Messer Giannozzo Manetti—if we may give credit to his enthusiastic biographer—was accustomed to say that there were three books which he had got by heart from long handling—Saint Paul's Epistles, Augustine's De civitate Dei, and (among the heathen) Aristotle's Ethics. There may be some exaggeration here; but there is no doubt that Manetti, from the beginning to the end of his long literary career, was deeply interested in the moral writings of Aristotle. Vespasiano tells a story of him in the early period of his studies. He used to give a Latin Ethics to somebody, and taking the original himself, would reel it off so fast in Latin that his hearer was unable to follow him.

The showcases of the antique-dealers in Odos Pandrosou are full of little lekythoi which were painted for the tombs of humble men of the people, and which to-day are destined for modest purchasers or for the Inspectors of the Archaeological Section of the Ministry of Education, while for more important purchasers there are hidden away somewhere else works of much greater value. It is seldom that we are stopped by the art or the subject of one of these lekythoi.

In 1943 when I was making an inventory of the stock of one antique-dealer—that which was on show—I picked out one lekythos which the owner gladly presented to the National Museum (Plate IVa, Figs, 1 and 2). From the funeral pyre the surface of the vase has taken a brown-grey colour, and the many joins show that it had been thrown to be broken and burnt with the dead body.

A curious male figure wrapped in a himation up to the top of the head, so that only the -eye and the upper part of the head remain free, walks rapidly to the left, raising one leg vigorously. He lifts his himation with his hand to help him move. High boots cover his legs to a point just below the knee. The hanging wreath does not appear to be related to the interpretation of the picture, but is taken from the commonplaces of funeral lekythoi, especially white ones.

The curious head which is illustrated, in actual size, on Plate VI., was bought by my colleague, Captain F. N. Pryce, and me from a well-known Greek dealer at Cairo in December 1918, and is now in the British Museum. It is carved in the beam of a stag's antler, the natural burr or coronet of the horn representing either a crown or curled, upstanding hair, while the longitudinal corrugations imitate hanging tresses. The smooth, round base of the shed antler very aptly resembles the top of a man's head (Fig. 1). All these features are unworked. The rest of the horn is carved in the shape of a human face wearing a full beard and turned-up moustaches. Across the forehead is a heavy ridged moulding, which runs into the edge of the beard on each side of the face. Whether this moulding represents the band of a headdress, or a ceremonial fillet, or the rim of a crown, or is simply a decorative device to help the transition from the projecting hair to the receding face, it is not possible to decide, for its details will not bear strict interpretation. The hair of eyebrows, moustache and beard is marked with close striations.

Certain passages in Overbeck are generally supposed to refer to a statue by Scopas of Apollo Smintheus, an aspect of the god to which classical students were probably introduced in Strabo's time as they are to-day by the old priest's prayer in the first book of the Iliad. It seems at first a not very serious suggestion that one at least of these passages reads as though the mouse alone, not the statue, were the work of Scopas. But further investigation indicates that the ambiguity is a little more than apparent, indeed real enough to have sheltered a few scholars in their endeavour to escape the difficulties and confusion of reconciling the usual interpretation of the Strabo passage with coin types of Alexandria Troas, and with what can be surmised of Scopas's style.

An inquiry into the classification of the various Island fabrics of the seventh century is accompanied by many difficulties, some of which are the peculiar inheritance of the subject. Not only was much of the material discovered without grouping or stratification in the Catharsis grave at Rheneia; the very fact of the original provenance of these vases from Delos at once deprives the circumstances of their discovery of much of its a priori significance. Further, by far the greater part of the material, from Rheneia remains unpublished; and, lastly, there will always be the difficulty, often amounting to impossibility, of classifying some of the fabrics at all without examining the vases in the hand—a process which involves a visit to several comparatively inaccessible places. The result of these various and partially inevitable causes is a misfortune, inasmuch as Cycladic vase-painting, despite many borrowings, possesses a definite and often very interesting individuality of its own. Of this the published finds have for some years given us a simple and fairly intelligible picture, a chiaroscuro effect, one might say, in which the central figures appeared clearly, if not sharply, grouped against the background. Gradually, however, as our knowledge and materials increase, it appears that the straight-forwardness of the picture was in some measure deceptive. In reality the subject is beset by complications, and there is, unfortunately, much for the chilly work of analysis to do before we can hope to appreciate for its own sake what the various schools of Island painting have to offer, or to understand their point of view in relation to that of their contemporaries in Crete, in Ionia and on the mainland of Greece. Accordingly, the appearance of a work containing much new material was a very welcome event. In Professor Dugas' book the subject receives its first specialised treatment, but his classification presents one or two difficulties, and the notes which follow have been put together as an alternative solution of the problems, independently arrived at.

