When the Chairman of Council asked me to read a paper at the Jubilee Meeting of the Classical Association, I felt highly honoured by this kind invitation. Twice before I have enjoyed the privilege of reading papers at General Meetings of the Association during the last war, when I had been most hospitably received in this country and had found a new home at Oxford. I confess I still feel quite at home here, and it gives me enormous pleasure to come over from Munich and to speak to you once more; so I am deeply grateful to you for giving me this opportunity.

But I think I owe you at least one word of explanation for the strange title of this lecture. The Chairman of Council said in his letter ‘that although one lecture should be given on the history of the Classical Association, the other papers should look forward rather than backward’. Now, I had been doing some work on a Hellenistic poet myself, especially during the years at Oxford; as far as I am concerned, I have finished with studies in that province of learning.

In recent years there have been several attempts to find support for a sexual interpretation of ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν at Aristophanes Frogs 1198–1248. It would add real point to the discomfiture of Euripides and his predictable prologues if his heroes were to lose their virility every time they lost their lekythia. But the matter has been hotly contested, and the linking of this problem with the mysterious αὐτολήκυθοι of Demosthenes liv 14–17 has compounded confusion in both passages. I shall discuss them separately in the first instance.

I

Two main objections are advanced by Jeffrey Henderson2 to a phallic lekythion in the Frogs: apart from the absence of unequivocal literary parallels, the context does not call for it, and the standard shapes of lekythia do not resemble male genitals anyway.

Representations of Helios in his chariot rising above the sea begin toward the end of the sixth century B.C., with a small series of black-figure vases, mostly lekythoi. Five of them have been interpreted as illustrations of the myth of Herakles and the Golden Bowl of the Sun. In Pherekydes' version of the story, Herakles, vexed by the burning rays, threatened Helios with his arrows, and obtained the god's golden vessel to sail the Ocean to the land of Geryon. Although the correspondence of the picture to the story is not literal, in fact largely limited to the cast of characters, such an interpretation is plausible for four vases.

On the lekythos in Athens by the Daybreak Painter, Herakles is crouching on a spur of ground which seems to emerge from the waves; he looks at the Sun in apparent awe. The scenes on the skyphos by the Theseus Painter in Taranto are akin to the Athenian piece: on one side Herakles rushes up the steep ground, on the other he sits on the rocky outline, his right hand gesturing toward the Sun. On a third vase, a lekythos in Cambridge, and on a fourth in Oxford, both Herakles and Athena are depicted on either side of Helios; on the Cambridge lekythos Herakles is actually striding toward the Sun, lifting the bow in his right hand. Only in this case can Herakles' attitude be taken as a threat; on all four vessels, however, the hero and the Sun look at each other, as if an exchange were to take place soon, and so are shown as the actors of the scene.

The British Museum recently bought by auction a number of terracottas in a lot together, of which two (1953, 4–10, 1 and 2) are of more than usual interest (Fig. 1). These are virtually identical and must have been made in the same mould. They are hollow, moulded front and back, and open underneath; there is no vent in the back. The modelling of the front is summary but careful: that of the back is sketchy in the extreme; this is due not to careless moulding, but to the cursory treatment of the back of the model from which the mould was made. The clay is rather coarse but homogeneous, pale orange in colour, and contains a fair amount of mica.

The sculpture of the East pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina is usually dated between 490 and 480 B.C. This seems to me too late, to judge by the torsion of the fallen soldier of the left corner and of the stooping youth from the middle of the right side (Plate XVIb-c). In the youth there is a small turning at the waist and this is managed competently by an organic twist. In the fallen soldier, where the torsion is much greater, the change of direction is made not by a twist but by an abrupt swivel; and though the waist was partly masked by the right arm, generally the sculptors who carved this pediment did not neglect those parts of their figures which could not be seen. From this it should follow that at that time they were acquainted only partially with the revolutionary innovation of organically twisting anatomy.

In vase painting the organic twisting of the torso was mastered during the last ten or fifteen years of the sixth century. So too in relief sculpture, notably in the Ball-players relief. In free-standing sculpture symmetrically frontal poses still remained normal, but that does not mean that it was simply retarded; and pedimental figures, though in the round, generally followed the rules for reliefs, anyhow before the Parthenon.

The inscription published below was discovered in June, 1893, built into a house in the small village of Pelen, which lies in the interior of the peninsula of Myndos, in the upper valley of a stream flowing southwards past Episkopi into the Gulf of Kos (Adm. Charts 1546, 1604); but which is not marked in any map hitherto. The stone is a block of the local grey limestone, and was much encrusted with whitewash; after a little cleaning, however, the reading became sufficiently clear. The inscription came from the ruins of a large church which stands about two miles east of Pelen, on the ridge between the valley of Pelen and that of Ghiöl to the east of it, at the point where the mountain road traverses the hills from Faréliah towards Budrum. The church is built upon the ruins of a Karian or Hellenic building, of large roughly squared stones, with the broad draft down the angles which is characteristic of the pre-Mausolean masonry of this neighbourhood. The site is much overgrown with thick shrubs, but enough can be made out to confirm the evidence of the inscription that this is the site of the temple of Apollo Telmisseus. We did not, however, find any other traces of inscriptions.