The circumstances of the discovery of the vases and objects described below by Mr. Robertson were, briefly, as follows:—

1931. In trial pits dug in 1931 (Figs. 2, 4, 6) the foundations of a rough wall (6) resting on virgin soil were found, to the north of which sub-Mycenaean and Protogeometric sherds associated with stones and calcined earth appeared. South of this wall appeared two layers of dark earth, of which the lower (8a) rested on virgin soil and was about 0·5 m. thick. The upper (8b) was only a few cm. thick, and was separated from the lower by a kind of stone platform, above which was a layer of more or less sterile earth (Fig. 6). Both the upper and the lower dark-earth layers were thickly packed with sherds, all post-Protogeometric. The lower layer continued below a wall (7) the foundations of which rested in it, and below a second wall (11) the foundations of which were sunk in the upper dark-earth layer.

No records or vase-paintings of an early date give any idea of the appearance of the primitive theatre cavea, and few of the remains in Attica can be traced back even as far as the Persian Wars. The earliest form of the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens may belong to the first half of the sixth century B.C., but none of the cavea there is of very early date; and it is questionable whether the theatre at Thorikos is as old as the sixth century. There is mention of a theatre at Eleusis, but none has been brought to light. It has therefore been suggested that the wide flight of steps above the Telesterion represented an auditorium.

This article has been written as a supplement to the Stationery Office booklet Works of Art in Greece, the Greek Islands and the Dodecanese, issued by the British Committee on the Preservation and Restitution of Works of Art, Archives and other Material in Enemy Hands. The survey of the antiquities in the Dodecanese was only commenced in September 1945 and was still in progress when the booklet went to press, with the result that only the information obtained in the early stages of the survey was included. This article records the position at the end of May 1946.

In the valuable list of Corinthian vase-inscriptions compiled in Chapter XI of Necrocorinthia, Payne made the following observations on the iota: ‘Iota is usually Σ; on late vases a simplified form is also found, but the old form persists even in the second half of the sixth century (A.D. i, pl. 7, 25; ii, pl. 24, 9; pl. 39, 12, & c). A further simplification, I, occurs on a few middle and late vases (nos. 17, 49, 50, 57 (?), 68, 70); this form is used on the Corinthian revetments from Calydon (Poulsen-Rhomaios, pls. 28–9), on the Corinthian Treasury at Delphi, and on a bronze weight of very archaic appearance, found in Attica (Journ. Int. Arch. Num. 1905, 5 ff; obv., bull's head, frontally, and ΓΒΝΓΤΑΙΟΝ rev., ); the weight may, however, be later than it looks… In the late sixth century the straight iota becomes commoner; it is the regular form from the fifth century onwards.’

The miscellaneous notes on Spartan inscriptions, mainly of the Imperial age, which I have put together in the following pages deal chiefly with texts already published in the Laconian volume of the Corpus (IG V. I) which record the Cursus Honorum of individuals or lists of magistrates or other officials. For many of these I suggest textual improvements, and for some an approximate date based on prosopographical evidence. Moreover, in a few cases, I have been able to unite fragments published separately in the Corpus, or to recognise the nature of lists hitherto classed as uncertain.

During the last forty years relatively few attempts have been made to define and describe that style of pottery known as Protogeometric. Following S. Wide's article on the Salamis graves, in which he identified the pottery associated with them as belonging to a new style, came B. Schweitzer's most valuable treatise in 1917, in which an attempt was made to bring together the whole of our knowledge up till that time. After 1917 little appeared until T. C. Skeat's The Dorians in Archaeology, published in 1932, in which the writer demonstrated the ‘excessive hospitality’ of Schweitzer's list of Protogeometric graves, and put forward the theory that the style originated in the North of Greece.

Syracuse. C. Anti's book, Teatri Greci Arcaici, reached me only when my article had arrived at page-proof. His theory on the earlier form of the cavea at Syracuse is as follows. As mentioned on p. 152 above, there is, in addition to the semicircular water-channel at the foot of the cavea, an earlier rectilinear channel, also rock-cut. The latter is three-sided and roughly in the shape of a trapezium, with the two short sides pointing towards the parodoi. Anti dates this channel to the period of Hieron I (478–67 B.C.), and considers it to have formed the base of a trapezium-shaped rock-cut cavea with three rectilinear sides.