This paper is principally concerned with two fifth century Athenian inscriptions and their interpretation. The first, IG i2 19, was discovered on the Akropolis and first published by Ulrich Köhler in 1867. Some twenty years later it was re-examined by H. G. Lolling, who was the first to see that it concerned relations between Athens and Egesta. It has subsequently been the object of the usual ingenious attempts at restoration. I give below a conservative text.

It was suggested to me by Mr. T. J. Dunbabin that the question of Attic B.F. export might be treated by grouping chronologically—as far as possible, for the sake of convenience, in twenty-year periods—the Attic B.F. ware hitherto found at various sites. This method of grouping differs slightly, of course, from that of Payne, and I have not found it possible to adhere strictly to it throughout (e.g., for the middle of the sixth century), but it perhaps serves as well as any other for the purposes of what aims at being an economic rather than a purely archaeological survey.

Throughout the paper only the earliest finds from any one site are listed. Although this method may well seem to give an undue importance to certain sites which were apparently but scant importers of the ware, it would be impossible—within the scope of such a paper—to give exhaustive lists of the finds of every date.

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.

This article reviews several books published since the turn of the millennium that explore the role and representation of animals in different areas of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Despite differences in focus and outlook, these books herald the arrival within classical studies of the questions, concepts and methods of human/animal studies as an emerging field of enquiry. This article takes their publication as an opportunity to take stock and to outline the relationship between these disciplines. I explore how current research on ancient animals resonates both in existing debates in classical scholarship and within the context of the larger interdisciplinary debate. I also suggest how this debate can point to productive avenues for further enquiry in classical studies. More specifically, I argue that the interdisciplinary debate sets an important agenda, which should be embraced more fully by classical studies. Classical scholarship on the role, function and perception of animals in different areas of ancient Greek and Roman life can provide important insights into one aspect of the heritage – Western conceptions of humanity and the place of the animal within it – which has not yet received the attention it deserves. I conclude that classical scholarship can make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate, helping it deliver on its stated goal of examining and challenging Western concepts of self, as well as the ideologies of ‘the other’ underpinning them.

In describing the sacred grove () of Asklepios in the territory of Epidaurus, Pausanias (ii 27.1) mentions two of the rules that were in force there: (he has just mentioned that the ἄλσος is surrounded on all sides by boundary stones), and, secondly,

Those about to give birth or to die were eventually accommodated immediately outside the peribolos in a building constructed for them in Pausanias' own time by ‘Antoninus, a Senator’. The eating accommodation was provided earlier, most obviously in the building generally described as the καταγώγιον. Since this lies between the temple of Asklepios and the theatre, which is itself, according to Pausanias we can assume that sacrificial meat consumed in it had not been taken outside the boundaries.

I do not know of any book or published paper devoted to Cleostratus. In the indexes to most histories of astronomy you will seek his name in vain, and, where you do find it, you are referred to a few jejune paragraphs or more often to a single sentence. Boll in his Sphaera (1903) honours him with three pages (191–194), based on a passage in Pliny and a scholium on Euripides, but he misinterprets both passages and holds one of them to be based on a misunderstanding of some older writer. Nearly all the passages bearing on him are to be found with notes of varying value in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ii. (1912), pp. 197, 198, where they occupy rather more than a page. Some valuable comments and one reference which is not in Diels will be found in Breithaupt's treatise De Parmenisco Grammatico (1915). And yet, for all this neglect, there are attributed to Cleostratus two capital contributions to Greek astronomy, viz. the introduction of the signs of the zodiac and the authorship of the eight years' cycle of intercalations.

There have been several recent discussions concerning the text of the Athenian Treaty with Samos (IG i2 50+ 102, ML 56, IG i3 48) and the reconstruction of its fragments. The discussions have dealt largely with inadequacies of the restoration offered ‘exempli gratia’ by Wade-Gery in 1931, but too little attention has been paid to the stones and the evidence they offer the historian. Three of the four stones associated with the Treaty were edited in IG i2 50+102; the fourth was there mentioned but not identified until Wade-Gcry’s article. Wade-Gery’s transcription of the stones has become the foundation of all recent discussion and only Bradeen and McGregor have contributed observations on the stones themselves.

