There has been no dearth, since Plutarch’s day at least, of erudite theories about what message the E at Apollo’s temple was meant to convey to visitors. Yet no account so far has added up to a truly compelling answer, not for lack of ingenuity, but because the various approaches have tended so strongly towards the sophisticated and artful, rather than the probable. This article will review why the familiar answers are more impressive than convincing, and will propose in their place a much simpler explanation: namely that the E was meant to represent the mysterious itself, reminding pilgrims that they were entering a realm where logos continued to hold sway, to be sure, as the other inscriptions testified, but where the human intellect must leave room for mantic wisdom, and where logical reasoning must be supplemented with contemplation and meditation upon the enigmatic, the hidden, and the ineffable.

This paper investigates the information that can be drawn from the Linear B tablets in Rooms 7–8 (Archives Complex) and their context, which advocate the ephemeral character of these documents. The morphological and syntactical traits of the various scribes, as well as the physical characteristics of the artifacts themselves, point to non-conventional organisation patterns. The lack of systematic arrangement at all levels of scribal production raises questions regarding the likelihood of having a storage area for tablets kept in the Archives Complex (AC) for an extended period, from several months to a year. Whether these rooms could cope with storing long term (from 2–3 months up to 1 year?) an ever-increasing number of written documents is now open to question. In all aspects, the Linear B documents and their spatially limited context present us with difficulties in accepting their categorisation as an official, archival, assemblage. Moreover, all the archaeological data point to a more temporary and slipshod corpus of tablets than previously thought.

The following article discusses the significance of a stool carried by persons referred to in ancient Greek sources (from Old Comedy to Plutarch) as diphrophoroi. As I argue, the iconography suggests that this piece of furniture was often used by attendants responsible for their mistresses’ outfit, make-up and hairstyle. By extension, the most famous representation of two girls with stools on their heads on the east Parthenon frieze can be interpreted as an allusion to the ritual dressing and embellishing of Athena's statue.