The vase here described was recently presented to the Otago Museum in commemoration of the distinguished services of Dr. H. D. Skinner, for many years Director of the Museum. It was formerly on the Rome market. It is restored from fragments, and missing pieces of the neck, mouth, and shoulder have been replaced by plaster. The joints and plaster restorations have been carefully painted over, and there has been a good deal of repainting where the glaze was worn. On the mouth, neck, and shoulder the restorations, though extensive, merely fill gaps in a well-defined pattern, and can therefore be passed over without a detailed description. The repainting of the figures on the body of the vase will be described at greater length below. The clay is a fine, clear red, rather lighter than the usual colour of Attic. The principal dimensions of the vase are as follows (measurements in metres):

The body is ovoid, with high, flat shoulders. It is separated from the wide flaring foot by a low, raised ridge. A similar ridge separates the shoulder from the neck, which is cylindrical with slightly concave sides. The lip flares widely. The side handles are small and slope slightly upward; they are attached just above the widest part of the vase and below the sharpest curve of the shoulder. The vertical handle is divided by three deep, vertical grooves. The inside of the mouth and the upper surface of the foot are ornamented with rounded tongues of black glaze. These were painted alternately red and white, but the paint, which was applied on top of the black glaze, is now much worn. On the lower part of the body are short black rays; above these is a rather wider zone with a chain of five-petalled lotuses linked to five-leaved palmettes.

On Pll. II–III and figs. 1–4, p. 8, I reproduce photographs of three Attic vases in the Museum of Valletta already published by Albert Mayr in Sitzgsb. d. philos.-philol. u. d. hist. Kl. der Kgl. Bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften 1905, Heft III, pl. II, 1, 4 and 5.

The first vase (Pl. II) is a late black-figured skyphos, height 165 mm.; diameter 222 mm. The obverse represents a chariot with two Amazons; the subject on the reverse is similar, but the second Amazon is here omitted. On both sides the scene is flanked by two sphinxes looking towards the handles. The vase belongs to the group of the CHC skyphoi, on which see Ure, Sixth and Fifth, p. 61, 26. 98–100 and Beazley, Some Attic Vases In the Cyprus Museum, pp. 22–3. For a list of vases of this group see Ure, CVI, Reading, p. 18.

At the VIIth Congress for the History of Religions, held at Amsterdam in 1950, the central question was posed whether a mythical-ritual pattern could be discerned in various ancient and modern civilisations. Reading the Congress Report, one does not get the impression that many final and far-reaching conclusions have been reached. Various conflicting views were brought forward in the section-meetings. But meanwhile the discussion goes on. And it may be not without interest to inquire into some individual cases where a ritual background behind some famous myth can be reconstructed, if not beyond all doubt, at least with a high degree of probability. In the following pages such an attempt is made in the case of the Seriphian Perseus-legend.

The present writer believes that there is a clue to the understanding of this story, which has been overlooked hitherto, namely its connexion with hot springs. A certain number of cults, myths, and legends were connected with such springs in the ancient Greek world; that they all show in origin a chthonic aspect is self-evident. But to dwell upon all of them would fall beyond the scope of this article. Let us for the present moment turn our attention to the thermal springs of that tiny piece of rock in the Aegean round which a major part of the Perseus-story centres.

ἀναψηφίƷειν is to put to the vote for the second time an issue on which a decision has already been taken. Until recently known only from Thuc. vi 14 in pre-Aristotelian prose, the word is now shown by SEG X 38B 11–14 (v. infra) to have been not a literary coinage but a recognised procedural term. The noun *ἀναψήφισις is not yet recorded; but since a convenient way of referring to this rather complex conception is needed, I suggest that ‘anapsephisis’ should be used. I include in this conception the putting of the issue either in exactly the same terms as on the first occasion or in the form λῦσαι τὸ ψήφισμα ὃ εἶπε … περὶ …

Herodotus has several references to the orders or companies of gods in Greece and Egypt, and they involve a comparison and a contrast.

They may be arranged, in translation, as follows:

(1) II, 4, 2. ‘They say that the Egyptians first used the names of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks adopted them from them.’

(2) II, 7, 2 mentions ‘the altar of the twelve gods at Athens’.

(3) II, 43, 2. ‘Concerning Heracles I heard this account, that he was one of the twelve gods.’

