It is as yet too soon to state what corrections or additions should be made to the various figures I gave in my Population of Athens as a result of new evidence since that book was published (1933), although some individual discoveries have been made and Sterling Dow has published his invaluable Prytaneis (Hesperia, Suppl. I, 1937); for the excavations in the Athenian agora are not finished–though it looks as though the hopes I expressed for the discovery of a large number of inscriptions that would throw new light on the problem will be disappointed. But two objections have been made to my treatment of the number of slaves in Athens, by Mr. Hammond in Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc, 1935, p. 1, and by Prof. George Thomson in his edition of The Oresteia, I 70, n. 1 and II 357-9, both of whom maintain that Ktesikles' figure of 400,000 must be accepted; and though the question has again been discussed, convincingly enough to my mind, by Prof. Westerraann in Athenian Studies (Harv. Stud, Suppl. Vol. I, 1940, 451-70), it is worth dealing with certain aspects afresh, especially in answer to Thomson, for some important principles are involved. Not that anything I can say will convince him; for he hopes that ‘the whole subject will be re-examined by someone who is prepared to take the ancient evidence seriously and is free from the suspicion of seeking to minimise the extent of an evil which casts a sinister shadow over the glory that was Greece.’ But I will do my best.

In my article in the previous issue of this Journal (JHS lxxviii (1958) 12) one of the points I tried to make was that the two-level ship was not, as is usually thought, a transient phase between the single-level ship and the trireme, but that representations of it appeared not long before 700 B.C. and continued until after the trireme is thought to have been introduced into Greece, i.e. during the third quarter of the sixth century.

The object of the present paper is to give some account of the scheme of political and social reform for the Peloponnese, which was propounded in the year 1415, by Gemistos Plethon, in the form of two pamphlets, addressed respectively to the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel Palaeologus II., and to his son, Theodore II., who at that time held the office of Despot of the Byzantine province of the Morea. These are entitled and . They were first printed at Antwerp in 1575, as an appendix to the first edition of Stobaeus, W. Canter being the editor; but the manuscript from which this text was derived was imperfect, and the first complete edition was that of Dr. Ellissen of Göttingen, who published the ‘Addresses,’ after a collation of a manuscript existing at Florence—with a German translation, and an excellent Introduction and notes—in 1860, in the fourth part of his Analekten der mittel- und neugriechischen Litteratur. The first person however who in modern times drew the attention of scholars to the importance of their contents was Prof. Fallmerayer, in his Geschichte der Morea, published in 1830. Though the proposals which they contain never were, and in all probability never could have been carried into effect, yet a greater interest attaches to them than to mere paper schemes and imaginary systems, because they were intended to be adapted to the circumstances of the case.

The vase which is the subject of the present paper is no new find. It has been for many years in the British Museum (Cat. No. 810), and was mentioned by Overbeck in his Heroische Bildwerke in 1851. It has not however hitherto been figured, and it may be well to take advantage of its publication in these pages to make a few observations on the general subject of vase-paintings which are connected with the myths of the Iliad.

The present vase is an amphora from Vulci, height nineteen inches. The form and decoration are given in the woodcut. On one side is a warrior standing to the left, clad in a chlamys, and armed with helmet, spear, and shield adorned with serpent. On the other side is a lady to the left, clad in Ionian chiton and overdress, her head enveloped in a kerchief; she raises her right hand; in her left hand is a baby boy, who turns and stretches his hands to the right. The main outlines of the figures are traced in black, but the folds of the Ionian chiton with light red; there are three incised circles on the warrior's shield. Under each figure runs a line of maeander pattern; an anthemion adorns the bottoms of both handles.

A singularly small contribution has been made by Aetolia to the vast and steadily growing mass of our epigraphical treasures. This seems to be due to two reasons,—a real dearth of inscriptions traceable in part to the character of the Aetolians themselves, and, secondly, the comparative neglect that Aetolia has suffered at the hands of travellers and archaeologists. The inscriptions given here are the results of a detailed exploration extending over part of each of the two years 1892 and 1893.

