Heavenly bodies figure in the works of both Homer and Hesiod, but their functions in the two poems mainly concerned are very different, as accords with the contrasting character of the Iliad and of the Works and Days. For the moment it is enough to note that Hesiod's attention is directed mainly to constellations, Homer's (so to call the poet of the Iliad) to individual stars. The passages which establish the fact are few, but as the precise meaning of some of them is in doubt, it is necessary to begin with an examination of the most important.

A group of ten copper and copper alloy Minoan tools from the Ashmolean Museum's Cretan collection is analysed. Though the component elements are recorded, the emphasis is on metallographic aspects of the objects. By considering these sets of information together we can learn how craftsmen treated the types of metal available in order to suit the requirements of the intended products. Many details of the stages undergone by the metal in its transformation into a finished item can be recovered. Much of this process is dictated by the physical properties of the metal itself. Two standards of finishing existed, relating to the available metal and its intended use. Though limited in the range of its conclusions, the study shows that the return of information, especially in an area of investigation left unexplored, well recompenses the loss of the snippet required for analysis.

The publication of further ceramic material from the terrace fills surrounding the temple of Aphaia on Aegina brings into question the present date assigned to the reconstruction by the excavation team. The cumulative effect of black-figured, red-figured, and black-glossed pottery, as well as lamps and amphorae from the terrace fills, seems to indicate that the temple may be later than the Persian wars. Much of the late material finds parallels from contexts in the Athenian Agora which are usually thought, on the conventional chronology, to date from the time of the Persian wars. If the revised views of these contexts are taken into account, then the temple of Aphaia may have to be dated lower still.

The intention of this paper is to set out the evidence for the ties between the family of Herodes Atticus, the Athenian consul and sophist, and the city of Sparta. Its kernel is the re-edition in Part Two of a fragmentary inscription from Sparta, which contains — it will be argued — evidence for the marriage of a previously unknown sister of Herodes to a Spartan aristocrat. The context of this match was a long-standing association between Sparta and the family stretching back at least to the Flavian period, all the other evidence for which is first examined in Part One.

First principles tend to be forgotten in the course of scholarly polemic. At worst the fault lies in the animus and heat engendered. At best it is because the opponents have become absorbed in an elegant game of skill. Meanwhile the problem remains unresolved—whether it is the dating of crucial fifth-century Attic texts or some far less serious point. We must keep our priorities right. What really counts in the ‘three-bar sigma’ controversy, for instance, is the bare text of the epigraphic documents, freed of modern supplement and interpretation. It is vital to start from this often narrow base of certainty. I propose to do just this, with more self-discipline than in the past. For convenience I shall divide my inquiry into six main parts.

Stylistic reasons are given for believing that many of the Hadra hydriae found in the Hellenistic cemeteries of Alexandria were made in Crete.

Analyses of the clay compositions of a group of Hadra vases are compared with control samples from Cretan sites and the Nile Valley. The results suggest, together with the stylistic evidence, that Crete is a likely home for the workshops producing Hadra vases.

The following notes are the results of several journeys in the district between Brusa and Mihallitch, which, in spite of its accessibility, is archaeologically ill known.

they deal with:—

1. The Byzantine Churches of Triglia and Syge.

2. The Byzantine fortresses: Caesarea Germanice, Katoikia, Koubouklia.

3. Besbicus-Kalolimno.

4. Inscriptions.

To the account of this well and of the objects found in it the following additions should be made.

A. There is one fragment of a funnel-shaped rhyton in stone from Mycenae in the National Museum at Athens. It is fluted and well-polished, and was found by Tsountas in his excavations on the acropolis (Athens Nat. Mus., No. 2669, height ·07, width ·065, thickness ·02 m.). A fragment of another was found in the Palace in 1923, see below, p. 183.

Johansen in Vases Sicyoniens and Payne in Necrocorinthia and Protokorinthische Vasenmalerei isolated a number of artistic personalities, but this was, or seemed at that stage, incidental to their main object, the ordering of Protocorinthian and ‘Corinthian’ pottery by phases of chronological development. Payne left further work on painters in manuscript notes, and we and others have done something in the same line, but so far there has been no attempt to see the whole development of the style in terms of artistic personalities influencing one another (which after all it was), as has been done by Beazley for Attic red-figure and blackfigure, and by J. M. Cook for Protoattic. If such a view can be achieved it modifies the necessarily rather schematic (even Procrustean) division into chronological phases, and gives a more organic view of the development. For the ‘Corinthian’ period it is a somewhat dispiriting task, though even there we believe that it would be worth doing, if only to help our understanding of the interrelation of Corinthian and Attic. In this article, however, we are concerned only with Protocorinthian, whose general level is very high, and the principal artists of superlative quality; the isolation of painters here needs no apology.