(4) II, 43, 4. ‘But to the Egyptians Heracles is an ancient god; and as they say themselves, there were seventeen thousand years to the reign of Amasis since the eight gods produced the twelve, of whom they consider Heracles to be one.’

(5) II, 46, 2. ‘The Mendesians hold Pan to be one of the eight gods, and they say that these eight gods came into existence before the twelve.’

(6) II, 145, 1. ‘Among the Greeks Heracles and Dionysus and Pan are considered to be the youngest of the gods, but among the Egyptians Pan is considered very ancient and one of the eight gods said to be the earliest, while Heracles is one of the second group, and Dionysus one of the third group, who were produced by the twelve.’

Von Frisch has shown that hive bees communicate with one another by ‘dancing’, a discovery comparable with that of Ventris. Both the direction of food found and its distance are indicated with considerable precision. Aristotle (or perhaps pseudo-Aristotle) described this dance in Hist. Animal. IX, 624b. After noting that an individual bee visits a number of flowers of the same species in succession, which Darwin, von Frisch, and others have shown to be generally, but not universally, true, he continued:

ὅταν δ' εἰς τὸ σμῆνος ἀφίκωνται, ἀποσείονται, και παρακολουθοῦσιν ἑκάστῃ τρεῑς ἢ τέτταρες. τὸ δὲ λαμβανόμενον οὐ ῥᾴδιόν ἐστιν ἰδεῖν̇ οὐδὲ τὴν ἐργασίαν ὅντινα τρόπον ποιοῦνται, οὐκ ὦπται.

Bekker's translation, due to J. C. Sealiger, revised by J. C. Schneider, is as follows:

eo cum sunt ingressae, excutiunt et deponunt onus, semper etiam singulis ternae quaternaeque administrant, quid accipiunt non facile videre est; neque visum quo operantur modo.

For students of Athenian private and public law it is a painful, but undeniable fact that there is still grave uncertainty as to the precise methods by which statutes, one of the most important sources of law, were made at the most formative period of the history of the system from the middle of the fifth century B.C. onwards. There have been two fairly recent and conflicting attempts to clear up some of the main points, those of Kahrstedt and of Mrs. Atkinson. Neither treatment seems wholly satisfactory, and in particular neither seems to take any account of J. H. Oliver's publication of additions to the code or of Ferguson's paper on these same additions. It may therefore be worthwhile re-examining the evidence for one chapter at least of the story, the chapter covering roughly the twenty years beginning in 411 B.C.

I cannot avoid a word on sources, in the historical not the legal sense. In the literary field historians and political theorists are very unhelpful. The problem does not seem to have interested them. Here therefore we have to rely mainly on two other classes of authority, firstly, grammarians and lexicographers, who were interested in the archaisms of the laws of Drakon and Solon, secondly, and most fruitful of all, the orators. In the orators we must distinguish between the documents cited in the texts and the orators' own words. I do not discuss the validity of the cited documents, but must content myself with saying that with regard to the more important documents which are here relevant there is now fairly general agreement among scholars that they are genuine. Statements of the orators themselves must always be examined under the microscope and allowance made for possible distortions due to the speaker's desire to support the particular point which he is making.

On rhythm amd metre Aristoxenus always talks the plainest common sense—which is more than one can say about certain other ancient metricians. On Time, in its rhythmical aspect, he remarks: ‘Time is articulated by each of the three ῥυθμιƷόμενα, λέξις, μέλος and κίνησις σωματική.’ The Greek choral lyric was a triple partnership of poetry, song, and dancing, and Aristoxenus here points out that they share a common rhythm. (He goes on to develop the idea, but that need not concern us here.) We could safely infer for ourselves, even if Plato and Aristotle had not told us, that the music and the dance were far from being merely decorative or casual additions to the poetry. The poetry may have been Queen, as Pratinas maintained, but the philosophers took the other two partners very seriously as ‘imitators’ of moral ideas and the like; and there is every reason to suppose that the dramatists did the same. But writers on Greek Tragedy have had much to say about the λέξις of the odes; nothing about its two partners—for the good reason that we know nothing about them. Yet it does seem possible, here and there, to say a little about the dance. Whether it is worth saying, the reader must judge.