A large proportion, and those the most interesting of the inscriptions found, come from Naupaktos, or its immediate neighbourhood. This valuable maritime station was, as is well known, put by Athens into the possession of the exiled Messenians and with the downfall of her Empire it passed into the hands of the Achaean allies of Sparta: they seem to have kept it in spite of all the efforts of the Aetolians and it was not until 338 B.C. that its natural owners finally regained it by the gift of Philip of Macedon. From that time onwards Naupaktos played an important part in the history of the League. Pausanias visited the town and among its antiquities he mentions the ruins of a temple of Asklepios of some reputation. The site of this temple has been identified from the inscriptions cut in the face of a rock forming the back of a terrace near the springs called Kephalóvrysis, a few minutes' walk to the east of the town. The few fragments which are all that can now be deciphered of the numerous inscriptions which once covered the rock are given by R. Weil in his paper ‘Das Asklepieion von Naupaktos,’ Mitth. des deutsch. Inst. vol. iv. p. 22.

These notes on the beginnings of Greek sculpture contain little that has not been said before, but aim at applying a severer logic to the evidence and the conclusions drawn from it. The problems may be defined as what models were used by early Greek sculptors, why they chose those models, where the choice was made, and what the impulse was that induced them to take up this new art.

The earliest surviving Greek sculpture worth the name is of the Daedalic style, which Jenkins has analysed neatly in his Dedalica. This style began in the second quarter of the seventh century and continued into the last quarter. So much is fairly generally accepted.

The artistic influence of Egypt on Greece has been propounded since the eighteenth century, and there are still many students who see its effects in sculpture. Usually their arguments are very general, asserting similarity of types and technical methods rather than of style. Of the Archaic Greek types the kouros is most apparently comparable to Egyptian—an upright, four-square figure with arms held to its sides and one foot in front of the other. Except for the stance this is the most obvious pose for a standing figure, and there are essential specific differences, well defined by Schrader. The stock Egyptian male has a support behind the forward leg, tilts backwards, and wears a kilt; the Greek kouros stands free, has a more mobile poise and is naked (except in the Daedalic style for a belt). As for resemblances in detail, Richter and Carpenter single out the roll of stone clenched in the hand of some Greek kouroi; this does not seem a regular or very early feature, and it may be a technical coincidence to avoid hollowing the inside of the closed fist. The ‘layer wig’ of course, though of Egyptian origin, is not so common in Egyptian sculpture and was already naturalised in Phoenician and Syrian art.

The modern convention for printing dialogues includes printing the names of the speakers on the margin at the beginning of their statements. But this practice was virtually unknown in ancient Greek dialogues. Instead, the most common convention for showing the shift from one speaker to another is through punctuation such as the colon, the παραγράφος or a horizontal stroke. Recently, N. G. Wilson has attributed the inclusion of the names of the speakers at the transitional points in Greek dialogues to Theodoret of Cyrus (mid-fifth century CE; composed Eranistes in 447) who, in this view, ‘deserves the credit for devising a literary convention that is now regarded as essential’.

I.—A. Wilhelm has recently republished the inscriptions on an altar at Side in Painphylia, originally published by Van Buren in JHS 1908, 190 sqq. Wilhelm's restorations and commentary, based solely on the photographs printed, without comment, by B. Pace in Annuario III , 33, have very greatly advanced the interpretation of these interesting inscriptions; but the disadvantage of working without seeing either the stone itself or a squeeze of it has led in several cases to readings which are not in fact on the stone. While assisting at the Turkish excavations at Side in September 1948, I had an opportunity of examining the stone in question, and with the kind permission of Prof. Arif Miifid Mansel, director of the excavations, I am able to offer the present note. My purpose is not so much to engage in the controversy concerning the altar and the significance of its inscriptions, as to help to establish the true text.