Earlier work on these lines was impeded by the fact that the miniature side of Protocorinthian has been so much better preserved and published than the parallel and contemporary ‘big style’. The balance has recently been partly righted by Kraiker's publication of material from Aigina; and the other most important body of Protocorinthian pottery—the votive deposit from the Temple of Hera Limenia at Perachora—has already been prepared for publication by Dunbabin. We have made full use of the Perachora material in this article, and the substantiation of some of our conclusions will have to await the appearance of Perachora II. There is a third, unpublished, collection of Protocorinthian ‘big style’ vases in Berlin, from Aigina.

An askos (BSA 49 [1954] 222, pl. 25:111) found by R.W. Hutchinson in Tomb 2 at Khaniale Tekke near Knossos is recognized as an export from nuragic Sardinia; similar askoi are common there in the same chronological range, c. 850–680 B.C., as that represented by the Cretan context. Although other good parallels have also been found outside Sardinia, notably at Vetulonia in Etruria, the Tekke piece is the first Sardinian artefact of the Early Iron Age to be identified in the Aegean. Its presence there is related to the Phoenician element in the complex pattern of long distance trade that preceded the arrival in Italy of the first Western Greeks.

This article is concerned with the Macedonian vaulted tombs as a specifically Macedonian contribution to the development of Greek architecture. It looks at the theory that the technique was inspired by eastern examples. Mesopotamian and Egyptian vaulting techniques are described, and shown to be different. It therefore follows that the Macedonian technique was not copied from the Near East.

The inscriptions here published or discussed have, some of them, historic interest; which I hope I have not entirely neglected to point out. But this is chiefly a report of my work in the Museum: the reconstruction of stelai, the recognising and distinguishing of hands. In the third section, A Distinctive Attic Hand, my argument for date is cumulative, and weak as cumulative arguments are: I have no single certain proof that any of the group, still less the whole of it, belongs to the 'thirties. I record it as my cumulative impression; but my main concern has been to distinguish the hand, and to try to formulate a method whereby hands can be, securely, distinguished.

Acknowledgments: first and warmest to M. Kourouniotis, Director of the Epigraphic Museum at Athens and of the excavations at Eleusis. His generosity in placing unpublished stones at my disposal, and his constant encouragement, have been delightful to remember. Next, to Hiller von Gaertringen, whose I.G. I has seldom, during this work, been far from my hand: all students of fifth-century Attic inscriptions will know what I owe him. I have had much help from Dow and Oliver of the American school: Dow indeed taught me to distinguish hands. Meritt's constant and exciting letters, while I was working on the Quota Lists, have made that the most useful section of my paper: I had much help also from West's pupil McGregor of Cincinnati University, who was working on the same subject (see below, p. 110).

The stele recording the victories of the Spartan Damonon and his son is reconsidered, and dated 403 B.C. It is argued that consequently other key examples of Lakonian lettering should be lowered in date.

The British School excavations in Laconia from 1905 to 1910 unearthed terracotta masks from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, just east of Sparta, right on the Eurotas river. Buried in two pits adjacent to the archaic temple, the masks were made between c.615 and c.450 bce. Description and analysis of the material and technique of the masks reveal their diverse character and the impracticalities of their being worn. The masks’ function is related to the presence of linen or wood originals that the terracotta versions reproduced, though not uniformly. Difficulty in explaining the (original) masks’ use is predicated on vague approximations of the nature of Orthia's origins and cult. The linguistic clusters proposed by the excavators as early as 1906 as descriptors of the masks or their use are scrutinised for possible illumination of the (original) masks’ use; the burial of the masks some centuries before the descriptions of Pollux, Hesychius and Pausanias begs the question of their applicability to the excavated masks. On the basis of theories of masking from Classics as well as from Japanese Noh theatre and neuroscience, the ‘grotesques’ and ‘caricatures’ proposed by the excavators are recast as comic and satiric figures. Like Aristotle's pre-urban drama, the ‘Orthian drama’ does not correspond to a single theatrical genre, but contains risible figures whose facial expressions are naturalistic and often negative (pain, worry). Given Aristotle's firm assertion that the roots of Greek theatre are Dorian, and the uniqueness of the Orthia material, it is proposed that these masks point us towards the origins of theatre.

