The north-west corner of Asia Minor, Lesbos and, in particular, Mytilene, have long been recognised as the home of these grey wares called Lesbian or Aeolic bucchero. With remarkable tact, citizens of Mytilene resident in Naukratis proved the point by inscribing their names and place of origin on the grey vases they dedicated. Their evidence was, however, supplemented by the discovery of grey pottery like their own in towns as near Lesbos as Larissa and Troy VIII.

Several centuries before Lesbian bucchero flourished, the same district produced a distinguished grey ware of which the home was in the sixth city of Troy. This pottery left descendants in the seventh city—side by side with the Buckelkeramik—and these descendants would seem to be the direct ancestors of the bucchero of Troy VIII, Lesbos and other Aeolic sites.

Returning to Troy VI, we find that some of its grey wares are unmistakably Minyan, which enables us to carry the pedigree further back still. Minyan ware is found in the second Minoan period, about 1900 B.C. Nor can it be denied that the fabrics of Troy VI are derived ultimately from those of Troy II and Troy I.

All modern commentators are agreed that the account of the campaign of Marathon left us by Herodotus is often inconsistent, and that as often it is difficult to reconcile it with probabilities. In seeking to disentangle fact from fable in the story of Marathon we have a harder task than in the case of the story of Xerxes' invasion of Greece, for we have much less material at our disposal, and the dilemma of deciding what to accept and what to reject of Herodotus' story is very real. There are, however, some guides through this dilemma. Herodotus wrote with the greater event of Xerxes' invasion between him and the campaign of Marathon. Persia had ceased to be the terror to Greece which she had been in the year 491 B.C., and the memory of Athenian fears and hesitations had been obliterated by pride of achievement. It is some guide in the process of selection from Herodotus' story to imagine the kind of tales of Marathon he would be likely to have heard, when making his inquiries, and the kind of event which would be forgotten or concealed.

Excavations at Sparta have cleared up many of the problems connected with the class of pottery now definitely recognised as Laconian, but the great number of the mythological scenes, found mainly on kylikes, form a group quite distinct in spirit and design from the other types of decoration used on Laconian ware, and it is still a question whether the vases with these scenes (nearly all of them found outside Greece) could really have come from the workshops which turned out the vases found in Spartan soil. There must be some distinct and powerful cause, lying outside the normal growth of local artistic tradition, to account for this new development, and this cause, as I will try to shew, seems to be the coming of Bathycles of Magnesia to build the great Throne of Apollo at Amyclae.

Xenophon (Hellenica, III, v, 5) records some reasons why the Spartans in 395 B.C. were particularly hostile to Thebes. First among these causes (apparently mentioned in chronological order) stands the Theban claim to the tithe of Apollo at Decelea: πάλαι ὀργιʒόμενοι αὐτοĩς (the Thebans) τῆς τε ἀντιλήψεως τῆς τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος δεκάτης ἐν Δεκελείᾳ, κτλ. This allusion to Decelea does not seem to have been understood by the editors. For instance, Breitenbach wished to get rid of it by the emendation ἐκ τῆς λείας. Underhill in support of the MSS. quoted Justin, V, x, 12: Thebani Corinthiique legatos ad Lacedaemonios mittunt qui ex manubiis portionem praedae communis belli periculique peterent, etc.: and Plutarch, Lysander, XXVII: τῆς τε ἀντιλήψεως τῆς τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος δεκάτης ἐν Δεκελείᾳ, κτλ. for references to the claims made by Thebes to a share of the booty of the Peloponnesian war. Now, both these passages are apposite, and probably refer to the same occasion which Xenophon means; but they do not mention Decelea. So Underhill preferred to abandon the reference to it as inexplicable.

Recent research is making us daily better acquainted with Byzantine religious buildings. Saint Sophia is a byword in architectural history and the Byzantine style has been drawn on in the West perhaps more than any other. But of the secular buildings of Byzantium, of the great palaces so famous in history, few examples have been spared. Accounts tell us of the great palace at Constantinople, but of this vast collection of buildings little more than a single stair remains above ground. Of the palace of the Hebdomon, situated on the Sea of Marmora to the south of the capital, even less is to be seen, though further excavations would probably prove fruitful, and of the mediaeval palace of the Blachernae on the Golden Horn, which served as the Imperial residence after the eleventh or twelfth century, only a single building, the Tekfour Serai, survives.

In JHS. xlix, 270, Beazley and Payne, in their article on Attic black-figured fragments from Naukratis in the British Museum, publish for the first time fragments of two cups that belong to a well-marked group of black-rimmed kylikes that was first studied by Droop some twenty years ago (JHS. xxx, 21 ff.). These cups can at once be distinguished from the ordinary black-rimmed Little Master kylix by the following peculiarities:

The upper part of the stem is reserved and generally channelled.

