Sing, Goddess, of the Wrath of Achilles son of Peleus,

Fatal and accurséd Wrath: for on the Greeks it laid

Innumerable Griefs, and many souls of stalwart Heroes

Hurl'd headlong to the house of Death, and of their bodies made

A prey for dogs, a feast for birds; fulfilling the Design

Of Zeus:—Begin the story when the King, the son of Atreus,

First fell apart in quarrel from Achilles the divine.

δῖος is one of Homer's favourite heroic epithets. He uses it for hero after hero, when the name scans suitably. It must be part of an inherited stock-in-trade. Yet here, where the form of the paragraph gives it emphasis, the ‘faded’ epithet is vivid and significant. The music haunts us.

It haunted Homer when he made the Odyssey:— ‘Muse … the resourceful Man … his Wife … the Nymph, bright among goddesses … the gods … godlike Odysseus.’ It haunted Virgil:— ‘Arms and the Man … Fate … Juno's Wrath … the Gods … the walls of Rome,’ and Milton:— ‘Man … One Greater Man … sing, Heavenly Muse….’

This vase was formerly in the Lambros collection; it passed thence to the National Museum at Athens, where it now is. The provenience is unknown, but in view of its obviously Corinthian manufacture, it is interesting to record that the fragments of earth which the vase still contains are of a light yellowish-white colour and very crumbly, full of small root-slivers, perhaps from vines. This rather distinctive earth would seem to point to the Corinthia, and it is a probable conjecture that the vase hails from a Corinthian grave.

The vase is 88 mm. tall by 55 mm. broad at the base. The form is unique among Corinthian plastic vases; the shape is that of a round-topped cone; a section of the periphery equal to about one-third of the circumference is flattened to form the front of the vase. On this flat side is modelled in high relief the head of an early archaic seilen, whose general characteristics will be easily gathered from the accompanying photographs. Below the neck of the seilen is a horizontal painted strip, evidently indicating some garment which he is wearing.

The story of the fragmentary head illustrated in fig. 1 is, in the words of Colonel Charles Healey, C.M.G., as follows:

24 Sussex Mansions,

London, S.W. 7.

8 July, 1935.

This fragment from the frieze on the Acropolis was given to me about the year 1890 by my father-in-law, Baron Ernst von Poellnitz. He was an officer in the Bavarian army when Prince Otto of Bavaria was placed on the throne of Greece. Baron Poellnitz' company was camped on the Acropolis with strict orders that no one should carry away any relics. On the long march back to Bavaria my father-in-law noticed one of his men obviously hampered by the weight of his knapsack, which contained this fragment. After making numerous efforts without success to return it to Athens, Baron Poellnitz retained the fragment, which he gave to me.

Colonel Healey has in turn given it to me, with this note of its origin.

The head is in low relief, facing right, with the lower part of the face broken away. The back of the marble has been knocked off, probably to lighten it. The upper side is preserved; and on it is to be seen the edge of the raised section behind. The distance from this edge to the face of the marble (the background of the head) is ·013 m.

The purpose of this article is somewhat ambitious. It is proposed to adduce evidence in support of the thesis, which the writer has already briefly maintained elsewhere, that the majority of the dates, earlier than the period of the Persian Wars, which pass current in our Greek history text-books, are wrong, and should be ‘scaled down’ by a certain proportion of their distance from 500 B.C. The virtue of 500 B.C. as a base-line lies simply in the fact that it falls in the middle of the generation that saw the beginnings of Greek historical prose writing in the hands of Hekataios of Miletos and others.

The genius of Herodotos, the considerable amount of contemporary information gleaned by later Greek scholars from the early elegiac, lyric and iambic poets, the vivid personalities of these poets themselves, and the systematising labours of generations of logographers and historians, ultimately reduced to order by Eratosthenes and transmitted to us by Eusebios—all these conspire to obscure from us the fact that the whole Archaic period in Greece is not an historic but a proto-historic age; an age known to us, not from contemporary historical writings, but through a synthesis of archaeology, references to historic events in a literature still exclusively poetic, references to our area in historical documents from a more mature adjacent region (such as Assyria), and genealogies and oral traditions that survived long enough to be written down later.

Some remarkable discoveries were made in Greece in the year ending at midsummer 1935; not all of them, by any means, from official excavations, for, as often, ‘chance finds’ produced much of the most interesting material. In the following account, much of the information as to the results of official excavations is taken from Karo's forthcoming report in the Archaeologischer Anzeiger, proofs of which, thanks to the author's generosity, I have been able to use. I would here express my thanks also to others who have provided me with information or photographs.

Athens And Attica

The fifth campaign of the American excavators in the Athenian Agora has again led to important topographical discoveries. The first results are described by Shear in AJA 1935, 173 ff.; and a general idea of the lie of the land may be obtained from the plan, loc. cit. 175, which embodies the identifications made possible last season by the discovery of the Tholos and of the Altar of the Twelve Gods.

In the present article I attempt briefly to survey the books and articles relating wholly or largely to Greek inscriptions which appeared in 1933 and 1934. I do not refer to all reviews, but only to those (including some published in 1935) which are of special value to the student, either as offering a useful conspectus of the works concerned or as making original contributions to the subjects under discussion. I mark with an asterisk those works which I have been unable to consult directly. Once again I tender my heartfelt thanks to all scholars who, by sending me copies of their contributions to epigraphical studies, have helped me in my pleasant but onerous task.

Death has not taken from us during these years any whose main interests and achievements lay in the field of Greek epigraphy, though E. Cuq, E. Pottier and F. Vulič had done work of real value in it.