An examination of the fragments conducted in June 1978 and in April 1979 uncovered in Wade-Gery’s transcription an error which served as the basis for his reconstruction of a list of generals attributed to the year 439/8 B.C. The incorrect reading is the next-to-last letter of the word presumed to be Κεκροπίδ]ος in line 31 of the ML text. Wade-Gery presented in his article first a dotted omicron in that space and later an undotted one; in his commentary he stated ‘The first letter in line 2 [line 31 of fragment d in the ML text] is almost certainly 0’. He did not mention that this contradicted the readings of both editions of IG, nor did he state any grounds for deciding the letter to be omicron. Bradeen and McGregor placed the omicron in brackets, thus disagreeing over whether the letter had ever been readable on the stone, but they retained Wade-Gery’s restoration, presumably to declare their approval.

The purpose of this article is somewhat ambitious. It is proposed to adduce evidence in support of the thesis, which the writer has already briefly maintained elsewhere, that the majority of the dates, earlier than the period of the Persian Wars, which pass current in our Greek history text-books, are wrong, and should be ‘scaled down’ by a certain proportion of their distance from 500 B.C. The virtue of 500 B.C. as a base-line lies simply in the fact that it falls in the middle of the generation that saw the beginnings of Greek historical prose writing in the hands of Hekataios of Miletos and others.

The genius of Herodotos, the considerable amount of contemporary information gleaned by later Greek scholars from the early elegiac, lyric and iambic poets, the vivid personalities of these poets themselves, and the systematising labours of generations of logographers and historians, ultimately reduced to order by Eratosthenes and transmitted to us by Eusebios—all these conspire to obscure from us the fact that the whole Archaic period in Greece is not an historic but a proto-historic age; an age known to us, not from contemporary historical writings, but through a synthesis of archaeology, references to historic events in a literature still exclusively poetic, references to our area in historical documents from a more mature adjacent region (such as Assyria), and genealogies and oral traditions that survived long enough to be written down later.

The excavations, the results of which are described in the following paper, were conducted in the spring of 1894 by the British School at Athens. The work was under the charge of Mr. A. G. Bather and myself; Mr Ernest Gardner, then director of the School, was also present during a portion of it. I have thought it better to give first a history of the two towns, as known from literature and the evidence of inscriptions, and then to describe the sites, and the discoveries which are the result of our work. The unpublished inscriptions which we dug up or copied on or near the sites are collected in an appendix, and we give (Pl. XIV.) a sketch map of the district. A plan of the gate and a plan of the τέμενος at Abae also accompany the paper. These plans and map are the work of Mr. F. W. Green, who is an expert in such matters, and undertook to do the work for me from general directions which I gave him about the sites.

• (i) By an oversight which I can neither explain nor excuse, I entirely failed to take account of the relevant Panathenaic amphorae attributed by Sir John Beazley to the Eucharides Painter (ABV 396):

1. 9. Athens, Acropolis 947, fr. … B, man holding auloi (Graef, Heft 2, pl. 61).

2. 10. Leningrad from Kerch. A, Athena; B, aulete on platform between two men on ground level, both leaning on rhabdoi. Arch. Anz. 1912, 339–40, figs. 23(A), 24(B).

3. 12. Athens, Acropolis 1060, fr. … B, two men on platform (= aulode and accompanist?) facing standing man with rhabdos (Graef, Heft 2, pl. 62).

• (ii) Since my article appeared, Dr Dorothy Kent Hill of the Walters Art Gallery (to whom I am indebted for most of the references on which these addenda are based) has published in AJA lxiii (1959), pl. 47 (fig. 3—A, fig. 4—B) a further Panathenaic amphora which she attributes to the Eucharides Painter:

• Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery 48.2107 (acquired 1958). A, Athena; B, man on platform playing kithara between two men leaning on rhabdoi.

The aim of this study is to challenge the current scholarly consensus depicting Plato as having renounced the political ideal of his Republic, and modified it in favour of a ‘mixed constitution’ in his last work, the Laws. The study shows that Plato's critique of democracy remains as firm in the Laws as it was in the Republic and the Statesman, refusing to concede any room to any form of popular sovereignty that could threaten the government of knowledge.

