Europe in the last two thousand years has three times passed through an experience which may fairly be called a Thirty Years War; in Greece from 432 to 404 B.C., in Central Europe from A.D. 1618 to 1648; and over the whole continent from 1914 to 1945; in all of them there were intervals in which the fighting ceased, but the interval hardly amounted to true peace; it was more like what a certain scholiast calls it, ἐχεχειρία ὕπουλος, ώδίνουσα, πόλεμον. In all three cases one notices a certain rhythm; an increase of brutality and demoralisation persisting to the end of the war and after, and later on a sort of revulsion of thought, an attempt to make sure that such evils shall not happen again. In our time it is the League of Nations movement; after the Thirty Years War it is the effort to distinguish between just and unjust wars, and establish international law, which centres in Grotius' De Jure Pacis et Belli. After the Peloponnesian War it is the magnificent conception of World Citizenship made specially articulate in Zeno's ideal Republic.

In the present paper I have tried to analyse a little more closely the actual reactions of Greek thought and practice to the first of these long strains of embittered war.

In one of the most popular anthology passages in Latin, Servius Sulpicius, writing to console Cicero for his daughter's death, describes how, as he reached Greek waters, sailing from Asia, he began to look about him at the ruins of Greece. ‘Behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, on the right the Piraeus, on the left Corinth, cities which had once been prosperous, but now lay shattered ruins before my sight.’ Oppidum cadavera he goes on to call them—corpses of cities! The picture, it will probably be objected, is overdrawn; certainly the ruin of Greece was, by Cicero's time, already a rhetorical commonplace, to be echoed by Horace, Ovid and Seneca in turn. But it was based upon an essential truth. The Saronic Gulf, once the centre of the world, was now, for all that Greece meant, a dead lake lapping about the foundations of dead cities. In that tragic decay—which was not confined to mainland Greece—we are confronted with one of the most urgent problems of ancient history, and one with a special significance for our generation, who were already living in an age of economic, political and spiritual upheaval, even before the bombs began to turn our own cities into shattered ruins.

This, then, is my reason for reopening a subject on which there is scope for such diverse opinion: adeo maxima quaeque ambigua sunt. If any further justification is required, then I will only add that the recent publication of Professor Michael Rostovtzeff's classic study of the social and economic life of the Hellenistic Age is at once an invitation and a challenge.

If you should ever attempt to motor from Assiût southwards to Baliana and Luxor—an enterprise I do not recommend, for the roads are vile—and, after some twenty-five miles of bumping and shaking, should decide, as my companion decided, to try your luck on the opposite side of the Nile Valley, you will come, after a few miles of a straight but evil road leading west, to another which runs southward again beside a canal separated by about a hundred yards of sandy plain from the great cliffs which form the escarpment of the Libyan Desert. The road which you have reached is no better than the one you have left, the dogs of the district are of a ferocity I found nowhere else in Egypt, and the human inhabitants are surly and hostile; but the natural amenities are considerable. The ordinary Egyptian canal, and so, by consequence, the road which normally runs along it, stretches without a bend for miles, but this particular canal at this point, conforming to the line of the cliffs, which here swing out eastwards, curves round in a great arc, and the road follows. The bank is shaded by a long line of palm-trees, and the view westwards, the reddish-brown trunks and feathery green fronds of the palms seen against a background of yellow sand and red cliffs, is delightful. Turning to the east one sees, stretched out in long perspective, the utter flatness of the Nile valley, clothed in the exquisite green of the young crops, out of which villages rise here and there like islands in a great lake. One such village, seen not far from the road shortly after we have turned to the south, makes a particularly charming effect.

In the Classical Quarterly, 1944, I have dealt with the slender evidence for the Genesia, a public festival of the dead in Athens which was mentioned already in Solon's Axones. Whether or not my suggestion is right that it was introduced by Solon himself as a part of his programme of uniting the classes into the new citizen state by abolishing the festivals of the single clans, or whether the public festival reached farther back, the heortological fact is not in dispute: there existed in Athens, and as far as we know only in Athens, a public festival of the dead, called Genesia, and celebrated in late autumn on the fifth of the month Boedromion with a sacrifice for Mother Earth. That is all we know about it, and in going beyond these clear facts we have to be aware that we pass the border-line into the realm not (I hope) of fiction but of hypothesis, and partly even of pure guesswork. It will depend on the inherent probability of these guesses whether it is worth while to risk them. In my opinion it is worth while, because in the course of our investigation we shall get one unexpected result: namely, the time at which the specifically Athenian custom of burying at home the men killed in action was introduced. And this date, which I believe can be established, will throw some light on the perhaps most famous section of the work of Thucydides, and incidentally on his historical principles.

