Mr. C. T Onions, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, has generously allowed me to examine a manuscript collection of inscriptions recently acquired by him and to publish such account of it as may be of interest to epigraphists. I gratefully avail myself of his kind permission.

The collection is contained in a book measuring 12½ × 7 × 1 ins., roughly bound and covered with white vellum. On the front is written ‘Inscriptions collected by Thos Blackburne Esqr,’ and on the back of the cover ‘Foreign Inscrips. Thos Blackburne.’ The book contains inety-six folios, unnumbered, the first of which bears the title

The verso of the great majority of the folios is left blank, though occasionally, where the page was too narrow to contain an inscription, the copy extends over the verso of one folio and the recto of the next. Folios 79 and 96 are left entirely blank.

Of the collector I can learn nothing. To judge by the British Museum and the Bodleian Library Catalogues, he published no account of his travels and observations. It seems to me, however, not improbable that he may be the same Thomas Blackburne who, in 1775, published at Edinburgh (Apud Balfour et Smellie, Academiae Typographos) as a doctoral dissertation a work entitled Dissertatio de medici institutis.

In discussing the Persian worship of the king's daimon in J.H.S., 1927, p. 54, I cited the following passage from Isocrates's Panegyricus (151): θνητὸνμὲν ἄνδρα προσκυνοῦντες καὶ δαίμονα προσαγορεύοντες By an error, the origin of which I am at a loss to understand, I inserted the article τόν before δαίμονα and accordingly misinterpreted the words. The meaning is, of course, ‘paying obeisance to mortal man and calling him daimon.’ The passage cannot, therefore, be cited as evidence for the cult of the personal daimon of the Persian king.

The significance of the evidence provided by the quotations from Theopompus and from the Artaxerxes of Plutarch is not affected by the fact that the words of Isocrates do not apply to the same cult. There is indeed another reference to the subject in Plutarch, this time in the life of Themistocles, which I have chanced to find recently. In the description of Themistocles's reception at the Persian court (chap. xxix), the chiliarch is represented as saying in wrath to Themistocles: ὄφις ῾´Ελλην ὁ ποικίλος ὁ βασιλέως σε δαίμων δεῦροἤγαηεν The story is, of course, of dubious historical value, but it is evident that in some one of the numerous sources which he cites in this part of the Themistocles, Plutarch found expression of the Persian belief in the idea of the king's daimon.

In the Third Graeco-Roman Room is a long relief, numbered 2154 and entitled a Votive Relief. It is described in the catalogue (1904) as ‘Relief, perhaps votive, with Dionysos receiving a libation. The central group consists of Dionysos and a Maenad…. Behind the Maenad a large crater stands on the ground…. A moulding appears to have been tooled away above…. May be as early as the end of the fourth century. Athens: Elgin Collection. Height 2 feet 7 inches; length 5 feet 8 inches. Found among the ruins of the theatre of Herodes Atticus. Formerly in the possession of N. Logotheti. Stuart, ii, pp. 23, 45.…’

Close to the ‘crater’ a hole about an inch in diameter has been carefully bored through the marble—so carefully that the presumption is that it is part of the original work, although it is suppressed in the old illustrations and is not mentioned in the descriptions. On looking behind the relief it at once appears that material at the two ends and the bottom has been cut away. The remnants of the parts which have been cut off suggest the two ends and bottom of a water trough or cistern. The hole mentioned above is situated an inch or so above what remains of the bottom, and thus conforms to the general tradition of stone water troughs such as several of granite which I have recently seen in Dartmoor farm-yards. From these evidences and the appropriate size it may not be doubted that the relief is the front of a water cistern.

