Perhaps the most salient feature of the recent development of knowledge in regard to prehistoric Greece is the peculiar connexion which has been shewn (chiefly by the discoveries of Dr. Arthur Evans) to have existed between the oldest Greek culture and the ancient civilization of Egypt. As far back as the time of the Hyksos and the XIIth Dynasty the connexion is certain. We now know that during the XVIIIth Dynasty (seventeenth to fifteenth century B.C.) Egypt maintained regular relations with the Cretan Mycenaeans of the great period of Knossos and Phaistos: the ‘Late Minoan’ period of Evans. This much the incontrovertible evidence of the Egyptian tomb-paintings at Thebes has told us, to say nothing of the numerous pieces of minor evidence from both Greece and Egypt. The corroborative evidence of the alabastron-lid of the Hyksos king Khian, and the figure of the Egyptian Abnub (who certainly lived during the Hyksos period), which have been found at Knossos, take us two centuries or more further back; and the remarkable parallels between the Cretan seal seal designs and the Egyptian scarab-designs of the Xlllth Dynasty, which Dr. Evans was the first to point out, shew us that the connexion was older than the days of the Hyksos.

The remarks below on UET 4 193 aim to correct the published accounts of that text in response to inquiries about its chronological implications. The long epigraphic comments are necessary to explain what might otherwise seem to readers unfamiliar with cuneiform script to be a suspiciously sharp discrepancy in interpretation. I take the occasion to append comments on two other ‘ghost facts’, a term meant as an analogy to ‘ghost words’.

A board of ‘law-guardians’, or nomophulakes, has long been associated with the Athenian regime of Demetrius of Phalerum (317-307 BC). The duties of Demetrius' officials have been surmised from an entry on nomophulakes in the Atthis of Philochorus (FGrHist 328 F64), which lists their central functions as the supervision of magistrates and the prevention of illegal resolutions by the assembly and council. This understanding of the fourth-century nomophulakes stands in contradiction to the explicit testimony of Pollux (8.102), who asserts that Demetrius changed the name of the hendeka, the eleven Athenian gaolers, to nomophulakes. A case is made here for the acceptance of Pollux, a case based on textual grounds and on comparison with other reforms associated with Demetrius. It is further argued that Philochorus' description applies – as the sole excerpter of the Atthis to give a temporal context, the Lexicon Cantabrigiense, indeed states – to nomophulakes created in the aftermath of Areopagite reform in the mid-fifth century, and that Demetrius' officials were linked to these early nomophulakes through their inheritance of different aspects of nomophulakia associated with the early Areopagus.

Scholarship on the late fifth-century BC New Music Revolution has mostly relied on the evidence provided by Athenaeus, the pseudo-Plutarch De musica and a few other late sources. To this date, however, very little has been done to understand Athenaeus' own role in shaping our understanding of the musical culture of that period. This article argues that the historical context provided by Athenaeus in the section of the Deipnosophistae that cites passages of Melanippides, Telestes and Pratinas on the mythology of the aulos (14.616e–617f) is not a credible reflection of the contemporary aesthetics and strategies of the authors and their works. Athenaeus is both following the structure of Aristotle's discussion of the topic of the aulos in Politics 8.1341a-1342b and accepting the élite ideological position given there. Athenaeus' text thus does not provide evidence for the historical context in which late fifth-century authors were composing, but rather constitutes an attempt to illustrate Aristotle's argument with poetic examples from late fifth-century poets.

Our evidence for events in Argos after her crushing defeat by Kleomenes at Sepeia (circ. 494 B.C.) is so scrappy, incoherent, and to a large extent so late, that accurate reconstruction is well-nigh impossible. But a fresh attempt may at least throw into relief certain points which deserve more consideration than they seem to have received.

If we except the passage in Aristotle, Pol. 1303A (the exact significance of which is disputed), our sole authority for the so-called Servile Interregnum is Herodotos, Bk. 6, 83. It is necessary to quote the passage in full.