Personal names in ordinary use between the fall of Knossos and the fall of Mycenae could have got into the tradition of heroic poetry in three ways. They could have persisted in common use (as some certainly did); or they could have existed as a stock of ‘names suitable for heroes’ on which the poets drew at will; or they could have come down attached to stories or incidents or professions, with the probability that some of them are historical. An analysis of all the personal names in the tablets is a task for someone better qualified to judge the probabilities of identification, but there may be some value in a preliminary study of the fifty-eight names listed by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick as ‘Names which can be exactly paralleled in Homer’. For the cautious restraint shown throughout their great book is as good a guarantee of accurate interpretation as could be found. The names are fairly evenly divided between Iliadand Odyssey—17 in both, 29 in the Iliad only and 12 in the Odyssey only—and of these Ilos or Iros must be omitted. The number seems too small to show significant tendencies, and it is the more surprising that they are found to cluster round certain localities or heroes. Names found in the tablets are printed in italics.

Athenaeus (474e) quotes the description of the karchesion cup by Kallixeinos of Rhodes, a third-century B.C. author: ‘a tall cup, slightly contracted at the middle with handles which extend down to the base’. Scholars have easily recognised in this a variety of kantharos, a cup with two vertical handles and either with a low foot or the footless sessile, both types current in Kallixeinos' day. The ordinary kantharos in its Classical form, with a stem and high-swung handles, may have derived its name, shared with the scarab beetle, from the wing-like appearance of the handles rather than from its overall similarity to a boat, which is one of the other meanings of the word (Ath. 473d–474c). It is doubtful whether Greek usage was ever very precise in these matters but ‘karchesion’ was probably reserved for the footless variety regardless of handle shape.

§ 1. It is less easy to forgive Xenophon for telling us so little about the foundation of Megalopolis than for telling us nothing at all about the foundation of Messene. We would give much to know the details of the building of the city on the slopes of Ithome and the synoecism of Messenia; but Megalopolis, in its double character of a federate city and a federal capital, presented such complicated problems that the silence of those who could have best told us how those problems were solved is more aggravating than many of such silences to the curiosity of posterity. In this paper I propose to deal with one problem which seems never to have been quite realised.

The name vase of the Painter of the Oxford Brygos, a fragmentary red-figure cup from Caere of the late archaic period, is well known (Plates I, IIa). Since it came to Oxford in 1911 it has been augmented from time to time by new fragments; the latest addition is a fragment formerly in New York, now on indefinite loan to the Ashmolean Museum, which was seen by Dr Dietrich von Bothmer to belong to the Oxford Brygos cup. This fragment has now been incorporated in the cup and several other pieces have been rearranged, on both sides, to good advantage. There seems to be no reason to question the identity of the artist as originally defined by Beazley. The cup is signed under the handle by Brygos as potter, but the style is quite different from that of Brygos' most frequent collaborator, the Brygos Painter. If A. Cambitoglou is correct in identifying the Brygos Painter and Potter as one and the same, we must assume that on this occasion Brygos potted for a second artist. The purpose of this article is primarily to draw attention to the restoration of the Oxford cup and to attempt a re-interpretation of the vase as a whole; it also, however, has a secondary purpose, to publish for the first time the only other vase securely assigned by Beazley to the same artist. The latter is a cup formerly on the Roman market and preserved in drawings in the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. While we do not suggest that the two cups are necessarily a pair, they do have some interesting features in common. First, the Rome cup (Plate IIb—d).

