A very interesting symbolic picture of the battle of Lepanto executed in a miniature style has recently reached this country from Athens, and the owner, Sir Arthur Evans, has kindly allowed me to publish a reproduction and description of it.

The picture measures ·373 m. in height by ·275 m. in width, and is executed with a full range of colours on a sheet of vellum which has been at some time sharply folded across about half-way up the picture. Above and below and on the back there are inscriptions in Greek, but before we come to them it will be convenient to give some description of the picture itself. This is divided horizontally into two parts: above we see the saints and angels looking down upon the battle; below is the battle itself, and immediately above the centre of the fray, where the two fleets, Christian and Turkish, are in conflict, is a small medallion containing a throned figure of Christ.

‘No artist will ever surpass Pheidias: progress may exist in the world, but it is not so in Art. The greatest of all sculptors will remain for ever without an equal’ (Rodin).

It is agreed that the sculptures of the Western pediment represented, at the centre, the Contest of Athena and Poseidon; that this central action was terminated by two chariot groups, one on the left, the other on the right; and that beyond these were spectators. Further, it is generally accepted that a pair of figures of an old man and a maiden on the left of the central action were meant for Cecrops and one of his daughters. Immediately to the left of Cecrops, between him and the first figure in the angle of the pediment, Nointel's drawing showed a void space, and in a nearly corresponding position in the other half of the pediment the same old drawing recorded another gap (X and Y in Fig. 1). It had been supposed by many students that both spaces might have been left void intentionally; Leake and others thought that one or both would have been filled.

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.

My article has at least had the merit of evoking a most interesting paper from Professor Kolbe. His classification of the inscriptions differs from mine; but I cannot myself see that requests by a citizen to his own city for a particular site, or requests by one city to another for a site in some hieron (‘Please put it in your record office’), bear on my theory, which was that one independent city never asked another for a particular site as I defined it; on this, and on the reasons adduced for Delos not being a member of the League, I can only refer to what I have already said.

In 1928 Sir Arthur Evans generously presented an archaic bronze mirror to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. My thanks are due to the Keeper, Mr. E. T. Leeds, for his kindness in inviting me to publish this interesting accession and supplying me with the photographs reproduced in Plate II and Fig. 1.

The mirror is in the form of a disk, 15 cm. in diameter: its thickness at the edge is 7 to 8 mm., at the centre about 5 mm. It weighs 675.5 grammes. The face, slightly concave, was of plain, burnished metal surrounded by a narrow ornamented band round the edge: it is now badly pitted and covered over the greater part of its surface by a green patina (Fig. 1).

παρειλήΦασι ϒἀρ ψευδῆ λόϒον, ὡς ἒστιν αὐτοῖς ἡϒεῖσθαι πἀτριον This is Isocrates' judgment (IV. 18) on the claim of the Spartans to be the leaders of Greece. He rightly saw that the tradition of hegemony had been the force behind most of Sparta's active foreign policy for more than two hundred years down till his own day. He might truthfully have added that the hegemony exercised by contemporary Sparta was of a kind which Spartans no more than a generation earlier had never imagined. Though they had long desired to control all Greece, the particular form of control which they came to possess over the members of their second empire was determined for them by the Peloponnesian war.

Sparta did not enter upon that long struggle with the deliberate intention of creating for herself a subject empire. She desired to destroy the Athenian ἀρχή, which appeared as a threat to her own Peloponnesian league: and in opposition to Athens, she asserted a principle of city autonomy, which was to prove both then and later wholly incompatible with the conception of a subject empire. At the outset, the Spartans can have contemplated no higher success than that the Athenian democracy might be so humbled as to abandon part, at least, of its ἀρχή and perhaps even to return to its earlier position as a member of the Peloponnesian league. But the war with Athens compelled Sparta to develop her social, political, and military organisation, and the conquest of Athens offered Sparta the temptation of securing a new kind of supremacy—not ἡγεμονία, but ἀρχή.

Winter made a seemingly exhaustive classification when he divided Clazomenian sarcophagi into two main classes, which he called A and B (Anz., 1898, p. 175). His class A is the small class to which belong the big, deep, rectangular sarcophagi with copious decoration in Clazomenian B.F. style (i.e. B.F. without incised lines) like the sarcophagus in the British Museum (Murray, Terracotta Sarcophagi, Pl. 1–7). This has a gable-roof, as had, probably, all the others of this class. His class B is the big class, to which belong the large number of open, trapezoidal sarcophagi with decoration ranging from seventh-century pure East-Greek style down through different phases with different techniques to the most developed Clazomenian B.F. style of the end of the sixth and beginning of the fifth centuries. Recently, fresh evidence has enabled Kjellberg to add a third class, which he calls C (Jahrb., 41, p. 51). The sarcophagi of this new class have features both of A and B, but the style of decoration and the simple, rectangular shape seem to show that they must be considerably earlier than all of A and earlier than the earliest of B.