The large numbers and variety of forms of this object type that have gradually accumulated in the last half century permit now of an overall review, drawing in part on earlier and more individual accounts. Following the Catalogue, five broad typological classes are discussed, analysed in detail, and manufacture and method of employment deduced, as far as possible. Geographical and chronological distribution is looked at. The Pre-Palatial period sees only the use of ‘mats’ – turned manually merely as the potter desired in building up his pot by hand; centrifugal force is harnessed at the perioid of the creation of the First Palaces – the freely-revolving wheel appears. Rapidly, before the construction of the Neo-Palatial buildings, a wheelhead incorporating a fly-wheel effect was devised, probably set low on the ground, pivoting in a fixed basal socket.

For three weeks of May–June 1937 excavations of limited extent were conducted at Stavros in northern Ithaca. The main site was a small area immediately below the village square to the south-west, where chance finds by the proprietor of the land, followed in 1936 by a trial excavation, had revealed the presence of Greek graves and a Bronze Age deposit.

Stavros lies on a narrow ridge commanding the bays of Phrikes to the east and Polis to the west. Along this ridge must at all times have run the route from the south of the island to Pelikata and the fertile valley of Kalamos. Below the ridge, to the south west, there is a good water-supply at Asprosykia, where late Helladic sherds are recorded. The existence of large dressed blocks lower down the slope at the head of the valley, and of other blocks and rock-cuttings farther westwards, towards Polis Bay, suggests that a not inconsiderable town stood here in classical times.

The Transitional LH III B2/C early pottery from Thorikos mine No. 3 is of particular importance for the definition of this as yet little-known phase. It is also of interest for its context. The assemblage is unusual; its nature implies a specific function rather than the debris of normal settlement. It is suggested that it may have resulted from mining activity.

Professor Hopf left unfinished at his death a projected work which would have filled a marked gap in our knowledge of the Latin dynasties of the Archipelago—the history of Lesbos and its dependencies under the Gattelusi of Genoa. The possessions of the Gattelusi in their fullest extent included Lesbos, the Thracian islands of Thasos, Lemnos, Samothrace, and Imbros, and the mainland towns of Phocaea (Foggia Vecchia) in Ionia and Aenos in Thrace. The Frankish monuments of the islands had already been adequately chronicled by Professor Conze, but the mainland dependencies remained, from this point of view, unexplored. In the course therefore, of cursory visits to Aenos and Phocaea in 1908, I took notes and photographs of the few surviving monuments, supplementing these researches by visits to Mytilene and Lemnos.

The present survey, based upon work carried out in the Cyclades in 1952 and 1953 and in museums in Greece and elsewhere, is intended to offer a more comprehensive view of Cycladic archaeology than has hitherto appeared. An attempt has been made to gather together both published and unpublished material from sites which flourished during this period; interpretations of the former have been revised in the light of recent knowledge of contemporary cultures in Greece and Crete. Unpublished pottery in museums has been studied, new sites recorded, and fresh evidence collected from the sites themselves.

The L.H. IIIA 2 period according to Furumark's chronology covers the fourteenth century, a crucial phase in Mycenaean history and, whatever absolute dates are eventually assigned to the period, the pottery belonging to it marks the vast expansion of Mycenaean trade throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. It is therefore extremely important to determine what pottery must and what pottery may belong to L.H. IIIA 2. The definition of L.H. IIIA 1 pottery adopted in a previous article enables us to deal with the beginning of the period. The division between L.H. IIIA 2 late and L.H. IIIB 1 can be placed, in terms of the pottery from settlement sites, at one of two points. The earlier would be the introduction of the vertical (as compared with horizontal or diagonal) Whorl-Shells. This was suggested by Mackeprang. The later point, and the one adopted in this discussion, is the introduction of the Deep Bowl (FS 284) and in unpainted ware the Conical Kylix (FS 274). This later terminus seems preferable as a more radical and easily recognizable development.