The enemies of classics sometimes say that it is a dead subject. They depict the classical scholar as spending his time in re-reading, re-editing, or re-annotating texts which have been read, edited, and annotated for generations or centuries; and they contrast him with the student of science, before whom the inexhaustible riches of nature are displayed as his quarry. It were strange, if this were true, that classical study should possess—as by the common experience of public schools it does possess—a capacity unsurpassed by any other subject for turning out men of practical ability and aptitude for the affairs of the world. But it is not true. The enemies of classics, in this as in other instances, have erected a dummy in order to knock it over. They may be reproducing traditions of their fathers, or of their own boyhood; but they are showing that they have not kept abreast of their own times, and that they are not competent to criticise a study of which they know so little. Even natural science, with all its wonderful discoveries, has not been a more living subject during the last half century than the study of classical antiquity. Literature and archaeology—which mean the record of the thoughts of man as expressed in words and in art, during a period when that expression was at its highest pitch of perfection—have gone from discovery to discovery, from development to development, at a rate unequalled even at the Renaissance. These years have given fresh life to the study of the heroic age of human intellectual progress; they have shown that the treasures of antiquity are not only to be enjoyed but are to be increased.

There are in the Hope Collection two vases, which may help towards an explanation of the well-known myth of Theseus and Sinis. They are both known from publications of about a hundred years back, but have for a long period been lost sight of. By the kindness of the owners I am able to bring them once more to light.

The scene from the side of one of them was published by Millin in his Peintures de Vases Antiques. It shows in the middle a tree growing from a small rise of ground. To the left of it stands Sinis, naked and bearded. He has pulled down a branch. To the right is Theseus, a young man in travelling costume, wearing a sword and carrying two spears. He has pulled down a larger branch. On the extreme left is a draped bearded man holding a sceptre. Millin writes, ‘le vase est aujourd'hui en Angleterre: il appartient à M. Edouard.’ By ‘M. Edouard’ he must mean J. Edwards, whose collection was dispersed in 1815, when the vase probably came directly into the hands of Thomas Hope. Millin's drawing is so incorrect and his description so scanty (he does not even indicate the shape) that a republication is necessary.

In the last pages of the Theaetetus Socrates is made to present four versions of a final attempt to define knowledge, as true opinion accompanied by logos, and to reject them all; yet in earlier dialogues ‘ability to give account’, λόγον ἔχειν or λόγον διδόναι δύναδθαι is closely associated with knowledge, not always, or not necessarily, knowledge of Forms, and in the Republic it is said to be the essential mark of the dialectician. These facts are exceedingly hard to interpret. In recent years the passage has been read as an indirect defence of the earlier theory of Forms, as the statement of a problem answered in the Sophist by a revision of that theory and as a piece of radical self-criticism. No one of these interpretations seems tome without difficulty, and in this article I shall attempt to argue for yet another solution which owes something to all three.

Professor Cornford, pressing the fact that Socrates draws all his illustrations from the world of concrete things, believes that Plato intended by criticism of the different versions to point the way to an old and invulnerable sense of λόγον διδόναι, which implies that the proper objects of knowledge are Forms. This is the statement or understanding of grounds for judgments which in the Meno is said to turn true opinion into knowledge. A rather similar line has been taken by Professor Cherniss. Professor Stenzel thinks that the earlier theory of Forms is vulnerable to Socrates' criticism of what I call ‘the first version’, the ‘dream’, but he believes that all three of the later versions ‘recover their meaning’ when the problem of definition has been solved in the Sophist with the help of the method of diaeresis; and so restated they can be shown to apply to particulars as well as to Forms.

The literature dealing with the so-called ‘Cyrenaic’ vases is comparatively so huge that some excuse is needed for a fresh approach to the subject. That excuse is to be found in the new light shed on these vases through the recent excavations at Sparta by the British School at Athens, of which one result has been the discovery that Laconia was the home of the school which produced them.

At Sparta this distinctive Laconian style is presented in good chronological sequence, and its course can be traced from its rise in the early seventh century, through its development and decline in the sixth and fifth centuries, to its end in the latter part of the fourth.