In Volume LVI of this Journal I published a series of. Attic stemless kylikes with red-figure painting outside and stamped or incised patterns inside. These run from about the middle to the end of the fifth century. Characteristic of the early part of the fourth century, though the earliest examples are to be dated before the end of the fifth, is a series of cup-kotylai with similar decoration which forms the subject of this paper.

The cups range in size from a height of 0·09 m. with a diameter of 0·165 m. to a height of 0·06 m. with a diameter of 0·12 m. Their deep and comparatively narrow bowls presented more difficulties to the stamper than the shallow kylikes and restricted his designs to smaller and simpler patterns.

The earliest group consists of a pair of cups from the same hand. The stamped pattern shows five or six separate palmettes set closely round a small incised central circle and surrounded by a pair of incised circles.

Little serious archaeological work has been carried out in Greece during the war years. The Greek Archaeological Service has been obliged to give all its attention to the conservation of sites and works of art, a task carried out with courage and devotion in often very difficult circumstances. The foreign Schools have been able to carry out little work. The many military works carried out by the occupying forces have had a less rich harvest of antiquities than might have been expected. In many cases little information is available beyond the bare fact that excavations were carried out or finds made; no Greek experts were present and the finds were not handed over to the Greek Archaeological Service.

This article describes new finds only. It does not cover the damage done by acts of war to monuments and museums, which will be described elsewhere. It does include excavations and finds of 1939–40, which have not yet been reported in JHS, and summarises a number of Greek publications of the war years.

I am indebted for information to P. Amandry (on whose articles in BCH lxiv–lxv (1940–1), 231 ff. and lxvi–lxvii (1942–3), 320 ff. this article is largely based), to J. M. Cook and T. W. French, who collected much of the material, to A. D. Keramopoullos and the members of the Greek Archaeological Service of which he is head, who have given information and assistance at every point. I have also made use of the articles in AA 1940, 121 ff.; 1942, 99 ff.

[The premature death of Reginald P. Austin, which took place on April 12, 1943, brought to a wide circle the loss of a singularly loyal and lovable friend, and impoverished all students of Greek archaeology and history, to the study and teaching of which he had made, and would have continued to make, contributions of marked value. His admirably clear and detailed reports on his excavations at Haliartus in 1926 and 1931 (BSA xxvii, 81 ff., xxviii, 128 ff., xxxii, 180 ff.) and his article on the epigraphical contents of an unpublished diary of Sir William Gell (BSA xxvii, 69 ff.) showed those same qualities of thoroughness and accuracy which marked his valuable work on The Stoichedon Style in Greek Inscription.

(1)The Location of Trogilus. The starting-point for this note is the able reinvestigation of the topography of Syracuse made by Knud Fabricius (Klio, Beiheft XXVIII, 1932). It is accepted here that he has proved his main thesis—that Epipolae was not part of the inhabited city at the time of the Sicilian expedition, and remained unoccupied even after it had been enclosed for strategic purposes inside Dionysius' wall. This view, conflicting with those generally held previously, involves considerable changes in the identification of various localities named in our ancient authorities. It is the purpose of the present note to suggest one further change, not considered by Fabricius, which will serve, however, to reinforce his general position.

At the suggestion of Professor Larsen of Chicago, a young American scholar, Dr. C. A. Roebuck, undertook a few years ago to write ‘A History of Messenia from 369 to 146 B.C.’ (diss. Chicago, 1941, pp. iii-128). It is perhaps too late to review it. And it might seem ungracious to criticise it. Though, in Dr. Roebuck's dissertation there is very little that is objectionable (save, perhaps, a question of approach, which I shall deal with presently, and a few points of detail on which I shall dwell at the end of this brief note). The author's merits are unquestioned.