The difficulty of transcribing words written in the Cypriote syllabary makes our acquaintance with the Cypriote dialect precarious and faulty, and in many cases leaves us uncertain about the exact form of a word, but in spite of this uncertainty it is clear that Cypriote, both in inscriptions and in glosses, shews in its vocabulary a notable similarity to the language of the Homeric poems. Inscriptions discovered since Hoffmann's day have enabled us to increase his already long list of such similarities (Die Griechischen Dialekte, I, pp. 278–283), and it is time to examine the evidence and see what bearing these have on the question of the nature of Homeric vocabulary. The problem presented by Homeric words in Cypriote is similar to that presented by their existence in Arcadian, but, though the meaning of Cypriote words is sometimes uncertain, Cyprus is richer in inscriptions than Arcadia and the ancient lexicographers and scholiasts have preserved a singularly large number of Cypriote glosses. The problem is simply stated: how far are we justified in believing that Homeric words in Cypriote are independent of the Homeric poems ? Are they indigenous words, naturally used, or are they ‘literary’ imitations of a well-known poetical style, used for effect in defiance of local dialect usage?

This paper is an endeavour to discover (1) the origin, (2) the value, and (3) the affinity of the Talent of the Homeric Poems to other systems. In those Poems we find two systems of denominating value, the one by the ox (or cow), or the value of an ox, the other by the talent (τάλαντον). The former is the one which has prevailed and does still prevail in barbaric communities, such as the Zulus, where the sole or principal wealth consists in herds and flocks. For several reasons we may assign to it priority in age as compared with the talent. For as it represents the most primitive form of exchange, the barter of one article of value for another, before the employment of the precious metals as a medium of exchange, consequently the estimation of values by the ox is older than that by a talent or ‘weight’ of gold, or silver, or copper. Again in Homer all values are expressed in so many beeves, e.g.

(Il. vi. 236.)

The talent on the other hand is only mentioned in relation to gold; for we never find any mention of a talent of silver. But the names of monetary units hold their ground long after they themselves have ceased to be in actual use, as we observe in such common expressions as ‘bet a guinea,’ or ‘worth a crown,’ although these coins themselves are no longer in circulation.

Why was Athens called the City of the Violet Crown? The question, though often asked, has not—so far as I am aware—been satisfactorily answered. Two widely divergent and mutually exclusive explanations already hold the field: but the one is open to grave objections, and the other, though true, is not the whole truth. There is therefore room for a fresh attempt to throw light upon the matter. It will be advisable to begin by summarising the essential facts of the case, then to review the hypotheses that have been framed to account for them, and finally to propound, if possible, a more adequate solution of the problem.

The admitted facts are these. Pindar in one of his dithyrambs composed later, perhaps several years later, than 480 B.C. praised Athens for her prowess in the war with Persia.

The second neolithic period in Eastern Thessaly is sharply severed from the first by the intrusion of a new culture which appears as something foreign and alien on the shores of the Pagasean Gulf. The pottery, for example, seems utterly different from that of the first period. The forms belong to a distinct series and are typologically older. The absence of feet and strap handles, so well developed in the A wares, precludes us from deriving Dimini ware from any of the latter. The characteristic designs, too, based on the spiral and the meander, are entirely foreign to the earlier series. Moreover, the use of fortifications beginning with this pottery (the traces of an earlier wall at Sesklo are exceedingly problematical), and restricted to its area, heightens this impression of foreignness. So too do the ‘megaron’ houses of Dimini and Sesklo, which do not seem to find their explanation in the curvilinear or square huts of the first period.

As to the provenance of this culture, the recent declaration of Sir Arthur Evans, that the origin of the spiral motive in Minoan ceramics is not to be sought in Crete itself, should dispose of the only reason for deriving it from the south; for there seems no ground for supposing that the Cycladic spirals antedate those of Dimini. Indeed I have argued in a previous paper, and my conclusion has been supported by more recent investigations, that Thessaly II. must be dated well back in the Early Cycladic Period. On the other hand, the theory of a northern origin has been strengthened by the discovery of Dimini ware in the Strymon valley. Indeed the general analogies between Dimini ware and the widespread group of painted and incised spiral-meander pottery north of the Balkans have been long recognised, and elaborate theories of an invasion, not only of Thessaly, but even of Crete itself, have been built up thereon.