The audience, sitting in the theatre, saw some kind of ordered physical movement in the orchestra as it listened to the singing or chanting of an ode. If in any given case we were asked what this movement was, our only answer is that we cannot possibly tell. Nevertheless, there are moments where we can infer, with more or less probability, the sort of thing that was being done by the dancers, and occasionally—notably in the Agamemnon—this dim and doubtful picture will contribute something to our appreciation of the drama.

This paper is only a small scratch at the surface of a much larger investigation of the meanings of folk-song and folk-tale—and that is why this journey to the World of the Dead, as it appears in some Greek folk-songs, begins in a hesitating and roundabout manner. I had been reading Professor Dawkins's Forty-five Stories from the Dodekanese, and had been impressed by part of the Introduction in which he explains how ‘ideas and feelings about life’, which cannot be directly expressed and often remain unconscious or not consciously formulated, may be ‘conveyed in the concrete external shape of a story’, and after that I began to think that any work of art, ifit is good enough to survive at all, must express more than the maker's conscious beliefs and must include some serious statement about the nature of the world. All good folk-tales and all good folk-songs have a hidden meaning, and that is why they survive. In the brain of James Barrie some feeling about the nature of Time and History must have been germinating when he wrote in Peter Pan about the crocodile which swallowed the alarm-clock; and I wondered if he had ever heard the Chinese folk-tale about the dragon that swallowed the moon. From that my thoughts went to Alice in Wonderland, which tells us not only a great deal about the hidden temperament of Lewis Carroll but also something he had felt about life, and something more than he found satisfactorily expressed in his religion. If this feeling of his was of any importance, the view that it expressed, or the feeling that produced such a view, would be shared by others, and a similar expression of it would turn up somewhere else. That led to thoughts about the World under the Ground, the World Below, the Under World—ὁ κάτω κόσμος.

The use of 39- and 27-year generations for dynasties of kings was common in Greek chronography, and seems to have been extended to the ‘successions’ of literary figures by Apollodoros and his school. This was made possible by wide and liberal use of thirds of generations, i.e. intervals of 13 and 9 years, and a complete system was erected on the basis of the equation 39 × 3 = 27 × 4⅓. In its final form (shown in the table below) the system consisted of: (i) eight 39-year generations divided into thirds and dated 780–468, the fifth, sixth, and seventh generations being marked by Thales' birth, akme, and death respectively; (ii) one 27-year series crosses this 39-year line at 741, 624, and 507—Apollodoros calculates 27 × 16⅓ years along this line from Homer to the Persian Wars (912–480); (iii) the second 27-year series crosses the 39-year line at 702, 585, and 468—Apollodoros calculates 27 × 12⅔ years from Hesiod to the Peloponnesian War (774–432); (iv) the third 27-year series crosses the 39-year line at 780, 663, and 546—Apollodoros uses this series only for Anaximenes, and possibly Xenophanes.

The aim of this paper is to explore the suggestion that Parmenides's poem, or at any rate some of it, has light to throw on the difficulties of the myth of Er in the Republic. Parmenides descends to the underworld as a shaman-poet in search of knowledge, Er goes there by the fortuitous circumstance of his death-like trance; but both katabaseis share a common setting, and in both the hero is shown a glimpse of the real shape and mechanism of the universe. In the case of Parmenides the exhibit is two-fold, both ‘the unshakeable heart of rounded truth’ and ‘the opinions of men in which there is no true belief’. Interest has been mainly concentrated on the former, metaphysical, section, from which the greater part of our fragments derive; but the latter contained, in the system of stephanai, an account of the appearance of the universe, which is interesting, both on its own account and in view of the light it throws on the difficulties of Er's myth. I shall consider first (I) the setting of Parmenides's poem as it appears in the opening lines, then (II) propose an interpretation of the system of stephanai, and (III) seek support for some of its main features in the general tradition of cosmological speculation from Homer downwards. Finally (IV), I shall proceed to examine the myth of Er and offer an interpretation of some of its difficulties which will take account of this body of earlier thought.

When the Chairman of Council asked me to read a paper at the Jubilee Meeting of the Classical Association, I felt highly honoured by this kind invitation. Twice before I have enjoyed the privilege of reading papers at General Meetings of the Association during the last war, when I had been most hospitably received in this country and had found a new home at Oxford. I confess I still feel quite at home here, and it gives me enormous pleasure to come over from Munich and to speak to you once more; so I am deeply grateful to you for giving me this opportunity.

