The Homeric talent, a quantity of unworked gold, has attracted very little scholarly comment. Yet it is a conspicuous enough feature of the Homeric economy: when Agamemnon lists the gifts with which he hopes to win over Achilles, he includes ten talents of gold (khrusou talanta) in the first line of his plutocratic catalogue. The same sum also features among the gifts Achilles receives from Priam. In what follows, I argue that the talent occupies an anomalous position within the system of Homeric gift exchange, and that this anomaly has interesting implications both within and beyond the Homeric text.

In a footnote in J.H.S. 1918, p. 144, I stated the view that the battle (319 B.C.) in which Antigonus defeated Alketas and the associated generals took place in the αὐλὼν which leads from the N.E. corner of the Limnai towards Pisidian Antioch, carrying the southern or Pisidian road across Asia Minor eastward. This important route, regarded as a highway from the west coast to the Cilician Gates, is a recent discovery, though parts of it have been often described and traversed. In J.H.S. 1920, p. 89 f., I have argued that it was the road by which Xerxes' great army marched from Kritalla to Kelainai.

There are two authorities on whom we depend for details of the battle of 319 B.C., Polyaenus Strat. 4, 6, 7 and Diodorus 18, 44; but both of these gather all their information from that excellent military writer Hieronymus of Cardia, the friend and historian of Eumenes. Polyaenus tells the story with soldierly brevity, relating only the chief military features: Diodorus diffusely and at great length; but so that we can recognise Hieronymus behind and beneath, and restore the full account as given by that writer.

Suppose that you are writing a highly eulogistic obituary notice of a well-known statesman who has recently died, and suppose further that you wish to suppress all reference to one period in that statesman's life which lasted for six years, how are you going to proceed? It is clearly a ticklish matter. But if your hero left X at the beginning of that period of six years to go to Y, and then at its close returned from Y to X, it might be possible to telescope the two residences at X into a single visit, and to cover your suppression of the six years' absence by a discreet lack of definition in your chronological statements. If you are successful, others may follow your lead, and centuries later your evasions may escape the notice of the historical student.

In discussions of Aeschylus' theology one of the passages most often quoted is the so-called ‘hymn to Zeus’ in the first chorus of the Agamemnon (Ag. 160–83). Fraenkel in his commentary goes so far as to call it ‘the corner-stone not only of this play but of the whole trilogy’. The passage concludes with two lines which in all modern editions are read as a statement, though our oldest manuscript, the Medicean, writes them as a question. Textually the difference is merely one of accent, but the difference of accent carries with it a reversal of meaning. As a statement the lines mean that the gods are something to be grateful for, that there is some χάρις or kindness associated with them. Taken as a question they deny this. Clearly then it is of great importance for the interpretation of Aeschylus to decide which is the correct reading.

The lines in question, written without accents, are

Our oldest manuscript, M, as I have said, writes ποῦ with an accent. So does our next oldest, the manuscript 468 of the Biblioteca di San Marco, generally known as V. If this reading stems uncorrupted from the time when accents were first applied to the text of Aeschylus and if at that time the oral tradition of the poet's words was not yet dead, then it will not be destitute of authority. But the thread is far too tenuous to bear any weight of proof.

Equally there can be no argument from authority on the side of reading the lines as a statement. For though Triclinius and the closely associated manuscript F write που without an accent as an enclitic, this is as likely as not to be due to simple conjecture.

On a fall night before Issus in 333 BC, we are told by Curtius Rufus, Alexander ascended by torchlight to the summit of a lofty mountain, and in accordance with ancestral custom performed sacrifices to the chief guardian deities of the place: an intriguing historical remnant, the more challenging because Curtius provides no other details, and no other Alexander account gives reliable information about this particular display of piety. Consequently the gods in question remain unknown. The purpose of this study is to establish the likelihood that Alexander did in fact perform these rites, and to determine the probable identities of the deities in the light of what is known about religious cults at Issus before he arrived.

The site map of Cyzicus reproduced in this number (Pl. VI) represents the results of Mr. A. E. Henderson's survey in the summers of 1902—3. The first season's work, of which alone I can speak at first hand, accounted for the coast line, prominent remains (including the city walls), and main roads: the limits of the marsh land on the isthmus were also ascertained with considerable exactness with a view to the recent discussion of the original nature of the Cyzicene Peninsula: these limits, however, are subject to a certain amount of variation with the season, and cultivation is yearly encroaching upon them. The maze of walls within the enceinte—some of them modern vineyard boundaries, others doubtless resting on ancient foundations—was added by Mr. Henderson and Mr. Peet in 1903: contouring was found impossible in the time at their disposal, and indeed the general levels of the site are fairly adequately shown on the excellent Admiralty Chart of Artaki Bay (of which a section is here reproduced in miniature in Fig. 1) and on the sketch maps of Perrot and De Rustafjaell.