In my publication of the al Mina excavations (JHS LVIII, 7-9) I argued that although al Mina itself, owing to the disappearance of the greater part of the ancient site, produced no remains earlier than the eighth century B.C. yet that it existed in a much earlier period could be deduced from the evidence afforded by the ‘residential’ town at Sabouni where Attic black-figured and Mycenaean pottery were found. Further evidence is now available. In 1947 we found in a pocket in the steep side of the acropolis one of the well-known ’dolly’ Mycenaean figurines; this was important because the few Mycenaean sherds previously discovered might just as well have been of the Xllth century, i.e. posterior to the invasion of the Peoples of the Sea which marked the beginning of a new era in North Syrian history, whereas the figurine is definitely earlier than that catastrophe. This year (1948) two of the peasants who cultivate the hill site brought me three seals found by them when ploughing; all are earlier than 1200 B.C. and one cylinder belongs to the first half of the second millennium. The connection between Sabouni and the port of al Mina is perfectly clear for all the periods represented on the latter site and should hold good for the earlier periods also. If Sabouni, and ex hypothesi al Mina, were flourishing at the time when Alalakh was a royal city we can be sure that al Mina was the port of Alalakh through which the Syrian town had its contacts—amply illustrated by our discoveries—with Cyprus and Crete. I originally chose the two sites for excavation on the theory that such was the case; now for the first time we have direct evidence for their being contemporary.

This set of instruments and the large beaker were found about three years ago near the site of Kolophon in Ionia. The objects are thirty-seven in number. With two exceptions all are of bronze. The blades of the knives were originally of steel, but this metal has in each case been almost destroyed by oxidation. The date is uncertain—it may have been before the Christian era but is more probably the first or second century A.D. The glass beaker belongs to a type which is said to occur so late as the fourth century.

The monumental work of Professor Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, must always remain the basis of any study among English collections of antiques. But since its publication in 1882 not a few collections have changed hands, others have been dispersed, while others, more fortunate, have been enlarged; in these various processes much that was unknown even to Michaelis has come to light, and he himself soon supplemented his great work by two important papers printed in this Journal in 1884 and 1885. He prefaced the first of these supplementary papers with the following words:

‘I cannot help thinking that there must be in Great Britain a good deal of bidden treasure…which would perhaps easier come to light if there were a place expressly destined to receive such communications…I have therefore ventured to propose to the Editors to open in this Journal a corner for storing up such supplements…As a first instalment, I here offer some notes which may begin the series…May other lovers and students of the Classic art, especially in Great Britain, follow my example.’

In a lecture on the Working of the Athenian Democracy delivered to the Hellenic Society at Burlington House on 3 May, 1949, Professor A. W. Gomme attacked the view ‘ that μοναρχια or principate describes with sufficient accuracy, not only Pericles' actual position, but Herodotus' and Thucydides' conceptions of it ’. To the word μοναρχια Gomme attached the meaning of absolute rule, typified in fifth-century thought, and in Herodotus, by the Persian kingship: by ‘ principate’ he meant the direct, single rule of an Augustus. To both he drew the parallel of modern dictatorship in a totalitarian state. Since he cited me as subscribing to this view in its most extreme form, in so far as I approved of E. M. Walker's remarks on the strategia in the Cambridge Ancient History and took Darius' arguments in favour of a monarchy for Persia in Herodotus iii 80–2 as ‘ Herodotus’ own justification for Pericles' unique position at Athens ', I feel that I should make some reply; and am grateful to the editor of the Journal for this opportunity of doing so. I am also grateful to Professor Gomme for letting me consult his MS. so that I have been able to take up the point with him on a surer foundation than that of memory, and have had the privilege of a second acquaintance with a brilliant lecture.

Homeric archaeology long dominated the study of early Greece, but new approaches have recently revolutionized the field. Drawing from these approaches, I offer a regional and diachronic analysis of Homeric stories about Crete, an assessment of the reception of these stories by the island's inhabitants throughout antiquity and an account of their impact on medieval to modern literature and art. I find that Cretan interest in Homer peaks in the Hellenistic period, but also argue for the much earlier familiarity of some Cretans with stories that underlie the Homeric epics. This argument relies on an analysis of the archaeological assemblage of a Knossian tomb of the 11th century BC, which includes a range of arms that is exceptional for both Aegean archaeology and the Homeric epics. In the epics, this equipment is carried by the Knossian hero Meriones, whose poetic persona can be traced back to the Late Bronze Age on philological and linguistic grounds. Based on this, and on current understandings of performance at death, I argue that the Knossian burial assemblage was staged to reference the persona of Meriones, therefore suggesting the familiarity of some Cretans with early stories that eventually filtered into the Homeric epics.