Of all the interpretations of the Ludovisi throne it is generally agreed that none is entirely convincing. For that reason any new suggestions that I have to bring forward here should only be interpreted as an attempt to indicate a fresh line of investigation that may perhaps lead to a more complete understanding of this most difficult of archaeological problems.

At the outset we are faced with the almost universally accepted view that the subject of the Ludovisi throne is the Birth of Aphrodite, with representatives of the cult or devotees shown on the side panels. Once this is admitted the explanation of the details of scene becomes a matter of purest academical or technical dispute. Similarly, the important corollary follows that the Boston counterpart, whatever we may think of its date or style, represents but other aspects, clearly more complicated, of the Aphrodite cult.

The object of this article is to examine the latest arrangement of the Athenian archons of this period, made by Dr. A. C. Johnson. Johnson's studies in third-century chronology begin earlier than 288/7 and extend far beyond 262/1, and embrace Delphi as well as Athens; but the period here examined is obscure and difficult, and can be treated by itself, since everyone agrees that there was a break in the secretary rotation in or following 262/1. Recognising that I have proved the absolute impossibility of placing Diokles (the fall of Demetrios) anywhere but in 288/7, and taking this therefore as a starting-point, Johnson has constructed an archon list with an unbroken secretary rotation from 288/7 to 262/1, which exhibits various new features and furnishes a number of facts which were new when put forward; some of these are permanent acquisitions.

There is at present an unfortunate hiatus between the study of Greek history and the science of Greek coins. The historians, if we except Holm have not had familiarity with Greek coins, and the numismatists have seldom gone into larger questions; they have mostly been occupied with minute details, which no doubt in their way are important. Yet coins give the investigator most exact and trustworthy information; and in matters of commerce and finance are first-hand authorities. My History of Ancient Coinage was meant to do something towards filling the hiatus; but much remains to be done.

At present I propose to treat briefly of the financial history of Chios as exhibited in the coins. I select that city for two reasons. In the first place the importance and wealth of the city, and its close connection with the main stream of Greek history, give it a claim to preference. In the second place the coins of Chios have been so fully and satisfactorily treated of by numismatists that I need not enumerate or discuss them in detail.

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.

Though I can hardly hope to justify it, I must record (as having given the impulse to this study) my impression that it was not so much the art of his days, as the theories built thereon, which led Plato to such definitions of the skiagraphia as ‘essentially servile and devoid of reality and truth,’ as ‘not altogether true nor pure,’ as ‘unclear and misleading,’ and as ‘an inferior coupled to an inferior and producing inferior offspring.’

From the Renaissance onwards efforts have been made to discover the portrait of the thinker whom even his contemporary Isocrates called the ‘prince of philosophers.’ At that period it was believed that it had been discovered in a venerable long-bearded male type, a view which Fulvius Ursinus thought to be supported by a gem inscription. According to this there was no longer anything to prevent the ascription of the name Plato to a whole series of Olympian heads, now acknowledged as being of the type of Dionysus or of Hermes. And when the bronze bust of the Indian Dionysus was found at Herculaneum in the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was greeted with enthusiasm as the most expressive portrait of the great intellectual hero, and passed as such in popular works right down to the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the beginning of this century an Italian archaeologist tried to save the name of Plato, and proposed to explain the bust as a combination of Plato and Dionysus.

On a Pisidian tombstone the name Gagdabos Edagdabos occurs. In publishing this in the Revue des Universités du Midi, 1895, p. 360, I quoted Radet's tempting conjecture, that it is a case of filiation expressed by prefix. Religion however furnishes a more probable explanation. A priest named Gagdabos adds his title Edagdabos. Gagdabos is a reduplicated form such as is extremely common in Anatolian nomenclature: e.g. on a sarcophagus found in the north Isaurian hills not very far from Lystra the two names Gaa and Goggoa both occur and are evidently names in the same family, one a reduplication of the other; Kretschmer has noted (like all Anatolian students) the habit of using reduplicated names.

Gagdabos therefore, implies a simpler name Gdabos or Gdawos: this word was grecised as δάος, and latinized as Davus, a common name of slaves from Anatolia.

The sculptures recently discovered by the Italian excavators at Cyrene were described and discussed by Signor Bagnani at a general meeting of the Hellenic Society on 9th November, 1920. It is hoped that Signor Bagnani's paper, together with full illustrations of all the sculptures referred to, will appear in the next number of this Journal. Meanwhile our readers will probably be glad to have a reproduction of the Aphrodite, which is the finest of them, but is not yet so well-known or so accessible as it should be on its merits.

Most of the statues found at Cyrene decorated a kind of hall, which served as a gallery of sculpture. They are by no means homogeneous, though most of them clearly belong to the Hellenistic age. There is, therefore, little external evidence to guide us to the period or school to which any of them belongs; and we are left mainly to internal evidence, derived from a study of the statue itself.

In the discussion on the battle of Marathon which Mr. How and Mr. Casson have recently carried on in this Journal, both these scholars have assumed that the Athenians fortified their position by artificial means.

This opinion seems to be construed out of a passage in Cornelius Nepos, the text of which, to judge by Mr. Casson's quotations, is read by him as follows :—

Dein postero die sub montis radicibus acie regione instructa nova arte vi summa proelium commiserunt: namque arbores multis locis erant rarae; hoc Consilio, ut et montium altitudine tegerentur et arborum tractu equitatus hostium impediretur, ne multitudine clauderentur.

Since writing my paper on Cleostratus, I have received from Professor Boll a copy of his masterly treatise, Antike Beobachtungen farbiger Sterne, in which he incidentally deals with the πρῶτα σημεῖα of Cleostratus, which he identifies with the sign Libra. This interpretation is based on an excerpt from Antiochus, dealing with the pernicious degrees of the zodiac. The passage runs as follows:—

Κέντρον Σκορπίου ἀπὸ ἔως ί κράσεως ᾿ Αρεως καὶ Κρόνου καὶ <ἡ>πρώτη μοῖρα κράσεως ῾ Ερμοῦ κτλ

Professor Boll recognises that the words ἀπὸ . . . Κρόνου cannot refer to the Scorpion's sting, and supposes that after Σκορπίου the words τὸμέτωπον τοῦ Σκορπίου have fallen out. He then takes ἡ πρώτη μοῖρα as equivalent to the πρῶτα σημεῖα of Cleostratus, a traditional phrase unlike the terminology of the rest of the passage.