The route by which the army of Xerxes marched across the plateau of Anatolia has never been determined with certainty. On general considerations it may be stated with perfect confidence that the army crossed the Taurus by the pass of the Cilician Gates. The reasons are conclusive; there was, in fact, no other way, and the matter is so generally admitted as to need no discussion. Thereafter the great army gathered on the north side of Taurus at a place called Kritala in Cappadocia (Herodotus, vii. 26). Whether Kritala was a town or a locality (such as a plain with a river) is not stated; but, taking into consideration all the conditions, one can say with certainty that it was situated either in the fertile plain of Tyana or in the equally fertile and well-watered plain that lies between Kybistra and the lake called in modern times Ak-Gyol. The next point stated exactly by Herodotus in the route of the army is Kelainai at the source of the Maeander. The question is how the journey was performed between those points, the Cilician Pass on the east and Kelainai on the west.

Every large museum contains some portraits, which can with certainty be assigned to the Flavian period: a layman indeed can recognize the ladies of this age by the high and ugly coiffure then fashionable, but the majority of these are quite second-rate works. Not even the glamour of an imperial name will awaken much interest in such. But there are a few others really of superlative excellence which are consequently, as the commoner chronological sign-posts are wanting, assigned in most catalogues to whatever period the individual writer regards as the ‘best period’ of Roman art. Three or four of them I have ventured to select and I have added notes upon one or two others, which help to explain the group and justify further the date to which I assign them. No doubt the list could be extended considerably, but a few will perhaps suffice as a beginning, if they are typical of the best which the age could produce.

H. van Thiel demonstrated only 16 years ago that the text of Longus's novel rests on two manuscripts, Laur. conv. sopp. 627 (s. xiii2) and Vat. gr. 1348 (s. xvi1). The descripti nevertheless yield historical information, and so it is as well to establish their relationships. Three scholars who knew them at first hand have tried: A. Kairis in his edition (Athens 1932), H. Dörrie in De Longi Achillis Tatii Heliodori memoria (Göttingen 1935), and E. Vilborg in his edition of Achilles Tatius (Gothenburg 1955). None of them arrived at the truth. Perhaps the same applies to me, because I have contented myself with collating at most book i and checking a few passages elsewhere; but I can give reasons for my disagreement.

I will first set out my stemma. As everyone's symbols conflict, I will use none except F for the Laurentianus and V for the Vaticanus, but in my discussion I will abbreviate the shelfmarks. Relationships that I do not discuss are adequately treated by Kairis, Dörrie, or Vilborg.

The three marble statue bases found in February 1922, incorporated as integral parts of the wall of Athens, are unique records of Attic art. While their supreme importance was recognised from the moment of their discovery, their exact contribution to our knowledge of Attic art is a matter upon which a variety of opinions has been expressed.

M. Philadelpheus, who as Ephor of antiquities of Attica was responsible for their custody at the time of discovery, was the first to publish them. He describes each briefly. No. I. he dates to the end of the sixth century B.C. No. II. he leaves undated, and No. III. he assigns either to the Peisistratid period or to the period of the Republic before 480. He makes no attempt to deal with the works in detail or to analyse their artistic significance.

M. Oikonomos has published a brief account of II. b, in which he suggests an interpretation of the so-called ‘hockey’ game. He disregards the problems of style and date.

Dr. della Seta of the Italian School at Athens is the only authority at present to discuss the artistic value and significance of Bases I. and II. and to attempt to place them chronologically in the Attic series. His exhaustive and attractive articles deserve the closest attention.

In one of the most stimulating chapters of his recent contribution to Homeric studies, Professor D. L. Page adduces considerable evidence to suggest that the traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey diverged at a fairly early date and, like isolated dialects, came to differ appreciably in their diction. Attractive and probable as this suggestion is as a whole, it will always be possible to wonder about the details of the evidence. In this paper it is intended to wonder whether the absence of φλόξ and its cognates from that part of the Odyssey that is certainly ‘Homer's’ is rightly adduced as evidence for this divergence of the traditions.

Page's argument runs as follows. The absence of φλόξ must be due either to ignorance or to chance. But it cannot be due to chance, since there are more than fifty opportunities for its use. Therefore the root, so common in the Iliad, must have been ‘wholly unknown to the Odyssean poet’.