Ἅργος δὲ ἀνδρῶν ἐχηρώθη οὕτω ὥστε οἱ δοῦλοι αὐτῶν ἕσχον πάντα τὰ πρήγματα ἄρχοντές τε καὶ διέποντες, ἐς ὅ ἐπήβησαν οἱ τῶν ἀπολομένων παῖδες. ἔπειτέ σφεας οὑτοι ἀνακτώμενοι ὀπίσω ἐς ἑωυτοὺς τὸ Ἂργος ἐξέβαλον• ἐξωθεύμενοι δὲ οἱ δοῦλοι μάχῃ ἔσχον Τίρυνθα. τέως μὲν δή σφι ἦν ἄρθμια ἐς ἀλλήλους, ἔπειτα δὲ ἐς τούς δούλους ῆλθε ἀνὴρ μάντις Κλέανδρος, γένος ἐὼν Φιγαλεὺς ἀπ᾿ Ἀρκαδίης• οὕτος τοὺς δούλους ἀνέγνωσε ἐπιθέσθαι τοῖσι δεσπότῃσι. ἐκ τούτου δὲ πόλεμός σφι ἦν ἐπὶ χρόνον συχνόν, ἐς ὄ δὴ μόγις οἱ ᾿Αργεῖοι ἐπεκράτησαν

Dr. Macan infers from this chapter ‘the admission of the “slaves” to the franchise.’ The wording of the first sentence in the extract may seem to support this inference, but Dr. Macan himself considers the chapter to involve both ‘exaggeration and misconception,’ and we may later see some considerations that tell against his inference. For myself I can find in Herodotos' account no convincing evidence of the actual and formal enfranchisement of the slaves. On the contrary, they are throughout described as δοῦλοι, and the last episode in the narrative is an attack from Tiryns of these slaves against their masters. Another remarkable point is that until the outbreak of hostilities at the finish, we hear nothing of any actual conflict between the slaves and their Argive owners.

The epitaphs and other verse inscriptions which are preserved for us in literature impose on us a certain caution. The good-will which our authors have brought to the reading of monuments is like what we bring to the singing of hymns: when lulled by the authority of the verse-form and of the occasion, we can accept things which the poet cannot have intended. I take as example the ‘green hill far away Without a city wall.’ The poet does not say that the hill is unwalled but that it is outside Jerusalem: yet to understand him to say the former is both easy and common.

The moral is important. What generations of intelligent piety can acquiesce in is one thing: what the poet can have meant is another. We must not, therefore, be shocked to find Herodotos also acquiescing in what the poet never meant him to believe. Recording the Battle of Thermopylai, and concluding with the action in which (he says) only Spartans and Thespians fought, he then names the bravest of the Spartans, and then of the Thespians.

1. Orestes at Delphi:

At the end of the Choephoroi Orestes announces that he will return to Delphi as suppliant (1038–9):

As he leaves the stage he sees a vision of nameless pursuers, ‘the angry hounds of my mother’, and the chorus come to the conclusion that ταραγμός has spread from the ‘strange’ blood still on his hands into his φρένες. They advise him (1059–60):

In the Eumenides Orestes receives an oracle from Apollo himself, appearing in miraculous epiphany to his suppliant. After reassuring Orestes of his continuing support and pointing to the sleeping pursuers as proof of his power (64–7), Apollo identifies the role of the Erinyes and gives instructions for escaping from πόνοι (74–83):

The combination of boxing and wrestling known as the pankration was a development of the primitive rough and tumble. To get his opponent down and by throttling, pummelling, biting, kicking, to reduce him to submission is the natural instinct of the savage or the child. But this rough and tumble is not suitable for an athletic competition: it is too dangerous and too undisciplined. To the early Greeks, athletics were the recreation of a warrior class, they were not the serious business of life or even a profession, and in an age of real warfare the warrior's life was too valuable to be endangered for sport. Moreover, without some form of law athletic competitions are impossible, and in the growth of law the simpler precedes the more complex Hence it was only natural that particular forms of fighting, such as boxing and wrestling, should be systematized first, and so made suitable for competitions before any attempt was made to reduce to law the more complicated rough and tumble of which they both formed parts. Wrestling and boxing were known to Homer, but not the pankration, and Greek tradition was following the natural order of evolution in assigning the introduction at Olympia of wrestling to the 18th, of boxing to the 23rd, and of the pankration to the 33rd Olympiad.

7 πῖαρ Plut.: πυαρ pap. Ath. Pol. ἀνταράξας … ἐξεῖλε pap., coniecerat Gildersleeve: ἂν ταράξας ἐξέλη Plut.

