B.M. B46. The catalogue describes this vase thus:—

Acquired 1867: Blacas Coll. Dinos. Ht. 13 in. Diam. 12½ in. Slightly restored, imperfectly fired. Around rim, chain of lotus and buds; on shoulder, tongue-pattern. Two friezes: above, banquet scene, of seven couches, on each of which two male banqueters; between the two end couches, group of five servants, in attendance on the banqueters; below, animal frieze. Beneath this a broad zone of black, and on bottom, polypus pattern.

The principal scene shows a series of seven couches, on each of which recline two bearded male figures, facing to 1.; seven of them wear wreaths. Alongside each couch stands a table, bearing viands for the banquet. From 1. to r., the first, fourth, sixth, tenth and thirteenth hold out phialae in varying attitudes; the third, eleventh and fourteenth hold out kerata, in the act of drinking, or to have them refilled, while the seventh and eighth also have each a keras; the fifth holds out a kantharos; the twelfth raises an apparently empty r. hand; the second also raises his r. hand, but the object he holds is hidden by the first figure; the ninth plays the double flute.

Of the children Echidna bore to Typhon the Chimaera was certainly the most illogical. She might even be considered as the very strangest among all the fantastical beings orientalising art in Greece liked to represent. For though she was called the goat, yet she stands before us as a lion, and the only thing there is of a goat about her is a head, that grows like a parasite out of the lion's back, and, in most cases, looks piteous rather than terrific. Even the later addition of a pair of forefeet cannot contribute to making her look formidable. We are told that she has a mighty weapon: the fiery flames she can eject from her mouth. Yet perched as she is, it is not easy for her to make use of this weapon; she will have to manœuvre very skilfully in order not to harm the lion, whose head will always come between her and the enemy they are confronting.

Acknowledgments are due to Professor Oikonomos and members of the Greek Archaeological Service, the Directors of the French and American Schools, the German Archaeological Institute, and of associated excavations, my colleagues of the British School and the Director of Antiquities in Cyprus, for the reports, photographs and drawings which they have generously contributed. This summary, as usual, does not exactly cover a period of twelve months. It contains all the proceedings of 1937 not already reported and a large proportion of those of 1938.

In the early years after its foundation in 1857, the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington pursued its policy of acquisition with a vigorously catholic taste. Since then its scope has become gradually limited to exclude work of the pre-Christian era, but in addition to the original purchases of Greek vases, the accession of large miscellaneous collections containing antiquities has contributed to what is now an excellent group of Greek and Roman objects. Important Greek vases were included in the big collection of modern European ceramics transferred in 1901 from the Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street, and in 1910 the late George Salting bequeathed his entire collection, other than paintings, to the Victoria and Albert Museum. His good taste in every other direction was sufficient guarantee that the Greek civilisations should be represented by work of more than average merit. Unfortunately, Salting kept few records concerning the provenance of his acquisitions, and so one of the finest Etruscan engraved mirrors in existence came to the Museum without a past history.

When discussing the monetary reform of Solon, I adopted the view that he obtained his supplies of silver for his new coinage from Corinth: it was obviously necessary for the success of his scheme that he should get silver from some market other than Aegina, and Corinth appeared to be the only place that would ‘ fill the bill’: she had a coinage on a standard independent of Aegina, with the same unit of weight for the stater as that adopted by Solon, and it seemed probable that the stations established by Periander on the Illyrian coast would enable her to procure silver from the mines in the interior. But recent research by Mr. John May has shown that these mines were situated much further from the Adriatic than had been inferred from Strabo's account : the centre of the mining region was Damastium, and the site of Damastium, on the evidence of coin-finds, was clearly near Scupi (Skoplje) and the upper valley of the Axius.

Ancient authorities agree in placing the division of the people into tribes, phratries and gene among the most primitive institutions of Athens. The question presents itself, Were all the citizens enrolled in all of these organisations, or were some sections of the people excluded from any or all of them? On the answer given to this question depends to some extent the view to be taken of the origin of this triple classification.