It appears that in order to show that φλόξ was not part of the Odyssey's traditional vocabulary, since it is this that diverges from the Iliad, Page must claim that the root was not part of the poet's vocabulary at all. Can this be regarded as a probable claim? Our available evidence is scarcely sufficient to differentiate the sub-dialects of Ionic (it is admitted that both poets are Ionians), so that it is impossible to confirm that differences of nontechnical vocabulary were a feature of the differentiation. Our view of the matter has therefore to depend on a subjective estimate of the probabilities. Two points are not unworthy of notice: first, the banishing of φλόξ from the Odyssey is only achieved by the attribution to a rhapsodic hack of the ‘Continuation’, where in ω 71, φλόξ appears in just the circumstances where, as I hope to show, it is to be expected; and second, derivatives of the root are used by prose and verse writers both Ionian and Attic, and also in the κοινή, in circumstances that make it impossible to suppose that every instance is a reminiscence of a long defunct epic word.

Professor I. Noshy, in a paper read to the 1968 conference of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Libya and published in its proceedings, has re-formulated Chamoux's view of the chronology of the reign of Arkesilas III, to which I proposed an alternative in JHS lxxxvi (1966) 99–103. Noshy upholds Chamoux's view that Arkesilas' appeal to Samos (Hdt. iv 162–3) was made to Polykrates before 525 (when he medized during Cambyses' Egyptian expedition (Hdt. iii 13 and iv 165), after which, according to Noshy (p. 73) he could only have appealed to his Persian patrons). He attempts to reduce the awkwardly long interval between these events and Arkesilas' murder by updating Aryandes' Libyan expedition, which followed the murder, to 519. Like Chamoux, he connects Aryandes' rebellion against Darius and his execution with the visit of Darius to Egypt, recorded by Polyainos (vii 11) and fixed to 518 by the date of the death of the Apis bull which Darius mourned. In Noshy's view, Aryandes' Libyan expedition was not authorised by Darius, whose impending visit caused him to recall it before the wider purpose of subduing the Libyan tribes was accomplished (pp. 64–5). He suggests further, that, contrary to the testimony of Herodotus (iv 164.4–5.1), Arkesilas' sojourn at Barka, which he places between 525 and 519, was by his own choice, with the object of subduing aristocratic revolt in western Cyrenaica, and that he never had to take refuge there, but was able to return to Cyrene between expeditions, only handing over the government to Pheretima while he was away on campaigns (p. 69). During this period, Noshy supposes that he founded Euhesperides to serve as an outpost in western Cyrenaica (pp. 70–1).

Mr John Boardman's suggestion that the sickles dedicated to Artemis Orthia at Sparta were used as strigils is most enlightening, and perhaps I may be allowed to find support in it for a theory that I have advanced elsewhere, that this form of sickle is the ξυήλη of Xenophon, Anabasis iv 7.16; iv 8.25. It is true that the dedicating inscriptions never use the word ξυήλη. The sickle is only named twice, being called δρέπανον once and once δρϵπάνη. But this may be explained by the late date of all the inscriptions. Ξυήλη is only found in the two passages already cited from Xenophon, in the lexicographers (Hesychius and the Souda s-v.), who also give the Doric form ξνάλη, and in Xenophon's Cyropaedia (vi 2.32), where it means a spokeshave for smoothing the shafts of spears. It is probable that the word was obsolete even at Sparta in the Hellenistic period, and that even in Xenophon's time it was not in common use throughout Greece. Pollux (i 137) mentions the Laconian ξυΐνη in a list of weapons, including δρϵπάνη and δορνδρέπανον, and this misspelling (more probably that of a scribe writing from dictation than Pollux's own) does indicate the unfamiliarity of the word.

This paper does not profess to give anything more than a brief account of the important results obtained by the German and Austrian excavators up to the time of my visit to these sites in June. I should like in particular to direct the attention of English archaeologists to Western Asia Minor as a field of research that is practically untouched, especially as regards remains of the Hellenistic period. Brilliant results await the scientific explorer of important sites such as Sardis, Tralies, Laodicea, and Apamea, and all these are extremely easy of access. The English traveller cannot help feeling ashamed of English archaeology when he sees the unintelligible mass of ruins and brushwood that covers the site of the Artemisium at Ephesus.

Pausanias, in a number of familiar passages, has given us the names of certain ancient monuments associated with Tantalus and Pelops, and visible in his own day on Mt. Sipylus; he speaks as a native of the district. In the problem of identifying these with the various monuments known today in the Smyrna-Magnesia region, there is still no agreement; opinion, after much discussion, has divided itself into two main camps, one of which finds them in the immediate vicinity of Magnesia (Manisa), while the other locates them in the hills north of Smyrna, near the old ‘Aeolic’ acropolis of that city.