Solon is answering his critics (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 12.5). The demos has never had it so good. The ‘bigger and stronger men’, μείζους καὶ βίαν ἀμείνονες, also have cause to thank him. For if anyone else had had this office, ‘he would not have restrained the demos, nor would he have stopped, before’, etc. Plutarch (Vit. Sol. 16) introduces the lines in almost the same words.

V. 7 is difficult. Bergk and others construe: ‘until, having stirred up the milk, he had taken the cream’. There are two objections to this. Firstly, the word order would involve an interlacing of main and participial clauses which Greek normally eschews. Bergk claims that Solon is peculiar in the freedom of his hyperbaton, but the examples he quotes (frr. 1.43–5 and 23.5D) are not of this type and are very much easier. Secondly, the sense: ‘it is not usual to stir up milk when it is wanted to skim off cream’. Linforth recognised the force of this argument, and concluded, in the truth of the ancient evidence, that πῑαρ refers to butter.

An inscription (IG i2 115) consisting of a prelude and then of Drakon's law of homicide has long been known. The prelude dates it 409/8 B.C.; it was evidently part of the recodification of Athenian law carried out by Nikomakhos and a board of anagrapheis in most of the years 411/0–400/399 B.C. Drakon's law was on a separate stele, of which the upper part, probably about half, survives. In some period since Antiquity the marble was used as pavement, and the resulting wear has deterred study of it since the edition of 1867. Recently, however, R. S. Stroud has published a new edition of the code inscription and this has stimulated renewed interest in the Athenian law of homicide. Stroud has provided not only a new and much expanded text of the code but also some persuasive solutions to problems that have long perplexed scholars. The code deals with unpremeditated (μὴ ἐκ προνοίας) homicide. This very aspect—the precise scope of the code—receives, oddly, scant treatment. I propose to look into it.

By scope I mean what sorts of homicide were covered by the extant portion of the code. Another, and I think inevitable, way of looking at this problem is to ask, Where did the missing portion of the code, dealing with premeditated homicide, stop, and where did the surviving portion start, i.e. where was the line drawn in Athens between premeditated and unpremeditated homicide? Thus stated, the question makes it clear that one cannot deal with the problem of premeditation in vacuo; it must be examined in the context of Athenian homicide as a whole.

Being desirous, after the revelation of intimacy between prehistoric Crete and Egypt which the Cnossian excavations had made, to know if there were indeed no ‘Aegean’ remains in the Lower Delta, I searched the authorities for an account of the extant antiquities of its north central region—north, that is, of the ‘Berari’ railway, which links Dessuk on the Rosetta Nile with Sherbin on the Damietta arm. But in vain. Nor, for that matter, could I find any description of the scenery of the region itself, more detailed and recent than the romantic sketch of the marshes with which Heliodorus opened his Aethiopica. I had myself visited the extreme south-west corner of it in 1896, following in the steps of Messrs. Petrie and Griffith to Tell al-Farain; and the last named scholar had gone on thence a few miles north to the district of Tida. North and east of that point stretched unknown land. So I was forced to undertake an exploration of the region for myself. The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies generously gave a grant in aid; and almost every kind of assistance was furnished on the spot by the Société Anonyme du Behéra, through the great goodwill of its Managing Director Mr. E. W. P. Foster, C.M.G.

At three o'clock on the afternoon of July 6th, 1901, I stood at the extreme edge of the col between Mount Skipieza and Mount Saïta, staring with a mixture of incredulity, irritation, and interest at the scene before me. Where I had expected to see the lake of Pheneus, a blue expanse of twenty-five square miles of water, there lay a fertile stretching plain, for the most part a blaze of golden corn, while here and there a white point of light shewed where a fustanella'd harvester was at his peaceful toil. Nearer, the corn gave place to an ugly foreground of sun-cracked clay, while just at my feet, stretching from side to side of the narrowing valley, lay a mere ribbon of slate-coloured water—all that is left of the lake of Pheneus to-day.

I knew that such changes in its condition had been noted by travellers from Pausanias downwards, but this last and I believe final disappearance of the historic lake seems to have passed without notice in Athens and elsewhere.

