Professor Wace's many distinguished contributions to archaeology have been in a variety of fields. In all, however, he has kept an eye on the technical side of the problem, which so often illuminates our research. I, therefore, offer this investigation in his honour.

After Mr. Charles F. Binns had in 1929 published his theory of the firing of Athenian vases successively under oxidising, reducing, and re-oxidising conditions it became clear that the glaze on Greek vases turned red or black according to the conditions of the firing. This theory has recently been endorsed and amplified by Mr. Theodor Schumann, a ceramic chemist, who, at the instigation of the well-known archaeologist Mr. Carl Weickert, conducted during the war a series of experiments in the chemical laboratory of the Schütte Akt. Ges. für Tonindustrie in Heisterholz, Westphalia, and at long last successfully imitated the Attic black glaze. Like Binns, he used as the only ingredients for the glaze a clay that contained iron—i.e. red-burning—and a small quantity of alkali (potash or soda). His important new contribution was the peptising of the clay, whereby he eliminated the heavier particles. By using only the fluid made of the smaller and therefore lighter particles of the clay, he obtained a glaze of remarkable thinness, equal in quality and appearance to the Attic one.

‘The vases of the classical period are but the reflection of classical beauty; the vases of the archaic period are archaic beauty itself.’ So Beazley; an indisputable and valuable truth, but a truth that needs some explanation. In spite of all the detailed work that has been done in the last fifty years and more on the development of Greek vase-painting and its relation to other arts, its nature still remains something of a problem. The issue is confused, of course, by the fact that vase-paintings are almost our only original Greek drawings—almost the only key-hole through which we can peep at archaic and classical painting—and this gives them an importance independent of their intrinsic worth.

Mitten auf dem von einem starken Mauerring umgebenen Hügel der zweiten Stadt von Troja liegen die vier Herrenhäuser, Megara langgestreckter Form mit tiefer und offener, nach Südosten gerichteter Vorhalle. Es sind einzellige Hallenbauten, die eine Unterteilung in zwei oder mehrere Innenräume nur beschränkt zulassen. Wo größere Raumbedürfnisse auftreten, müssen wie in Troja mehrere solcher Hallenbauten nebeneinander hingestellt werden. Ihre Bauweise nutzt zweifellos die Erfahrungen Alt-Anatoliens und des gleichzeitigen Vorderasiens. Ihre Bauästhetik dagegen—streng richtungsgebundene Achse durch Vorhalle, Tor bis zum Herd im Innern, anthropoide Proportion, unmittelbare Zugänglichkeit—findet nichts Entsprechendes im vorderen Orient oder in Ägypten, ja widerstreitet allen dort verbreiteten Wohnformen und Baugewohnheiten.

The uniformity of Mycenaean pottery in its third phase (L.H. III) has often, and naturally, been remarked upon. It was made, we may almost say, by mass-production methods, in so far as such methods may be achieved when the only machine available to aid the potter's hand is his wheel. In the ‘Potter's shop’ at Zygouries certain types repeat themselves by the score with scarcely any variation in size or shape, and with only a little in decoration; from Cyprus, as the Corpus Vasorum will show, one may see in the British Museum alone dozens of small stirrup-jars with so little to differentiate one from another that one cannot remember them individually. More than this; we can find stirrup-jars (and the same is true of other types) from Rhodes or Mycenae or even Egypt that are indistinguishable from the Cypriot ones. There is in fact plenty of evidence to justify the use of terms like uniformity, standardisation, sameness, even monotony, that are sometimes employed in speaking of L.H. III pottery.

At one time it was generally assumed, even by distinguished Byzantinists, that the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 put a sudden stop to the production of all objects of quality in the East Christian world, and that after that date Byzantine art at once degenerated into a peasant art throughout the whole of the area touched by the Turks. Recent research has, however, led to some modification of this view, and though work of the same superb quality as that produced in the great middle period of Byzantine art was not executed, we now know that in addition to painted icons, such things as embroideries, carved reliquaries, crosses of chased metal work or champlevé enamel and objects in bone or even ivory, were produced, which were by no means negligible from the artistic standpoint. Their production continued, moreover, through the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries; only after that date did Christian art in Greece and the Balkans assume an essentially ‘peasant’ character. It is indeed to the sixteenth century that the greater number of painted icons that are now to be found in museums and private collections in Greece are to be assigned, and though there was much hack-work, paintings of very high quality were also produced amongst them.

Alan Wace and I spent three memorable years together, wellnigh half a century ago, in the British School at Athens, of which he was later to be for nine years the Director. The first book which either of us published was the Catalogue of the Sparta Museum, in the writing of which we collaborated, and I have followed with keen interest his subsequent career as scholar, administrator and teacher. I therefore regard it as a privilege to make a contribution however slight to the volume of the British School Annual which will serve as a tangible expression of his friends' admiration of his past achievements and their heartfelt wishes for his future happiness.

It seems appropriate to contribute to this volume an unpublished fragment from Sparta of a list of victorious σφαιρεῖς of which Professor Wace kindly gave me a squeeze many years ago, and to append to it some miscellaneous notes on the lists of this class published in IG V. 1, 674–688. Some of these notes have already appeared in print, in earlier volumes of the Annual, but it may be helpful to collect and slightly amplify them here, using the prosopographical evidence now available for establishing a more exact date for some of the lists. It seems also a suitable occasion to examine briefly a new interpretation of these lists suggested in a recent work on Sparta.

We offer here for the inspection and criticism of Professor Wace a new text of the decrees passed by the Athenians late in the fifth century concerning their faithful allies the Neopolitans, who lived on the coast of Thrace where now is the modern town of Kavalla.

The larger fragments of the stone, in two groups, have been built into a bed of plaster in the Epigraphical Museum at Athens, where they bear the Inventory Number 6598 (Plate 23). A smaller fragment, which belongs to the first decree, but which cannot be fitted into a definite place in the reconstruction of the monument, bears the Inventory Number 6589 (cf. Fig.).

Nothing Greek is alien to Alan Wace; a handsome Byzantine manuscript is one of the latest productions of Greek skill, and a study of one belonging to Pembroke College seems peculiarly in place. Wace came up in 1898 when I was in Russia, but we made good friends when I got home in 1899; we called each other ‘Godbrother’, having discovered a common godfather who had neglected us equally. Great was my delight when in 1902 he got distinction in Classical Archaeology, and yet greater when he gained his first Fellowship that made possible his distinguished future career.

In honour of Professor Alan Wace, who has spent some fifty fruitful years in Greco-Roman archæology, I dedicate this paper. During that epoch his efforts in this sphere have been widespread. He has unearthed many finds and various archæological data of the utmost importance in Greece, particularly at Mycenae, and in Egypt both in Alexandria and Hermopolis Magna. By his discoveries and contributions, which have been recognised as worthy of highest esteem, he has shed much interesting light on various aspects of life in the Graeco-Roman world. As an ex-colleague in the Faculty of Arts, Farouk I University, I have been in close touch with him during the last seven years and he has always shown himself to be an indispensable source of information and a scholar of wide learning.