There are few truths that are more forcibly impressed on the attention of any one engaged in restoring the lost monuments of antiquity than the painful one—that no form of written words is sufficient to convey a distinct idea of a building which has been destroyed. No adequate reproduction of its form can be made unless the words are accompanied by a diagram or drawing of some sort, or when these cannot be obtained, unless some sufficient remains of the building still exist to make its restoration possible, or if neither of these be attainable, unless it proves to be part of a known series—in other words, unless some edifices exist, either before or after it in date, so similar in form and purpose as to enable us from a study of their peculiarities to appreciate the meaning of the terms applied to the one we are attempting to restore.

The Temples of the Jews are a conspicuous illustration of this truth. Though so minutely described in the Bible or by Josephus, nothing can be more discrepant than the notions entertained by restorers of their forms and dimensions, and it is only very recently that we have begun to perceive that they form a part of a series (though it must be confessed not of familiar or well understood types), and that we begin to realize their forms with anything like distinctness. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, were important buildings of which we knew nothing till very recently, except from written descriptions; and nothing could be more various than the restorations that were proposed to reconcile their features with the verbal texts. Thanks to the excavations conducted by Messrs. Newton and Wood, we now know what the real appearances of these celebrated buildings were with sufficient exactness for all practical purposes.

The discovery of a new “Hittite” inscription was one of the more solid results of a short and too hurried journey in Asia Minor which I made with Mr. J. W. Crowfoot during July and August of last year, and its publication may not be inopportune at a moment when fresh interest has been aroused in this species of script by the discoveries of Mr. Arthur Evans in Crete.

After a rather abortive attempt to re-explore the obscure and rugged borderland between Lycaonia and Pamphylia, the net result of which was the discovery of just enough to make the topography of this dark corner even less intelligible than before, we turned towards Cappadocia, where we had hopes of finding at least some pre-Hellenic monuments. Years ago Professor Ramsay and Mr. Hogarth had heard a report of what was presumably a Hittite inscription near Nev-sheher (Soandos), a town two days' journey west of Caesareia Mazaca: important things were said to have turned up near the latter city since M. Chantre's visit: and we learnt also of the existence of hieroglyphic stones at Arapison (Zoropassos) on the Halys.

The epistates of the prytaneis is last attested in 403/2 and the epistates of the proedroi is first recorded in 379/8. So much for the direct epigraphic evidence. Though Rhodes believed that the proedroi might not have been in existence as late as the 390s, MacDowell and Hansen proposed that they were instituted soon after 403/2. But a little noted passage of Apollodorus suggests a low date for the introduction of proedroi.

The coin of Sicyon, of the obverse of which a drawing by Mr. F. Anderson (made over a photograph) is given here, has been twice published both times by Professor Percy Gardner.

The inscription on the obverse, which lends special interest to this piece, is unique among adscititious inscriptions upon Greek coins, not only in its elaborate character, but in the manner of its execution. Such inscriptions are in other cases graffiti, scratched with a point; this is pricked into the metal with a pointed instrument.

The British excavations at Mycenae in 1953 had the following main objectives: the further exploration of the Prehistoric Cemetery outside the Cyclopean walls to the west of the Lion Gate, the area south of the Perseia Krene where a fine wall of ashlar poros was discovered in 1952, the houses to the north and south of the House of the Oil Merchant, and further investigation of the Cyclopean Terrace Building. At the same time work was begun on the excavation of the area within the Acropolis between the South House and Tsountas' House. The excavations were supported by a research grant from the American Philosophical Society, with contributions from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the British Academy, the Bollingen Foundation, and the British School at Athens, under whose aegis the work was conducted.

In the Prehistoric Cemetery several tombs of the Middle Helladic period were discovered. On the northern edge of the cemetery an interesting group of graves was found, one of the latest Mycenaean period, L.H. IIIC, and two of the developed Geometric period. With the larger of the latter, a cist grave, nineteen vases were found which included undecorated vases of excellent fabric and a shallow bowl of ‘Pie Ware’ which demonstrate the contemporaneity of these styles. These vases, together with two others from a Proto-Geometrie grave dug into the ruins of the House of Shields, form a series illustrating the gradual evolution of culture at Mycenae from the end of the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. They show that there was no sudden break in its development, but only a slow evolution as in Attica. The ‘Dorian Invasion’ was not a cultural revolution.

The collection of Greek inscriptions in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, has been much increased during the last four decades. It will therefore be useful to give a complete list, and, where it seems to be advisable, a full description of these sixty-four texts in stone, bronze and wood, twenty-four of which are unpublished, as far as I am able to ascertain, or have been published without full transcription.

The object of the present paper is to give some account of the scheme of political and social reform for the Peloponnese, which was propounded in the year 1415, by Gemistos Plethon, in the form of two pamphlets, addressed respectively to the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel Palaeologus II., and to his son, Theodore II., who at that time held the office of Despot of the Byzantine province of the Morea. These are entitled and . They were first printed at Antwerp in 1575, as an appendix to the first edition of Stobaeus, W. Canter being the editor; but the manuscript from which this text was derived was imperfect, and the first complete edition was that of Dr. Ellissen of Göttingen, who published the ‘Addresses,’ after a collation of a manuscript existing at Florence—with a German translation, and an excellent Introduction and notes—in 1860, in the fourth part of his Analekten der mittel- und neugriechischen Litteratur. The first person however who in modern times drew the attention of scholars to the importance of their contents was Prof. Fallmerayer, in his Geschichte der Morea, published in 1830. Though the proposals which they contain never were, and in all probability never could have been carried into effect, yet a greater interest attaches to them than to mere paper schemes and imaginary systems, because they were intended to be adapted to the circumstances of the case.

The modern convention for printing dialogues includes printing the names of the speakers on the margin at the beginning of their statements. But this practice was virtually unknown in ancient Greek dialogues. Instead, the most common convention for showing the shift from one speaker to another is through punctuation such as the colon, the παραγράφος or a horizontal stroke. Recently, N. G. Wilson has attributed the inclusion of the names of the speakers at the transitional points in Greek dialogues to Theodoret of Cyrus (mid-fifth century CE; composed Eranistes in 447) who, in this view, ‘deserves the credit for devising a literary convention that is now regarded as essential’.

There is no denying that Theophrastus ranks among the most prolific Peripatetic philosophers. Diogenes Laertius lists 225 items in his bibliography, some of them perhaps twice—first as an independent treatise, then as part of a larger work. As time went on, this vast oeuvre suffered the usual vicissitudes: the overwhelming majority of it has been partly or entirely lost. In sharp contrast to the Frankish West, where, despite great losses, more texts were in circulation under Theophrastus' name than was justified, in the ever shrinking Byzantine world we find comparatively few references to him. But this surely does not mean that the small number of references are unreliable.