But I think I owe you at least one word of explanation for the strange title of this lecture. The Chairman of Council said in his letter ‘that although one lecture should be given on the history of the Classical Association, the other papers should look forward rather than backward’. Now, I had been doing some work on a Hellenistic poet myself, especially during the years at Oxford; as far as I am concerned, I have finished with studies in that province of learning.

The period of Demosthenes has a special interest for the student of Greek politics; more evidence exists, in the form of speeches, for the actual working of Athenian affairs in this period than in any other. It should therefore provide the starting-point in any attempt to find out the presuppositions of Athenian politics, to find what sort of behaviour is habitually expected of politicians and what motives are taken for granted as the normal motives of public men. Here the political scene at the entry of Demosthenes into politics will be examined in the hope of contributing towards answering these questions. For the ascertainable facts, preserved mainly in Speeches xx, xxii and xxiv of Demosthenes; are comparatively plentiful, and so they may be used in order to criticise current assumptions about the nature of political parties and conflicts in ancient Athens.

A preliminary question concerns the dates of these three speeches. Dionysius of Halicarnassus assigns Speeches xx and xxii to 355/4 and Speech xxiv to 353/2. It is hoped to defend elsewhere the general credibility of the Dionysian dates for the Demosthenic speeches. That for Speech xxii has been seriously questioned by Mr. D. M. Lewis.

Editors and translators have long recognised the dramatic element in Plato's work. It might seem superfluous to take up this subject in detail; but the detail in some aspects does not, in fact, appear to have been closely studied or recorded.

The desire to honour the personality and to perpetuate the method of Socrates is an obvious motive for Plato's choice of the dialogue form as medium for his own published expositions of philosophic thought. Such thought takes naturally, for him, the form of Socratic inquiry and response. But much more than this, in interest, inspiration, and technique, goes to the making of the Platonic dialogue. It is this background and this execution that are now to be considered.

We have the familiar tradition, recorded by Diogenes Laertius (III. 6) as received from Dicaearchus, that Plato wrote dithyrambs, lyrics, and tragedies, and was about to compete with a tragedy in the theatre of Dionysus when, still at an early age, he ‘heard’ Socrates, burnt his poems, and took up philosophy.

Professor Haspels in her Attic Black-figured Lekythoi has described the work of the Theseus painter and analysed his style. In this account of him she naturally gives more consideration to his lekythoi than to the other shapes that he decorated, but his numerous skyphoi, painted in the ‘White Heron’ workshop, are listed in full and briefly discussed. Miss Haspels describes the Theseus painter as the moving spirit in this busy undertaking, until at last, she suggests, he may have ‘got weary of inspiring the hacks in the “Heron workshop” and of witnessing their decay’ and so left and went elsewhere. Later she adds that ‘that workshop apparently turned out skyphoi before he joined’, but the theme has never been developed, and there is now a general tendency to attribute all skyphoi from this shop that are not by his hand to followers or imitators of the Theseus painter without further qualification. This may be somewhat misleading, since followers and imitators are necessarily later than what they follow and imitate. I hope to show that the shop in which the Theseus painter painted his skyphoi was a flourishing concern, making both skyphoi and kylikes, before he entered it, and that some of his companions, so far from being imitators, were his seniors and to some extent his teachers.

Some of the most magnificent representations of chariots in mid career are seen on the coins of Sicily and Southern Italy toward the close of the fifth century B.C. There are two major theories concerning the appearance of these striking compositions in Sicilian numismatic art. One theory is that dies for these coins are the independent products of local, native artists of highest competence. The other is that the dies for these pieces are the work of Attic artists who migrated to the prosperous cities of Sicily to take up new careers as workers in the minor metallic arts, as gem cutters, and as die sinkers for the various local rulers. We lack positive evidence. We cannot identify any artist who left Attica to pursue work of this type in Southern Italy or Sicily. Scholars have produced a mass of conjecture and speculation on this subject.

The treatment of space and depth in the chariot compositions seems to the writer to provide a new possibility for grouping and relating the representations of chariots in the late fifth century—both those on the major monuments in sculptured relief and those on the Tetradrachms and Dekadrachms of Syracuse and Akragas. From a restudy of the methods of relief representation and from a survey of information derived from such connecting links between major sculpture and coinage as silverware, gems, and vases further light may be thrown on the problems of the artistic derivation of the renowned die compositions of later fifth-century Sicily.