In discussing Ikaros as represented on vase-paintings, Prof. J. D. Beazley has, I think, omitted one consideration which throws further light on a detail of the subject and strengthens his contention as regards the interpretation of a painting. He shows a picture from what he describes as ‘a small red-figured lekythos, of about 470 B.C.,’ which represents a winged youth either rising or sinking; he interprets him as sinking, which indeed the general attitude suggests, and calls attention to the presence just above him of a bird, which ‘is flying almost straight down.… The bird acts as the directional arrow in cartography.’ He therefore concludes that the artist has chosen for his subject the fall of Ikaros during the escape from Crete.

That the bird is not there merely to fill up space I heartily agree; Greek artists of the fifth century were not fond of such tricks, having little or no horror uacui and possessing the precious talent of stopping when they had nothing more to say. That it incidentally shows the direction in which the chief figure moves I am perfectly ready to believe; it is a convention conceivable in itself and made reasonably probable—I do not think it is actually proved—by the other examples cited. But surely it is still better if the bird is part of the story, and this I believe it is.

With the Stroganoff Collection the Hermitage acquired a skyphos with PL. 1. one horizontal and one vertical handle.

A. Woman with chiton and himation and man with himation and stick, offering a purse to the woman; he is holding a piece of money in his left hand. A lekythos is suspended between them. Inscriptions, twice, ὁ παῖς καλός

B. A girl clad in chiton and himation offers a lekythos to a youth with himation and stick. Inscriptions, twice, ὁ παῖςκαλός

Very fine drawing; no relief outlines; purple on the leaves of the diadem, on the taeniae on the head of the youth and the man, on the purse. The muscles are drawn with brown varnish. There are to be noticed as most characteristic features: the high round form of the head on A, the expressive type of the faces, the realistic treatment of the mantles, the manneristic gestures of the hands. All the details prove that this skyphos is painted by the Penthesilea master. Indeed the exterior of the Munich kylix 2688 offers analogies for the round form of the head, the drawing of feet and hands, the purple lines on the hands, the individual profiles. Most characteristic of this master is the type of the youth with curled hair.

§1. A saying attributed to the Cynic Diogenes by Diogenes Laertius, VI. 63, ψηφισαμένων ᾿Αθηναίων ᾿Αλέξανδρον Διόνυσον, κἀμέ, ἔφη, Σάραπιν ποιήσατε though condemned as unhistorical by some scholars, has recently been quoted as evidence for the divine honours paid to Alexander during his life. It cannot, however, be genuine; Diogenes was not a contemporary of Alexander as world-conqueror, and Sarapis as a god who would be known in the Greek world at large is subsequent to king and Cynic alike. Apart from this we frequently find in modern authorities the statement that, when Alexander sent his demand in 324 to the cities of Greece to be recognised as a god, Athens on the proposal of Demades voted that he should be honoured as Dionysus. This is not the case.

In the Rectory garden at Ewhurst, Sussex, while the late Rev. A. J. Tuck was rector, there was discovered in 1905, obscured by earth and debris in the rockery, the remarkable Greek stele here illustrated. It is now in the possession of the rector's widow, Mrs. Tuck Powell.

The living of Ewhurst had previously been held by the Rev. G. J. Boudier, a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, who had been a chaplain in the Crimea; and he may have procured this marble there or on his way out or back in Greece. Nothing further is known of its provenance, or can be guessed except from the relic itself.

The face which we have has been roughly broken off from its back, leaving the surface uneven. At the back on the upper part about two inches of marble remain at the left end, which gradually slopes down to a very thin edge on the right end, the marble here being left in the rough. On the left side of the marble at the back the broken portion is smoothed and slopes inwards, being from 2½ inches thick to 3¼ inches at the bottom end. Along the bottom and at the back the stone has been smoothed and is 3½ inches thick.

Professor Ormerod was the first to direct attention to the importance of this proconsul's war against the Isaurian pirates in its bearing on the topography of Asia Minor. The operations were fully described in Sallust's Histories, but only fragments remain. The list of territories which Servilius added to the ager publicus of Rome is given twice by Cicero in his Orationes de Lege Agraria, I. 5 and II. 50, especially the latter.