The edge of the foot is convex and black, not, as in normal Little Master cups, whether red or black of rim, straight in section and reserved.

The hollow cone that runs from the base some way up the stem has a black band: in normal Little Master cups this cone is entirely reserved.

Inside the bowl there is a thin reserved band, not, as in normal Little Master cups, right at the top of the rim, but some way down it.

Whereas the normal Little Master cup, whether red-rimmed or black-rimmed, has the lower part of the body black with one reserved band, this treatment is exceptional in the Droop cups, which often shew a great variety of ornamental zones on this part of the vase; of these the most distinctive is a zone of inverted birds or animals, generally in pure silhouette.

The inside of the bowl is decorated with only a small reserved medallion with sometimes a central dot and circle or two, or else is entirely black.

THE office of Federal Archon was apparently created in the League which was revived and reconstituted by Thebes after her liberation from Sparta in 379. Like the archons of the individual cities, the federal archons seem to have had little power; as Swoboda points out, the fact that their seat was not in Thebes but in Onchestus 4 shows that their functions were chiefly ceremonial. This explains why the Boeotarchs but not the archons of Boeotia are frequently mentioned in literature. The archons are, however, important as being the eponymous magistrates of the Boeotian League. From the revival of the League soon after 379 on into Roman times federal documents are generally, and documents of individual cities often, headed with the names of archons of the League.

In the first book of Hero's Pneumatics, chaps. 4–6, there is a description of a way in which it is possible to make water flow at a constant and adjustable rate. This is the old problem of the water-clock, in which the flow of water has to be constant during the day, but must be adjusted from day to day to suit the unequal length of the hours, which were reckoned from sunrise to sunset, and so were long in summer but short in winter. Hero solves the problem in the following way :—

In the container he places a siphon, through which the water flows ; this siphon he places on 2 float, which sinks down slowly as the water drains out. The rate of the flow depends upon the depth of the outer end of the siphon below the surface of the water of the container; as the float follows the surface, the depth is constant, and so is the rate of the flow.

In JHS. li, 286, Prof. Sayce published a note from which I am happy to find that I have his support for the main thesis of my article Keftiu : Crete or Cilicia ? However, some of his remarks demand a word from me in reply.

Prof. Sayce still uses the word ‘Keftiu’ as if it were the name of the people and not that of the land. Like so many others he speaks of ‘the Keftiu,’ ‘the Kaftians,’ etc. This assumes that the name of the land was ‘Keft,’ and that of an inhabitant a ‘Kefti,’ making its plural ‘Keftiu’ in the normal way. But this is not so. The name of the land itself was ‘Keftiu,’ and a native was called a ‘Keftiu-i,’ a form which actually occurs (Wainwright, in LA. vi, 82, No. 18). The plural of this, of which, however, no example survives, would be ‘Keftiu-iu.’ The land must, therefore, be called Keftiu, and the inhabitants ‘the people of Keftiu’ or ‘Keftiuans’ or by some similar epithet.

I have read with great interest Prof. Sayce's discussion on the home of the Keftiu in the previous part of the JHS., and I am glad to see that on the whole he shares Mr. Wainwright's views, which I myself believe to be correct, if only we admit the possibility that Cretans may have been included under the term during a short period. Prof. Sayce definitely states, in opposition to Mr. Wainwright, that no tin is found in Asia Minor. He seems not to be aware that in the Sitzb. Kgl. Bayer. Ak. d. W., Ph. Hist. Kl. 1911, 6, pp. 6 ff., I have quoted Hintze, Handbuch d. Mineralogie, I, pp. 1678 ff., where it is stated (p. 1702) that at Eskishehir, in Central Asia Minor, tin had been found quite recently and that the mines were exploited under the old Turkish government. Prof. Rothpletz, the well-known authority on alpine geology and mineralogy, at that time of the University of Munich, added that there was every chance of tin occurring as ‘Seifenzinn’ or ‘Stromzinn’ on Sinai and in the desert between Assuan and the Red Sea.

On p. 289 of the last volume of the Journal Dr. Roes refers to the discovery at Nineveh by Dr. Campbell Thompson of large quantities of‘the black-painted ware the like of which is found in South Mesopotamia and Persia,’ in Parthian houses erected among the ruins of the destroyed temple of Ishtar. She discourages Dr. Thompson's suggestion that they were part of the ‘collection’ of a Parthian antiquary and suggests that ‘the discovery must mean that in the days of the Parthians the vases were still being made somewhere.’

I also feel sceptical about Dr. Thompson's Parthian antiquary, but think that Dr. Roes probably does not realise the peculiar nature of the site. Quyunjik is an immense mound rising about 100 feet above the bed of the Khosr that flows under it.