Cle omedes, De motu circulari corporum caelestium. II. 75 (p. 136 Ziegler). Ἐλέγχεται δὲ καὶ διὰ τῶν ὑδρολογίων τὸ εὔηθες τοῦ λόγου [viz. ὅτι ποδιαῖός ἐστιν ὁ ἥλιος]. Δείκνυται γὰρ δι' αὐτῶν, ὅτι, ἂν ᾖ ποδιαῖος ὁ ἥλιος, δεήσει τὸν μέγιστον τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κύκλον ἑπτακοσίων πεντήκοντα ποδῶν εἶναι. Διὰ γὰρ τῶν ὑδρολογίων καταμετρούμενος εὑρίσκεται μέρος ἑπτακοσιοστὸν καὶ πεντηκοστὸν τοὑ οἰκείου κύκλου. Ἐὰν γὰρ, ἐν ᾧ αὐτὸς ἀνέρχεται πᾶς ἐκ τοῦ ὁρίƷοντος ὁ ἥλιος, κύαθος, φέρε εἰπεῖν, ῥεύσῃ, τὸ ὅδωρ ἀφεθὲν ὅλῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ καὶ νυκτὶ ῥεῖν εὑρίσκεται κυάθους ἔχον ἑπτακοσίους καὶ πεντήκοντα. Λέγεται δὲ ἡ τοιαύτη ἔφοδος ὑπὸ πρώτων τῶν Αἰγυπτίων ἐπινοηθῆναι.

In Pollux, VIII. 20 (ed. Bethe, Leipzig, 1900–37) in the section on σκεύη δικαστικά—κιγκλίς, δρύφακτος κτλ.—we read περισχοινίσαντας (περισκηνήσαντας A) δέ τι τῆς ἀγορᾶς μέρος ἔδει φέρειν εἰς τὸν περιορισθέντα τόπον Ἀθηναίων τὸν βουλόμενον ὄστρακον ἐγγεγραμμένον τοὔνομα τοῦ μέλλοντος ἐξοστρακίƷεσθαι. Dindorf described περισκηνήσαντας, ‘quod hactenus vulgatum est’, as ‘ineptissimum’, and it has been given short shrift. Bearing in mind that good authorities speak of a more solid and substantial barrier than a σχοῖνος on occasions of ostracism, he suggested that περισχοινίƷειν could mean simply ‘circumsepire, cingere, circumdare septo, vel cancellis’. But surely the σχοῖνος element of the word is inescapable; περισχοινίƷειν means ‘;place a rope around’; and if he used this word Pollux is in conflict with other writers, notably Philochorus, and is probably wrong. Carcopino, who quotes περισχοινίσαντας without question, thinks that Pollux has simply made a mistake, misled by recollection of the σχοινίον μεμιλτωμένον with which stragglers were shepherded into the assembly. But there would be little risk of confusion with the red rope; the error is due rather to recollection of the roped enclosures mentioned below.

Once more, and for the last time, I attempt briefly to review the epigraphical progress of the last two years, so completing a survey which began in 1906 (YWCS 1906, 69 ff.) and has appeared in this Journal since 1913 (XXXIV 321 ff.). In view of the superlative value of the annual ‘Bulletin Epigraphique’ of J. and L. Robert and of the welcome revival of the SEG under the editorship of A. G. Woodhead, my own work may well be deemed superfluous. To the successive editors of the Journal, who have treated me with unfailing generosity, to all scholars who have lightened my burden by sending me copies of their works, and above all to those who have encouraged me by their expressions of interest and appreciation I offer my heartfelt thanks. The present bibliography follows the same lines as its predecessors; books and articles which I have not seen are marked by an asterisk.

The ranks of Greek epigraphists have suffered serious losses in the deaths of F. M. Abel, J. G. C. Anderson, W. H. Buckler, R. Herzog, L. B. Holland, J. G. Milne, M. I. Rostovtzeff and A. Vogliano. Appreciations of the character and achievement of A. Wilhelm we owe to J. Keil and L. Robert, and of J. Hatzfeld to C. Picard.