(i) Any attempt to track down this ubiquitous but evasive people must start from the vestiges of Pelasgians in the Homeric epics, which will here be treated as a single authority on the assumption that, whatever may be the secret of their composition, they preserve a consistent record of authentic traditions of the Heroic Age.

The Trojan Catalogue (Il. ii. 811 seqq.), having put the Trojans of Ilium of course at the head of its list, recites the contingents from their kinsfolk and nearest neighbours. To most of them it assigns a seat—to the Trojans led by Pandarus Zelea and the valley of the Aesepus; to the men under the sons of Merops the coast of the Propontis west of the Aesepus with the Adrastean plain and doubtless the valley of the Granicus; to the followers of Asius the Hellespontine shore down to the Narrows below Abydus and including Sestus on the opposite side of the straits. But the Dardanians, next after the Ilians on the list, are left without a home. Dardanus on the Hellespont south of Abydus is impossible; it has far too exiguous an ager, is never mentioned in the Homeric poems, and is incompatible with the indications to be found in them. We must seek Dardania elsewhere.

The alabaster bowl which is our subject is at present in the possession of Dr. J. Hirsch of Geneva and is published with his kind consent. Until recently it was in a private collection in Leipzig; it was presumably acquired in the Mediterranean area several decades ago. Its principal dimensions are:—

Diam. at top, 22 cm.; h. 8 cm.; greatest depth, 5·5 cm.; diam. of the central knob of the base, 4 cm., and of the outer base-ring, 16 cm.; h. of arcade, 4 cm. Measurements seem to be based on an inch of about 2 cm.

The bowl was worked freehand, without the lathe, and is accordingly somewhat uneven and irregular in shape. A deep point in the middle of the bottom indicates that the compass was used to control distances. The carving was done with some form of knife; the cutting is plainly visible round and between the letters of the inscription (fig. 1), at the edges of the hair, and elsewhere.

Professor J. D. Beazley recently discussed in this Journal (xlix. 1 ff.) a fifth-century Attic relief now preserved in Cairness House, Lonmay, Aberdeenshire. He appended a short account, partly from the pen of Colonel C. T. Gordon, of General Thomas Gordon (1788–1841), who brought to this country that relief and various other antiquities, and of the dispersion of the collection in 1850. The relief, however, remained at Cairness, together with two inscribed stelae, one of which has not been published hitherto, while the other has been regarded as lost. These form the subject of the present article.

My warm thanks are due to the late Professor J. Harrower for calling my attention to the inscriptions and supplying me with excellent photographs of them, as also to Colonel Gordon for granting me permission to publish them and for his hospitality at Cairness, where he kindly gave me every facility for examining the stones with a view to verifying and completing the texts I had already deciphered from the photographs.

The statuette illustrated in Fig. 1 and Pl. VII was recently acquired for his Museum by Mr. A. Benaki, who has kindly allowed me to publish it. There are, as everyone knows, many bronzes of this sort, most of them representing either Herakles or Zeus; but a glance at our illustrations, which inevitably do not do full justice to the original, will shew that the new example has few rivals in this series, and few in the whole company of contemporary bronzes. I doubt if there is in existence a figure more characteristic of the archaic conception of Herakles, of the hero as the ideal strong man, short, thickset, and naturally developed: μόρφαν βρἁχυς ψυχὰν δ᾿ἄκαμπτος προσπαλαίσων ἤλθ᾿ ἀνήρ… Pindar certainly had some such conception in mind when he wrote these words, within a year or two of the time when this statuette was made.

The new Herakles is three and five-eighths inches high, and is perfectly preserved except for the loss of part of the club, the bow (once held in the left hand, which is perforated), the right foot, and part of the tang below the left foot. It has a smooth dark green patina. The photographs make detailed description unnecessary, and it will be enough to call attention to a few points.

In April 1898 at Ceglie near Bari there was discovered a large tomb, the principal contents of which consisted of a number of vases, some entire but most of them in a fragmentary condition, which were later acquired by the Taranto Museum, where they now are. Two of these vases, both large volute kraters, on account of the great interest of the subjects and of the general excellence of their composition and drawing, are of the highest importance for the study of early South Italian pottery and it seems surprising that they have remained so long unpublished, despite an ever-increasing amount of literature about them. One, published earlier in the present year, depicts (a) seated Dionysus surrounded by his followers and (b) on the upper register, Perseus terrifying the silens with the Gorgon's head, and below, dancers at the festival of the Karneia. The other vase (Plates VIII, IX) is even more richly figured as it has separate scenes on the neck as well. Its obverse shews (i) a scene from the fight between the Centaurs and Lapiths, (ii) the birth of Dionysus; and the reverse, (i) Herakles served by silens, (ii) an Amazonomachy. Two are subjects common in the repertory of the vase painter, two are rare.

The precise nature of Solon's σεισάχθεια has long been a matter of dispute. There can be no reasonable doubt that Solon abolished arrears of rent, and passed something analogous to an Evicted Tenants' Act. He certainly abolished debts for the nonpayment of which personal freedom had been forfeited, and for the future forbade loans of this type. This does not amount to a wholesale abolition of all debts, both public and private. It is equally certain that mere devaluation, while it would have affected all debts expressed in money, would not have been sufficiently drastic to meet the case of the evicted tenant and the enslaved artisan. Yet there is something to be said for the view that the reduction of the standard coin by some 30 per cent, was an integral part of the σεισάχθεια. The other measures affecting debt would no doubt restore those who had fallen under the load. But in all commercial communities, ancient and modern, in times of economic stress there are business men, industrialists and farmers, who are struggling along under burdens of debt, and who bravely continue the struggle. These are the persons whose activities constitute the mainspring of economic life in any profit-making economy. It is precisely this class whose economic circumstances would have been alleviated by the currency devaluation which Solon certainly enacted.

The following account of recent discoveries in Greece is shorter than usual, for the sake of economy of space in the JHS. There is, moreover, actually less to report, since, largely owing to the economic situation, there has been unusually little excavation in Greece, and work on many sites has been virtually, or entirely, held up. The source of the greater part of what follows is the forthcoming report in the Anzeiger of the Jahrbuch of the German Archaeological Institute. To Professor Karo, the author of that report, I owe a special debt of gratitude for his generosity in allowing me to make free use of his manuscript; and I would here offer my thanks to others who have supplied me with information or photographs.

We are familiar only with the highlymoralised version which appears in Genesis. There it has been moulded by the teaching of the Hebrew prophets as to the nature of God and His relation with mankind. In Genesis the myth is used as the vehicle of a meditation on the origin and nature of sin, the permanent value of which is not in dispute. But what was its original form before it had undergone this moralising process ? I do not know whether any information is available. But it is not impossible that in the original form of the myth, common to all the Semitic peoples, the moral character of God was not beyond criticism from the Christian standpoint; which every modern writer does, in fact, adopt instinctively. An a-moral or immoral deity may be a contradiction in terms to us. But only to us. Such a being might well be defied by man, and perhaps eventually defeated by him. The Babylonian version of the story of the Flood, which is older than the one in Genesis, shews that the idea of a deity hostile to mankind presented no difficulty to the Semitic mind. This conception, with Prometheus in the role of Adam, might help to solve the problem of the relations between Prometheus and Zeus which Mr. Kitto regards as the heart of the difficulty (p. 14).