tombs to the northeast of the city, and near the line of the modern road to Apollonia. In the course of these operations some intact burials came to light.

The following inscription was found by me on a dry wall in the yard of Kyriakos Sava of Yeroskipou. It comes from the locality known as ‘mitzi’, which is supposed to have been the necropolis of Hierokepia, a town mentioned by Strabo: Geographica, XIV, 6: ‘A short distance from the sea is Hierokepia. Then Paphos built by Agapenor’.

The stoa investigated by the Americans in the N.W. corner of the agora of Athens has won with good reason a notable place among ancient monuments, both as a subject of topographical controversy and as an interesting architectural type. I should like to turn to it again for a short time and in particular to examine at greater length than was possible in a brief review C. Anti's theory of its genesis, given in Chap. IX of his Teatri Greci Arcaici. As the non-committal name given to it in my heading shows, I should like for the present to steer clear as far as possible of the difficult problem of its identification. Anti confidently assumes that the building was the Stoa Basileios; indeed his theory of the origin of the type depends partly on the correctness of this assumption. But the identification has been the subject of a good deal of dispute; even H. A. Thompson, while putting forward with sober confidence his view that the stoa is both the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios and the Basileios, admits in the end that ‘an element of uncertainty must persist’. I accept Thompson's view, but certainly not with sufficient confidence to use it as a corner-stone in building up any theory. It is very distracting when one finds that whereas Anti links up his Royal Stoa with oriental palaces, A. Rumpf looks the other way in space and time and regards his Royal Stoa (a building of very different type—the spacious hypostyle hall west of the North-West Stoa and north of the temple of Hephaestus) as the Stammutter of the Roman basilica. ‘They ran away in opposite directions, and vanished to the east and to the west.’ Both of course use the name Basileios to support their identifications. One may perhaps be excused for giving up the riddle for a while and concentrating on the architectural form of the North-West stoa as we undoubtedly have it.