Describing the approach toward Sardis in the spring of 1699, the British antiquary Edmund Chishull wrote: ‘We continue our journey through a spatious and fertile plain, curiously beset on each side the road with [a] variety of round hillocks, which from their number, figure, and situation, in so level a campaign, appear plainly to be artificial’. The tumuli or burial mounds so described by Chishull still dominate the Hermus river plain opposite Sardis. Their modern name is Bin Tepe, or ‘Thousand Mounds’.

Amongst the legendary heroes who appear in leading roles in the surviving plays of Sophocles, it is noteworthy that Oedipus, Ajax and Heracles all received some form of divine worship in Attica, not to mention localities more readily associated with each of them. Sophocles is not unaware of this aspect of each of these figures, but where the future prospect of their cult is alluded to in the plays, such allusions are not always prominent or explicit; though the future cult of the Oedipus of the Oedipus Coloneus is crucial for the play, it is only directly mentioned in a few passages, while the Ajax of Ajax is seen as a future receiver of cult only in a single unusual scene of supplicating his dead body, and it is unclear in the Trachiniae whether the audience is intended to supply a future cult on Oeta and apotheosis for Heracles. I should here like to argue that in Philoctetes Sophocles again consciously employs a hero destined to receive worship after his death, and that this is subtly suggested at the end of the play.

The problem of the date of the surrender of the Messenians blockaded by the Spartans at Ithome has been subjected to considerable discussion in recent years. From this discussion two main attitudes have emerged:

(a) The majority hold the view that the surrender took place round about 460, and that the phrase ‘δεκάτῳ ἔτει’ in Thucydides' account (i 103.1) requires emendation, though they are not agreed on what the text should be.

(b) A minority view, put forward by Scharf, and independently and in greater detail by Hammond, agrees in putting the surrender early, round about 460, but keeps ‘δεκάτῳ’ in the text of Thucydides, and supposes that his calculation was made not from the revolt that followed hard upon the famous earthquake (which is the usual view), but from an alleged earlier rising dated to 469/8. In a rather different form this view is also held by Sealey.

The join is between the right end of 1008 and the left end of 1010, (plate Ia, b). The reason why it has escaped notice is that the Knights of St John, when building the reliefs into the walls of the Castle of St Peter at Bodrum, hacked the slab in two clumsily, destroying several inches of the front surface in doing so. Once the two pieces had been set up in the British Museum, with slab 1009 interposed, and catalogued in that order, the join was unlikely to be recognised, for the subjects do not at first sight appear to connect, and the join even now is not obvious from the front, because of the rough way in which the block was split in two; but when the fractured surfaces further back in the slab are brought together, the correspondence of the contours leaves no doubt whatever that they fit, and thus produce a single, very large, slab, nearly nine and a half feet long, as against the seven feet odd of the next longest survivor, 1022.

The new join is of interest partly because it prolongs a continuous run of the frieze (1007 plus 1008) by several feet (plate Ib), giving a sequence of eleven figures, if we include the two legs at the right edge; but chiefly because the composition thus produced regains a significance which the separation of its parts had obscured. The figure on 1008 who wields a club and wears a lion's skin must surely be Herakles: the addition of 1010 on the right shows that this important figure is balanced by another Greek who ought to be equally important, and who is engaged with an Amazon on horseback. Would this not be Theseus? On Athenian vases of a century earlier, a composition not unlike this, of the duel between Theseus and an Amazon, each using a spear, was already established (plate Ic): its prototype may have been in some famous wall-painting, and the designer of the Mausoleum frieze may have drawn his inspiration directly from that or from some version of it in another work of art now also lost to us. The identity of the two Amazons is a separate problem.

At Lysistrate 614-705, after the actors have left the acting area, the two half-choruses, instead of addressing the audience directly in a parabasis as we expect, engage in a debate which displays some of the features of a regular parabasis. The male half-chorus after removing their outer garments (615) perform a lyric stanza followed by an epirrhema, whereupon the women likewise prepare to sing by disencumbering themselves (637): ἀλλὰ θώμεσθ᾿ ὧ φίλαι γρᾶες ταδὶ πρῶτον χαμαί’ ‘but, old dears, let's first put these things on the ground’. The two most recent commentators both suppose, as scholars have long assumed, that the women at this stage remove their outer garments. I wish to suggest an alternative possibility, that the female half-chorus remove only one garment, at 686, and that at 637 they merely put down their pitchers in preparation for their first lyric stanza. This is not a new suggestion, but it has never been adequately discussed.

