§ 1. Introduction.—A Herbal is a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medical purposes. Most herbal remedies are quite devoid of any rational basis. It may be taken for granted that the writer of a herbal is unable to treat evidence on a scientific basis. He makes a ‘direct attack’ on disease, without any ‘nonsense about theories.’ The herbal is thus to be distinguished from the scientific botanical treatise by the fact that its aims are exclusively ‘practical’—a vague and foolish word with which, from the days of Plato to our own, men have sought to conceal from themselves and from others their destitution of anything in the nature of general ideas.

A herbal is, moreover, to be distinguished from most other medical works not only in method but also in form. Its arrangement is under remedies rather than under diseases or conditions to be treated. A herbal is, in fact, primarily a descriptive drug-list or, as we now call it, a pharmacopoeia. Pharmacopoeias include a number of substances that cannot be classed as of vegetable origin. Nevertheless, in many ancient as in most modern medical systems, there has been a tendency for remedies to be of a herbal nature. The pharmacopoeias of the Greco-Roman world thus tended to approximate to the nature of herbals.

When a Persian came into the presence of the great king he greeted his lord by a form of salutation which the Greeks denoted by the verb προσκυνεῖν and the noun προσκύνησις. The verb, a compound of κυνεῖν, to kiss, means ‘to send a kiss toward.’ It is the word used to describe the commonest Greek act of devotion to a god—the custom of bringing the hand to the mouth and wafting a kiss toward the image of a god. This act, represented on a number of Attic vase paintings, was commonly performed by the Greeks and Romans when they passed the numerous images and shrines of the gods along their streets. Under the guise of performing the proskynesis to Poseidon, Demosthenes is said to have deceived the emissaries of Antipater and to have brought the poison to his lips. The idea of the kiss as a concrete sign of worship is originally strong in the word and usually persists in it, though sometimes the meaning seems to be little more than to worship. The use of the word to describe the Persian greeting indicates that the Greek saw in the salutation of the king a kind of cult kiss. By a custom familiar in the East from very ancient times until to-day, the subject threw himself on the ground to perform the salutation.

I should have liked to begin what I hope will be a series of essays on black-figure artists, not with the Antimenes painter, but with one of those bold congeners of Euphronios and Euthymides to whom Buschor has recently drawn attention. But these, as it turned out, presented unexpected difficulties, so I begin with the Antimenes painter.

I name him after the inscription on a vase in Leyden, a hydria with a representation of youths washing which has always seemed to me one of the prettiest of black-figure pictures. The vase has been published twice, first by Roulez in very imperfect drawings, lately by the lutrologist Sudhoff in good photographs. New photographs, which I owe to the kindness of Miss Brants, bring out some details obscure in Sudhoff (although in other points Sudhoff is superior), and give the proportions of the figures better, for in Sudhoff the lower parts are somewhat foreshortened.

Among the many thousands of terracottas recently recovered from the soil at Tarentum, there is one large group which has not yet received much mention in print. I refer to a series of some hundreds of female statuettes which have been identified by Duemmler and Winter as Artemis figures. The majority of these figures are at present in the Museo Nazionale at Taranto, though some few have found their way into museums elsewhere.

In the main type of the figures there is little variation. They usually range from eight to twelve inches in height, and are standing, female, draped figures each with one or more attributes. They all wear either a lion-skin head-dress, or a lion-skin apron; some, indeed, show both the head-dress and the apron. Most of the examples are single-moulded statuettes with unmodelled back, but there are a few which are almost reliefs. The figurines are for the most part rough and not retouched after moulding, though there are some finely modelled exceptions to this rule.

Through the generosity of the descendants of Robert Wood (1716–71) the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies now possesses a number of note-books, diaries, sketch-books, etc., the records of a long tour which he made in 1750–51, in the company of John Bouverie and James Dawkins, and which bore fruit in Wood's publications of the ruins of Palmyra (1753), of Baalbec (1757) and in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767).

Little is known of Wood's history before this tour; according to Horace Walpole he was originally a travelling tutor, and from scattered references in his published works and in his note-books we learn that between May 1742 and the spring of 1743 he had made a long tour which embraced Constantinople, many of the islands in the Aegean Sea, Egypt and some towns in Syria and Mesopotamia. He himself tells us it was for this reason that Messrs. Bouverie and Dawkins, with whom he had travelled in Italy, invited him to accompany them. The diaries and note-books shew that he was a bom traveller with a quick eye for the salient features of a landscape and a keen appreciation of its natural beauties. He was also an excellent classical scholar, and, as such, interested in the identification of ancient sites and in the inscriptions found there, but this interest was literary rather than antiquarian; his real interest lay in comparing the statements of ancient geographers and modern travellers with the physical conditions as he found them, above all in identifying any river he crossed and, wherever possible, tracing it to its source.