In front of the house are two slaves, one of whom, the company's chief actor, has been commending the play to the public and explaining the situation. Bdelycleon, who has been asleep on the flat roof, wakes up and calls to the slaves: ‘One of you run round here quick; my father has got into the kitchen and he is scuttering around like a mouse inside; mind he doesn't get out through the waste-hole. And you, up against the door with you!’ Slave A, the chief actor, disappears round the side of the house, to take up position as Philocleon inside. A rapid change of mask would enable him to poke a head up through the chimney—144 —only to be extinguished by the bread-trough and log which his watchful son claps on. (How the chimney was represented, if at all, is anybody's guess.) Now comes a diversion from the ground floor, the exact form of which is unfortunately uncertain. RV give the unmetrical , (imperative): whether this is to be emended as Hermann , or whether it is a gloss on the following which has displaced the original text, it is clear that after being warned of the new situation Bdelycleon tells Slave B to press well and truly against the door—which implies that Philocleon is pushing from the inside. ‘I'll be down there in a minute myself,’ he goes on; ‘look out for the bolt, and keep an eye on the bar to see he doesn't gnaw out the pin.’ (βάλανος was edible as ‘date’, ‘acorn’.) Bdelycleon thereupon disappears down the back of the roof [there was of course a staircase or ladder giving access to the roof out of sight of the spectators, as required on occasion by tragedy too (Ag., PV, Psychostasia, HF, Or., Phoen.)] and comes round on to the stage presumably by the same way as Slave A left it. This would take one or two minutes, and of course the next few remarks in the dialogue with Philocleon are made by Slave B, not by Bdelycleon as in the Oxford Text; he would in any case not address his father as Philocleon (163). The ‘net’ which Philocleon threatens to gnaw through (164) cannot be stretched across the door, which has to open unimpeded the next minute; it is over the upper part of the house only, covering the window or windows, as we learn from 367 ff., having been put up to prevent him from hopping over the courtyard wall behind (130 ff.). 164 suggests that Philocleon is talking through a window during this exchange, which would make him more easily audible.

The capture of Salamis from Megara in the sixth century B.C. can safely be said to mark a turning-point in Athenian development. Considerations both of economics and defence would lead one to expect the island to be a natural bone of contention between the two mainland cities, and hence for it to be controlled by the one which was temporarily stronger. The surprising thing is that in the early part of the sixth century the stronger should have been Athens.

We have, it is true, one piece of evidence which suggests that Athenian naval power and interests were already considerable in this period. This is the account, in Herodotus, Diogenes, and Strabo, of the struggle against Mytilene for Sigeion, a struggle terminated by the arbitration of Periander in favour of the Athenians. The causes and aims of the Athenian venture are a matter for speculation, but whether they went as traders, pirates, or settlers, or as all three, their going underlines the fact that there were in the Athenian community at the time a number of men who had invested their capital and were prepared to risk their lives in a distant naval venture: their successful opposition to the forces of Mytilene in its turn suggests that the naval strength at the disposal of the Athenians was correspondingly formidable. It is possible that the expedition began as a private venture, financed, directed, and executed by a band of interested Athenians without any official backing. In view of the position of Sigeion it seems most probable that the venture was connected with the flow of trade to and from the Pontus: Sigeion was perhaps the base at which friendly ships bound for Attica could find rest and refuge, and from which other ships coming from the straits could be raided with the object of diverting corn cargoes to the home market.

The traveller riding westward from Macri soon reaches the Gargy Chai, which is the only perennial stream running into the Telmessian Gulf, and is rightly identified by Kiepert with the overflowing Glaucus. It rises in a ridge connecting the uplands of Kyzyl Kaya with the Aigür Dagh, a partly detached lower buttress standing out to the north-west of the long mountain commonly called Eljik Dagh in the maps, of which the eastern peak is named Chal Dagh, and the less lofty western peak Shimshir Dagh.

Hence the stream runs to the S.S.E. down a deep glen, and after receiving the Nif Chai from the N.E., turns S.W. round the Kyzyl Dagh to the sea. Pliny, the only geographer who mentions the Glaucus, says that it had a tributary, the Telmedius. If, as the inhabitants positively assured me, the Nif Chai is merely a tributary of the other, it must be the Telmedius. If so, the name of Telandrus, which was on the Glaucus, must be given to the only ruins in the main valley, those at It-hissar, a site discovered by MM. Collignon and Duchesne, but not exactly described.

