In my last article I tried to show that there is no adequate evidence for the statement that the Greek frequently jumped fifty feet or more, and still less for the theories of a ‘triple jump’ or a ‘hop, skip, and jump,’ which have been suggested simply to explain such a record. Other misconceptions are due to the same cause. The old idea, that the rods which so frequently occur in vase-paintings of the palaestra are jumping-poles, has been long since abandoned, and they are now recognised as akontia, or possibly measuring rods (κανόνες).

During a visit to Corone (the ancient Asine and medieval Coron) in March of this year, I copied and took impressions of a stone which had been recently found in the Venetian fortress there, not far from the church of Ἄγιος Χαράλαμπος. It is a fragment of a white marble stele, of which only the left margin is preserved. Height ·365 m.; breadth ·16 m.; thickness ·09 m.

The letters are small and carelessly formed, often running into each other and rendering the reading somewhat difficult.

I. In spite of much discussion, the question of Apollo versus Athlete in this famous group of monuments remains undecided. Though there is considerable difference in detail, the rendering of the hair as a purely athletic coiffure is common to all the replicas, but an additional feature in an unpublished head in the British Museum seems to have escaped notice, and the light it throws on the subject is such as perhaps to justify a fresh consideration of the evidence.

One of the most curious of the Greek stories about Egypt is that which ascribed the building of the Third Pyramid of Gîzeh to a woman, according to the usual tale, the famous courtesan Rhodopis. We find this story given in various forms by Herodotus, Diodorus, and Strabo. Herodotus would not credit it (ii. 134), but it was evidently generally accepted among the Greeks in Egypt, so much so that the native historian, Manetho, when called upon by the Greek rulers of Egypt to write the history of his country, himself attributed the building of the pyramid to a woman, an Egyptian queen, Nitokris, the heroine of another Herodotean story (ii. 100). This Nitokris Manetho places at the end of the VIth Dynasty. Thus Nitokris and Rhodopis were connected, and Professor Petrie in his ‘History’ (i.p. 105) considers, that the Herodotean Rhodopis is ‘evidently another version of Nitokris, whom Manetho describes as fair and ruddy.’ In reality however it would seem that Manetho's Nitokris was a version of Rhodopis rather than Rhodopis a version of Nitokris.

Those who have written upon the Greek Oracles in this country have been content, for the most part, to accept without criticism the traditional accounts of the procedure at these institutions. Where the meaning of a custom appears entirely strange and unsympathetic, there seems to be little to choose between one account of its details and another. Truth is hard enough to discover when the subject is intelligible; when the whole sphere of enquiry is dark its claims yield to those of the picturesque. This has been the fate of the oracles; their place in the life of the Greeks cannot be explained to the satisfaction of our reason and therefore they demand that they should be represented to our imagination with all possible violence. But the very reason which makes us prone to accept any account of the oracles and their procedure if it be sufficiently lurid and effective, should make us exercise the greatest caution before we endorse any traditional account as a fact. We are not the first to refuse our approbation to the oracles, and to demand in the place of intellectual conviction a striking appeal to the imagination.