The prevailing opinion is that, whereas tribes and phratries embraced the whole citizen-body, the gene were the exclusive organisation of the nobles. M. Cary adduces a fragment of early Attic law to prove that the phratries contained others besides gennetai (I shall deal later with this text) and asserts, in the face of the explicit testimony of Aristotle and the lexicographers, that the genos was not a subdivision of the phratry. I can find absolutely no support in the texts for this view. Most modern authorities are so completely convinced of the aristocratic nature of the genos that they do not even try to prove it. Francotte says simply: ‘D'abord, les genê sont des institutions aristocratiques. Je ne crois pas qu'il soit nécessaire d'insister.’

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.

While collecting information about the early history of Kythera I recently came across a short communication from Leake in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, Vol. IV (new series), 1853. It is in the form of a letter to the Secretary, and entitled ‘ Some remarks on the Island Cerigo, anciently Cythera,’ and reproduces an extract translated by Mr. Hamilton from a Memoir on the island sent to the latter by Mr. Calucci, an inhabitant of Kythera, on Oct. 3rd, 1849. On p. 4 he gives a copy of an inscribed stone found at Palaiopoli (Scandeia) which he describes thus: ‘ A small rectangular piece of hard white stone, one inch (sic) in length and ten lines thick; its lower surface has deep cuttings in it so as to form five half cylinders. On the upper surface, which is highly polished, is the inscription in five lines represented in the annexed drawing (Fig. 2). The measurement given appears impossibly small and must be a mistranslation of the original Greek (or Italian).

The paper is known to Pauly-Wissowa. Weil (AM v, 1880, pp. 293 f.) mentions it and copies the late Greek inscription also illustrated there, but takes no notice of our inscription, and no scholar interested in Minoan or early Asia Minor scripts seems to have any knowledge of it. Some, but not all, of the signs are found in the Minoan linear script, a few also in the Cypriote syllabary.

‘Since the discovery of the ῾Αθηναίων Πολιτεία in 1890’ the learned editors of the Oxyrhynchus papyri tell us, ‘Egypt has not produced any historical papyrus at all comparable in importance to these portions of a lost Greek historian, obviously of the first rank, dealing in minute detail with the events of the Greek world in the years 396 and 395 B.C.’ Drs. Grenfell and Hunt are indeed to be congratulated first on having made so great a discovery—a piece of luck which their long and arduous labours, systematically and scientifically conducted, have so richly deserved—and secondly they are still more to be congratulated on the success with which they have pieced together and deciphered the text and illumined their interpretation with clearly written and closely argued introduction and notes. They have not contented themselves, as they well might have done, merely with arranging and deciphering the text—a work demanding the greatest patience and the most exact scholarship—but they have boldly tackled, and with great acumen, the difficult question of the authorship of the work and many historical problems raised both by the fragmentary nature of the text itself and by comparison of its statements with those of other extant authorities.

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 paper re-evaluates the narrative roles occupied by Geryon and Herakles in Stesichoros’ Geryoneis in the light of contemporary thinking about Herakles’ apotheosis. It proposes that Stesichoros activates his audience's awareness of Herakles’ fated divinity in order to reframe the hero versus monster encounter not as a duel between two mortal heroes – the usual interpretation – but as a showdown between a hero and a god. This reorientation destabilizes an audience's sympathies and self-identification, forcing a re-evaluation of the nature of both heroism and humanity. Following a discussion of the potential narrative roles in play, the prominence of Herakles’ apotheosis in the sixth century and its salience for Stesichoros’ audience is established. The apotheosis is then applied as a complementary lens to the long-recognized Iliadic intertexts in a reinterpretation of the encounter between Geryon and Herakles on Erytheia. Finally, the use of the apotheosis as a lens for interpreting two fragments beyond Erytheia is considered.

A variety of ancient sources suggest that there was more than one Aristophanic play entitled Πλοῦτος, and the scholia on the extant Plutus show that one ancient commentator erroneously thought that he was working on a comedy of 408 BC when in reality he had the comedy of 388 BC in front of him. This error, which most likely arose because there were two similar versions of the late Plutus, has often been attributed to the first-century BC scholar Didymus Chalcenterus. It is here argued that the basis for this ascription is weak and that there are in fact substantial counter-arguments. Instead of Didymus, a later commentator such as the second-century AD scholar Symmachus may have been responsible for the mistake, which probably had more to do with the evolving transmission history of Aristophanes’ comedies than with careless scholarship.