A relatively very small but by absolute reckoning considerable number of painted Greek pots have signatures on them. These signatures are almost always painted and indicate either the maker (έποίησϵν) or the painter (ἔγραψϵν). The relevant statistics are these. Most of the signatures are on Attic products of the century from 570 to 470. Makers' signatures are about twice as common as painters'. Sometimes both kinds of signature occur on the same pot, but (so far as I know) only three times are the maker and the painter the same man. In two instances the signature gives the names of two makers.

Since the publication of ‘The Greek Kitchen’ in JHS lxxxii (1962) 121–137, fresh material for the Appendix (pp. 132–137) has come to light, mainly in the shape of terracottas which were unknown to me at the time, and I take this opportunity of correcting and adding to the original list. A number of pieces listed below were brought to my notice by Dietrich von Bothmer, of the Metropolitan Museum, New York (nos. 14, 15A, 30A, 33A, 33B), with whom I had two valuable discussions; for knowledge of no. 53B, I am indebted to Mademoiselle V. Verhoogen, of the Musées d'Art et Histoire, Brussels. Others to whom I am indebted for information and help with photographs, are: Madame Lilly Ginouvès, of the Louvre; Miss Elaine Loeffler, of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Signorina Paola Pelagatti, of the National Museum, Syracuse; Jean Balty, of the Brussels Museum; Bernard von Bothmer, of the Brooklyn Museum; P. Devambez, of the Louvre; R. Noll, of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; A. Oliver, of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; N. Raumschüssel, of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Miss Alison Frantz took the photographs of nos. 45 and 74, here plate XXIX.2, for which many thanks are given, Mrs A. D. Ure was assiduous in lending rare books, and Miss Lucy Talcott made valuable suggestions on the subject of the Vienna lekythos.

The year 1949 has seen a great improvement in conditions in Greece. The Peloponnese and Central Greece have been completely cleared, and archaeological sites in the north can now be visited; excavation has been resumed by the Archaeological Society and the foreign schools. The Italian School has returned to activity with Dr. Doro Levi in charge. Funds have not yet radiated to the provinces, but the metropolitan museums are being restored and a fourth gallery has been opened in the National Museum; the Eleusis Museum is being put in order.

There is no news from the Acropolis apart from Prof. Orlandos' recent discovery that the cover tiles in every third row on the roof of the Parthenon were bigger than those in the intermediate ones. Orlandos has secured and underpinned the wall and rock at weak points on the south side of the Acropolis, and has made considerable progress with the restoration of the orchestra pavement and cavea of the Odeum of Herodes. J. Travlos has cleared part of an establishment with handsome mosaic floors which preceded the Early Christian basilica by the Arch of Hadrian.

All I hope to do in this note is to reinforce Lesky's protest against ‘the attitude of mind shown by many modern scholars, who refuse to admit that there is a Prometheus problem at all, and pass over in silence so many arguments which deserve the most careful attention’. One reason why the majority of scholars are so sanguine about the peculiarities of Prometheus Desmotes is that they take it for granted that the surviving play was the first of a trilogy, and that the remainder of the trilogy would somehow or other have resolved some or most or all of the problems of the surviving part. It is assumed that the second play was, as the titles apparently proclaim, Prometheus Luomenos: the chief exception to this view is W. Schmid, the much reviled but scarcely refuted champion of the bastardy of Prom. Desm., who argued that the surviving play was written in the third quarter of the fifth century by an imitator of Aeschylus. Next it is usually supposed that Prometheus Purphoros (a title in the catalogue in M, twice cited elsewhere) was the third play—though there have been more respectable exceptions to that step. The fourth Prometheus title (twice cited by Pollux), Prometheus Purkaeus, is very plausibly taken to be the satyr play of 472 B.C., called simply Προυηθεύς in the hypothesis to Pers. Despite this, no-one seems to have questioned the easy assumption that the other three Prometheus titles are evidence for the connected trilogy. I shall offer here a neglected reason for thinking that, on the contrary, the titles are evidence that the Prometheus plays were not produced together. The argument is pedantic, even irritating, but it is nonetheless coherent and hard to contradict.