Professor Haspels in her Attic Black-figured Lekythoi has described the work of the Theseus painter and analysed his style. In this account of him she naturally gives more consideration to his lekythoi than to the other shapes that he decorated, but his numerous skyphoi, painted in the ‘White Heron’ workshop, are listed in full and briefly discussed. Miss Haspels describes the Theseus painter as the moving spirit in this busy undertaking, until at last, she suggests, he may have ‘got weary of inspiring the hacks in the “Heron workshop” and of witnessing their decay’ and so left and went elsewhere. Later she adds that ‘that workshop apparently turned out skyphoi before he joined’, but the theme has never been developed, and there is now a general tendency to attribute all skyphoi from this shop that are not by his hand to followers or imitators of the Theseus painter without further qualification. This may be somewhat misleading, since followers and imitators are necessarily later than what they follow and imitate. I hope to show that the shop in which the Theseus painter painted his skyphoi was a flourishing concern, making both skyphoi and kylikes, before he entered it, and that some of his companions, so far from being imitators, were his seniors and to some extent his teachers.

The three-sided Boston relief (Plate XIIIa), which is to be dated in the second quarter of the fifth century, has been the object of a long controversy with regard both to its subject matter and to its authenticity, which has been doubted by some scholars. The authenticity of the monument will be taken for granted here, since the work of Jucker, and especially the recent exhaustive stylistic and scientific study by Ashmole and Young leave no possible room for doubting it. Another aspect of the relief which I will take for granted in this paper is the artistic milieu which created it, since it has been convincingly shown that it is of South Italian, and more specifically Epizephyrian Locrian, origin. The object of the present paper is to discuss the iconography of the monument, especially with reference to the cult and religious environment of the city in which it was produced.

The interpretation of the central scene and the two side-panels of the Boston relief is still a matter of controversy, although many hypotheses have been put forward since the monument first appeared in the antiquities market. Discussions of the iconography of this relief tend more often than not to connect the problem, in some way or other, with the subject matter of the Ludovisi throne (Plate XIIIb), another three-sided relief belonging to the artistic environment of Locri Epizephyrii, but of a much higher artistic quality. The interpretation of the scenes on the Ludovisi throne has not provoked the same amount of controversy, and it would, I think, be a fair statement that the interpretation of the central representation as the birth of Aphrodite is now generally accepted—more accurately, it is the new-born Aphrodite being assisted out of the sea, and to the shore, by the Moirai or the Horai. On each of the side-panels a female figure is shown, a naked pipe-player on one, a heavily draped young matron burning incense in a thymiaterion on the other. They have been interpreted as hetaira and young bride or wife, two contrasting figures associated with Aphrodite's Locrian cult.

The scientific treatment of the Geography of Ptolemy (Γεωγραφικὴὑφήγησις) had made considerable progress during the last century, so that it seemed as if this work had been brought at least to a provisory issue. An edition arranged according to the demands of science and, as was to be desired, an edition that could be called final had not yet been produced, but there was reason to believe that the edition undertaken by the well-known editor C. Mueller in the great Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum, published by Firmin Didot in Paris, would come up to these expectations. However, owing to his death in 1893 it has remained unfinished. After Part I. had appeared in 1883, C. Th. Fischer, to whom the continuation of the work was entrusted, was able in 1901 to publish Part II., which had been found almost ready for the press among the literary remains of the deceased.

Among the various references which Athenaeus makes in his Δειπνοσοφισταί to the encounter of Herakles with Helios, when he was going to the island of Erytheia, we find the following (Book xi. 39 ff):—

Φερεκύδης δ᾿ἐν τῇ τρίτῃ τῶν ίστοριῶν προειπὼν περὶ τοῦ ᾿ Ωκεανοῦἐπιφέρει ὁ δ᾿Ηρακλῆς ἔλκεται ἐπ᾿αὐτὸν τὸ τόξον ὡς βαλῶν καὶ ὁ Ηλιοςπαύσασθαι κελεύει ὄ δὲ δείσας παύεται. ῾´ Ηλιος δὶ ἀντὶ τούτου διδωσιναὐτῷ τὸ δέπας τὸ χρύσεον ὄ αὐτὸν ἐφόρει σὺν ταῖς ἴπποις ἐπὴν δύῃ διὰ τοῦΩκεαυοῦ τὴν νύκτα πρὸς ἐῴην ἴν᾿ἀνίσχει ὁ ᾿´ Ηλιος ἔπειτα πορεύεται ὁ῾ Ηρακλῆς ἐν τῷ δέπαϊ τούτῳ τούτῳ ἐς τὴν ῾ Ερύθειαν κ.τ.λ.