Fig. 1 is a fragment in a private collection in England. It is said to have been found on the Acropolis of Athens, and Mr. Payne points out to me that it joins a fragment in the Acropolis collection, Graef 1780, pls. 83 and 87, with the inscription χ]ειρον εποιε[σεν. The vase was a Siana cup with overlap decoration. Red is used for the helmet, the second and fifth sections of the crest, and the inside of the Boeotian shield; white for the fifth, fourth and last sections of the crest, spots and stripes on the cuirass, the arm-strap and the shield-device, a seated lion or sphinx with one paw raised. The contours are incised, except for the upper edge of the Boeotian shield. In front of the crest is the end of a black line; it is too close to be part of the other warrior's crest and is not incised; probably it is the beginning of an inscription, no doubt the warrior's name. The painter has carelessly transferred to the upper part of the rim of the Boeotian shield the pattern belonging to the round one.

Since the publication of ‘Boeotian Geometricising Vases’ in this Journal (49, p. 160 f.) four more vases of this series have come to light. All are in Athens, the first three in the collection of Mr. Michael P. Vlasto, to whom I am very much indebted for allowing me to study and publish the vases and for providing the photographs here reproduced. The fourth is in the National Museum. Though all are in their general appearance thoroughly characteristic of the style, each one of them presents some novel feature.

The photographs of Pl. XII. shew a cast which is now in the Acropolis Museum at Athens. The upper part of the figure (minus the two fragments of the left arm) is usually known as the Aphrodite of Lyons or of Marseilles: the lower part and the fragments of the left arm are in the Acropolis Museum (the lower part, Dickins no. 269). As the photographs shew, these fragments are all parts of a single statue: the lower part joins the upper over a small area on the right side, the arm-fragments join over the whole of the inner broken surfaces. The join on the right side is not visible in the photographs here reproduced, but the relation of the two pieces is sufficiently clear from the correspondence of the folds of the drapery. The Lyons fragment was first mentioned in a work published in 1719, and must have reached France at the end of the seventeenth or at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Cho. 581–2

τὰ δ᾿ ἄλλα τσύτῳ δεῦρ᾿ ἐποπτεῦσαι λέγω ξιφηφρους ἀγῶνας όρθώσοντί μοι

In a recent article {JHS Iv. 20-34) I have argued that this passage is based on an allusion to the Eleusinian hro-meiot, the second grade of the Mysteries. My purpose now is to explain more clearly the significance of that conception.

Plato likened the soul of man to a charioteer, who drove two horses, one good, the other bad, one docile, the other recalcitrant (Phaedr. 246—7) : ἔνθα δὴ πόνος τε καὶ ἀγὼν ἔσχατος ψυχῇ πρόκειται. And he saw human life as a struggle in which many of the chariots clashed and fell (248b): θόρυβος οῦν καί ἅμιλλα λαί ἱδρὼς ἔσχατος γίγνεται … πᾶσαι δὲ πολὺν ἔχουσαι πόδρον ἀτελεῖς τῆς τοῦ ὄντος θέας ἀπέρχονται.

Mr. A. D. Trendall 's welcome publication (JUS liv, 175) of a volute crater in the Taranto Museum brings to light the second of two very important early South Italian vases. The other was published two years ago by Wuilleumier in RA 1933. ii, 3, and now that they have both been revealed it is time for them to sever partnership. Theyhave long left a gap in the history of South Italian vase painting, and have not unnaturally been usually classed together as the two important unpublished Taranto craters. One began to think of them automatically as companion pieces, probably by the same hand. But this they are now shewn not to be. This conclusion, which I can base on a study of photographs only, is confirmed by Mr. Trendall. His vase, with the Birth of Dionysos on the obverse, and an Amazonomachy on the reverse, is so like the well-known volute crater Naples 2411 (Sacrifice to Dionysos and a Centauromachy), as he has already indicated,8 that I do not hesitate to say that they are by the same hand, and to suggest that a name must be found for this important artist, whom I still disassociate from the Sisyphus painter, though he follows closely in his tradition. He also painted the Brussels volute crater A1018 with the Apotheosis of Heracles.

Well known though the grylli are, we have still very little to say about their meaning and about their origin.Our knowledge of them, which has hardly increased since the days of Furtwangler, amounts to the following facts. Grylli were one of the most popular motives for the decoration of gems in Roman times; they remained in favour during more than three centuries. Several indications lead us to believe that some pro-phylactic value was ascribed to them; this may also account for their long popularity. In appearance they can as a rule be divided into two classes. Either they are a composition of various human and animal heads, sometimes with birds added to them, or else they consist of the body of a bird, generally a cock, to which heads and masks are attached in different ways. As the cock often is provided with a horse's head, we are reminded of the Attic hippalectryon; it is, however, impossible to trace their descent from Greek art, for we do not know of any more complicated Greek design that may have inspired Roman gem-cutters; the hippalectryon itself even does not seem to have lived down to the Hellenistic period. On the other hand, it is equally impossible to regard them as an original Roman fantasy. In the first place, their connexion with the hippalectryon, though distant, is unmistakable; secondly and chiefly, we know there were grylli before the days of Roman glyptic art. In the necropolis of Tharros in Sardinia have been found several scarabs decorated with motives closely resembling the Roman grylli. Now the necropolis seems to have been in use for a very long time, but Furtwangler believed, no doubt rightly, that the bulk of the objects found in it, and especially the grylli, must be dated rather early as they still show some of the traditions of archaic art. Our Fig. 3a is a good example.