It is true that the finds of pottery at the shrine of Artemis Orthia at Sparta consist of fragments of dedicated vases, the refuse, in fact, thrown out from time to time from the temple, so that what is presented by the stratification of the site is the chronological sequence not of the manufacture of the vases but of their destruction. Yet the development of the style as a whole, even when judged by the stratification, is so regular that it may be assumed that in most cases the order of destruction corresponded with that of manufacture. In any case the destruction of the older temple at the close of the seventh century gives at least one point where such correspondence is certain. Vases thrown out from the new temple must have been dedicated after the destruction of the older building. To divide the style with much certainty into six chronological periods called, and approximately dated

In the Hellenic Journal for 1903, while publishing some heads of Apollo, I took occasion to express my doubts as to the expediency of hereafter taking the Apoxyomenos as the norm of the works of Lysippus. These views, however, were not expressed in any detail, and occurring at the end of a paper devoted to other matters, have not attracted much attention from archaeologists. The subject is of great importance, since if my contention be justified, much of the history of Greek sculpture in the fourth century will have to be reconsidered. Being still convinced of the justice of the view which I took two years ago, I feel bound to bring it forward in more detail and with a fuller statement of reasons.

Our knowledge of many of the sculptors of the fourth century, Praxiteles, Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus, and others, has been enormously enlarged during the last thirty years through our discovery of works proved by documentary evidence to have been either actually executed by them, or at least made under their direction. But in the case of Lysippus no such discovery was made until the very important identification of the Agias at Delphi as a copy of a statue by this master.

Reviewing the recent archaeological discoveries in the areas where the ancient Greek colonies of Italy flourished, I shall divide them, so as to facilitate the finding of the places on the modern map, according to the present Italian regions. These correspond more or less to the old Roman divisions, excepting Lucania, the western part of which (Paestum, Velia) now belongs to Campania.

Sicily

Sicily suffered a great loss last year in the death of Paolo Orsi, to whom we owe the revelation of Siculan civilisation and an incalculable number of discoveries in the Greek centres of the island and of Magna Graecia. After his death lack of funds interrupted the work he had so happily initiated of liberating the temple of Apollo in Ortygia. Of this old Sicilian temple (seventh century B.C.) there was brought to light during 1933–34, by the demolition of the sixteenth-century Spanish barracks, the southern wall of the cella, still 6 and 7 m. high, and built with orthostates.

Professor Thomas A. Brady, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, U.S.A., has recently published privately a repertory of statuary and figured monuments relating to the cult of the Egyptian Gods. He desires to make his collection as complete as possible before eventual publication of the photographs. Copies of the repertory are available free of charge. Those interested in the subject are requested to send any information bearing upon the materials, as well as photographs of pieces. Prompt payment will be made for photographs and for any other expense involved.

The Fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus has probably been more admired, and has certainly received more attention from scholars, than any other Alexandrian poem; and for obvious reasons. ‘It is a page,’ said Matthew Arnold, ‘torn fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom! what animation! what gaiety! what naturalness!’ The picture of contemporary manners which it presents has a charm far beyond the compass of T.'s nearest rival in this genre, Herodas, and, if some reservations be made on the score of language, it is convincingly lifelike. Nevertheless, in spite of the attention it has received, it has not, I think, been viewed as clearly as it may be either in details or as a whole. Of the five sections of which this paper is composed, the first four are an attempt to bring the picture into rather sharper focus; the fifth is a briefer note upon a point of detail.

At the invitation of Sir William Ramsay, I make public a formal statement of the information acquired by me in 1912 and 1913 (and communicated informally to him and to others at the time) bearing on the statuette published by him in Athenaeum, 1909, p.736, and in The Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey(1909), pp. 214 ff.,

On the afternoon of June 27th, 1913, after Sir William had left for England, I sat with our common servant, Prodromos the Djinnji, in the garden of the Baghdad Hotel at Konia, making arrangements for a journey which was to begin on the following day. The conversation came round to the ‘Mithraic’ statuette (which Prodromos then declared he had never seen, and which he had always maintained to be genuine), and Prodromos told me that he had seen in the bazaar a statuette similar to my description of it.

FRAGMENTARY Mycenaean terracottas are unquestionably difficult to interpret, particularly when seen only in photographs. In an attempt to question the identity of the Ugarit figurine now in the Aleppo Museum as a centaur it is claimed that an added strip of clay was attached to the preserved upright portion of the figurine and that the curving sides of the upper section were painted a solid colour. Both observations are incorrect. Since the new identification of this figurine is based on these incorrect observations, the new identification itself remains questionable.