Hellenists still debate whether the ‘wild she-mules’ (ἡμιόνων γένος ἀγροτεράων) of the Iliad (ii 852) are domestic mules or wild equidae.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that the ancients did not seem to differentiate adequately between the true wild ass and the wild hemione, although, according to Hančar's authoritative book—which incorporates the findings of modern zoology—the two are definitely distinct. There is, furthermore, a great deal of plausibility in Keller's statement that the ancients did not always differentiate properly even between wild horses and wild hemiones. In fact, the only author who seems to have had more than an inkling that there is a difference between wild asses and hemiones is Aristotle (Historia Animalium vi 36=580b). Even the distinction between wild species and the domestic mule is sometimes so blurred that only the report that a ‘mule’ had a foal enables one to decide that the animal is a domesticated hemione or wild ass. Under these conditions little help can be derived from nomenclature, though, for the sake of completeness, we will indicate whether the animal is called hemionos, onos agrios, onagros, asinus ferus, or mula.

Among the sherds found at Gela in what must have been the sanctuary of the hero Antiphamos—the Rhodian co-founder, with the Cretan Entimos, of the city itself—was a fragment of a large Attic skyphos representing the Assassination of Hipparchos. It was described, though not figured, by Orsi in Notizie degli Scavi 1900 p. 276. He compared it with the well-known picture of the same subject on the stamnos by the Copenhagen Painter in Würzburg (515: AZ. 1883 pl. 12 and pp. 215–8, Boehlau; Klio 20 pll. 1–4; Langlotz pll. 182–3 and 210: ARV. p. 193 no. 5). Petersen noticed the fragment in R.M. 16 (1901) p. 103, and there are one or two bare mentions elsewhere. In 1923 it was still in private hands at Gela, where I saw it, but not long afterwards it passed to the Villa Giulia, and was figured, with a hasty description, by Cultrera in Bollettino d'Arte 7 (1927) p. 319, above, 2. This publication seems to have escaped general notice, at least it is not quoted in recent studies of the Tyrant-slayers. The fragment has such exceptional interest of subject that I may be excused for returning to it.

The primary purpose of this article is to publish two terracotta representations of lute-players in the British Museum. The subject is rare, but not quite so rare as might be supposed from the scarcity of literature about it. It has, therefore, seemed worth while to add a Ust of the examples known to us—a list which does not claim to be exhaustive—and to discuss briefly some of the problems which they raise. We do this in the hope that it may stimulate further investigation of a neglected theme.

Between lutes and lyres there is a difference of principle which could hardly be more fundamental. The strings of the lyre are relatively numerous, but, in default of a fingerboard, fret-board, or neck, against which they could be firmly pressed (or ‘stopped’), the possibilities of obtaining more than one note from each string, in so far as they existed, must have been limited as to the number and quality of notes obtainable. The lute has few strings, but they are stretched over a solid neck, or a prolongation of the sound-box, against which they can be pressed so as to shorten the string-length and produce notes of higher pitch than those of the open strings; each string can thus provide a number of notes of approximately equal quality. Lutes and lyres were both common in Asia and in Egypt. In Greek lands the lyre predominated, and no examples of the lute are found in art before the fourth century B.C. The examples known to us are mostly terracottas.

At p. 319 n. 203 of my recent book, I discuss

the appearance of the letters ΑΙΔΟΣ … designating the figure of Artemis on an Attic red-figure amphora (depicting the rape of Leto by Tityos) by Phintias (Louvre G42; ARV2 23,1 [Paralipomena 323, Addenda 154; see now also LIMC ii pl. 275, Apollon 1069, vi, Leto 34; PLATE I] …). That this constitutes an association between the goddess and aidôs is the position of Kretschmer [Die griechischen Vaseninschriften (Gütersloh 1894) 197], Norwood [Essays on Euripidean drama (Berkeley 1954) 76 n. 2], and Schefold [Götterund Heldensagen der Griechen in der spätarchaischen Kunst (Munich 1978) 68].