The ultimate authority is doubtless the Act. Triumph., which would be certainly complete and unimpeachable; and it is in the last degree improbable that Cicero would omit any ager. The enumeration would be very effective in his sonorous orations, and it is given twice. Error might creep in by two loop-holes: (1) errors in transmission of the text of Cicero; (2) errors in representing by Roman letters names which were counted barbarous and Anatolian. Probably there was an intermediate stage of transmission through Greek; and it is pointed out frequently in my Asianic Elements in Greek Civilisation that the Greek alphabet had no suitable symbols to represent quite a variety of Anatolian sounds, especially W or V, Yod, sonant N and several vowel sounds; also that several consonants were (and are still in the peasants' Turkish) pronounced in a way very difficult to catch exactly; e.g. R and L, also L and N, seem to interchange (Sayce finds the latter linguistic phenomenon in Hittite).

Dr. Fotheringham, in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. XLV (1925) has written a rejoinder to a criticism which I made six years ago in the same Journal (XLI, pp. 70–85) on his earlier article, ‘Cleostratus of Tenedos’ (1919). In this second paper Dr. Fotheringham very handsomely admits that he has been converted, not indeed so far as to embrace the—somewhat negative—views which my article expressed, but as to admit the error of at least one theory which he had himself rather confidently advanced. If I return to the controversy it is because the entire conversion of Dr. Fotheringham, whose services to the study of ancient astronomy no one values more highly than I, would be an event, in my opinion, of real importance to that neglected branch of archaeology. Moreover, now that Cleostratus has, by Dr. Fotheringham's aid, been brought back on to the historic stage, I cannot but think it hard that he should be obliged to pose thereon in the Babylonian garments with which Dr. Fotheringham insists on investing him.

In my forthcoming publication of the Rhind Lectures, 1923, on The Civilization of Greece in the Bronze Age I have briefly referred (pp. 225–6) to the remarkable discovery by Dr. Walter Andrae for the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, at Ḳala'at Sharḳat, the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Ashur, on the Tigris, of a series of objects in fayence not only of precisely the same type as the remarkable fayence vases and other objects found by the British Museum excavators at Enkomi and Maroni in Cyprus, but some of them, one would think, made by the same hand. These Assyrian objects were among those brought back to England from Mesopotamia after the war, and finally assigned to the British Museum, when eventually a division-was made of the whole between London and Berlin. Before this division was effected I had recognized these particular fayence objects as the counterparts of those already in the British Museum from Enkomi, and Dr. Andrae and I, after I had pointed out the fact to him on a visit made by him to London, agreed that we should publish them separately, he as their discoverer in their context in his full publication of his finds, I in order to emphasize their identity with the Enkomi finds and their Minoan character.

In the history of Greek literature, as regarded by the general reader, there are two remarkable intermissions. The first occurs when ancient Greek literature comes to an end with Lucian in the second century after Christ; or perhaps when the hexameter itself begins to dissolve in the hands of Nonnus in the fourth. The second break naturally follows when Byzantine literature is cut short by the fall of Constantinople in 1453—after which it is commonly and wrongly supposed that hardly a Greek put pen to paper, save in the way of commerce or grammar, until the revolutionary songs of Eegas heralded the revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is, however, one of the fascinations of Greek studies that they introduce us to a language that can be traced in an unbroken descent from Homer to the present day: and wherever the Greek language has been spoken the art of literature has never quite perished, though its traces are sometimes rather faint and its beauties rare. But for the complete study of a language second-rate authors must not be neglected where masterpieces are few and far between. Unfortunately it is only in the last fifty years that scholars have turned their attention to publication of the obscure works that carry on the literary tradition from Byzantium to modern Greece. Of these authors ‘of the Turkish period’ the learned Sophocles, in the introduction to his Lexicon, remarks (1860) : ‘It is unnecessary to inform the reader here that, with very few exceptions, they are beneath criticism.’