In selecting for the purpose of illustrating Herodotus' conception of the proper relation of ἀπὀδεξις to ἱστορίη his account of the Lydian emigration to Italy, I have not had in mind the requirements of the Etruscologist alone. The Lydian setting of the story raises the whole question of the sources for the reconstruction of the Dark Ages of Aegean history which Greek historians, at the time of Herodotus and earlier, had at their disposal.

It is well known that from the point of view of Etruscologists this migration story, which is usually accepted by them as a genuine tradition of origin, is dated five centuries too early; and although the arguments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which mainly stress the total dissimilarity of Etruscan and Lydian culture, are insufficient reason for discrediting Herodotus after the lapse of so many centuries and in an age when philology was not a science, to suppose without further investigation a mistake of 500 years is not only unfair to Herodotus, but may remove whatever basis of fact the tradition originally contained.

As a preliminary to the consideration of the changes introduced by Solon into the currency system of Athens, it will be well to review the situation which he had to face. He had found the farmers of Attica in a condition of hopeless insolvency owing to the burden of borrowed money, and had relieved them by a summary process of cancelling their debts: in effect, he had adjudged them bankrupt and then given them their discharges, so that they could start afresh with the moral guarantee of the State to support their credit, like any modern trader who has similarly gone through the courts. But it would have been of little use to do this unless he had at the same time provided some safeguard against the recurrence of the trouble: this had been so widespread that it must have been due to some cause which operated throughout the industry, not to the shortcomings of individuals; and, as the step which Solon took was to reform the currency, it is clear that in his view it was the currency which had been at fault.

There are few things in history more illusive and at the same time more persistent than the tradition that the Hellenistic language and culture did not cease to be part of the life of Southern Italy when Magna Graecia ceased to be anything but the shadow of a great name. It is a fact that the Hellenism of South Italy has a habit of being lost sight of. It hides itself, as it were, from the end of the Punic wars till the time of Justinian. After the end of the Byzantine domination it again burrows into the earth, and it is only now when it is indeed disappearing that we begin to realise that it has been there all the time. There have always been signs of its presence for those who will look for them.

‘The critics who have brought forward such arguments will, it is to be hoped, soon come to realise that once the sculptures can be openly submitted to the judgment of science, ill will it go with a scholar's reputation if his doubts of their genuineness are known.’ With such quasi-papal thunder does a certain professor conclude his six-hundred-word panegyric of the group recently published by Studniczka (Fig. 1). True, that at the time he wrote he had not seen the group. But since he goes on to declare that ‘in dealing with works of this quality the judgment of style made possible by good photographs is even more important than the observation of technical details on the marble itself,’ I do not hesitate to put forward a study based on such observation. For although judgment on aesthetic grounds is important, it has no ulterior sanction; and if I say—as I think—that the piece of sculpture is ugly and not of ancient style, this opinion may have as much or as little validity as the professor's, that the sculptor was a late archaic Greek and one who could hold his own with the best of his period.

The appearance of the Cambridge Ancient History has revived interest in a number of problems not yet solved. Here are four of the fifth century, on which the authors of the C.A.H. take what is on the whole the prevalent view, and on which something still remains to be said.

I. The Peace of Callias

Mr. Walker (C.A.H. v. 469–471) argues that the embassy of Callias (Hdt. vii. 151–2) must have been sent about 460, for the simultaneous Argive embassy was asking for a renewal of an old friendship by Artaxerxes, and so had set out soon after the latter's accession. He forgets to add that Herodotus expresses doubts whether any such embassy was ever sent by Argos. He also says that the embassy ‘must have been sent at a time when Argos was in danger of being attacked, obviously by Sparta,’ and so before 451.

1. I happened to be staying in Constantinople in the late summer of 1922 as the guest of General Sir Charles Harrington, and I was there when the Chanak crisis of that year arose. I visited the Narrows of the Dardanelles at a time when Kemal's leading troops were approaching the Asiatic coast of the Dardanelles, and there was then naturally much debate as to whether and how he would attempt to cross into Europe. It occurred to me at the time that it would be of interest to study what Xerxes had done 2402 years previously, and on returning to Constantinople I borrowed a Herodotus from the American College, and when the crisis had died down I went back with it to the Dardanelles. In that district, during the dry season, the problem of water supply looms large, and I was at once struck on reading Herodotus by the fact that this had been also Xerxes' chief difficulty, in that portion of his march which took him from the Scamander, the modern Mendere, across the Hellespont to the Hebrus, the modern Maritza.