For the historian of the ancient world there is nothing more necessary and nothing more difficult than the task of discriminating between fact and fiction, between accuracy and exaggeration, in his sources. The Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus presents this problem in an acute form, and while certain passages, such as Iambulus's discovery of the Islands of the Sun, are quite evidently dominated by an uncritical acceptance of romantic tales, other sections of this extensive miscellany are less easily categorised. It is the purpose of this note to examine two short passages only, viz. iii. 12. 1–14. 5 and v. 36. 1–38. 4, which contain Diodorus's description of the mines in Egypt and Spain, in order to determine how far they may be accepted as a reliable record.

Commercial buying and selling had replaced mutual gift giving long before Aristotle's time, and he gives fair exchange primacy over the other forms of justice in book five of the Nicomachean Ethics just because it provided philia for an activity which he knew to be more basic than any other in the life of the polis. He calls it ‘the salvation of states’, and repeats the judgement in the Politics.

Yet the account of fair exchange in EN v 5 has a reputation for obscurity which ought to seem surprising. There is no agreed meaning for the formula ‘as builder to shoemaker, so many shoes to a house’ (1133a23-5, 32-3), and chapter 5 has become the poor relation in book five partly for this reason. The formula has a simple explanation, however, which has been overlooked because of a mistaken belief that inequality enters into it.

I must ask the readers of the Hellenic Journal to take the somewhat disjointed notes that follow strictly for what they are, namely, addenda to my paper in last year's Journal (vol. xxiii. 1903) on the ‘Mystica Vannus Iacchi.’

My object in writing that paper was to elucidate the mysticism of the ‘fan’ and thereby, I hoped, to throw some light on an obscure chapter in the history of Greek religion, namely the shift from the worship of Demeter to that of Dionysos. Incidentally it became necessary to examine the various forms of winnowing ‘fans.’ My personal interest in this necessary step in my argument was slight and my statement of evidence, I fear, inadequate and superficial. Since the appearance of the article many friendly critics have supplied me with material to fill the gaps left by my ignorance, and the examination of this material has not been without its use to me in clearing up some obscurities as to the mysticism of the fan.

In the second and third centuries AD, many of the cities in the eastern Mediterranean could boast about having their own athletic games. In the fourth century, however, these games quickly declined. In recent years, the traditional explanations for the end of athletic games, most prominently the supposed ban by Theodosius, have been proven unfounded. This paper proposes an alternative explanation: institutional and financial changes hindered the successful organization of athletic contests by the cities in the fourth and fifth centuries. In order to show the effect of these changes, this paper first offers a detailed analysis of how athletic contests were founded and funded in the early imperial period. It then examines how and to what extent these procedures and funds were affected by changes in late antiquity. The decline was not caused by a general financial crisis - in fact the estates (partially) funding the games remained a stable form of financing. Instead the shift of power to a centralized bureaucracy limited the cities in their administration of the games: they could no longer independently meet deficits in the agonistic budget from the city treasury and had to rely increasingly on elite sponsors, whose ambitions focused mainly on the provincial capitals and who gradually lost their interest in athletics.

There are not many of the occupations of primitive man in Europe that have continued to the present day. The beasts that he hunted have, for the most part, disappeared: the elk and the mammoth are in the museum; the weapons which he employed in his pursuit of them must be sought for in the same quarter; if we were suddenly to come upon him in some unexplored area, his speech would be almost as unintelligible to us as the cry of a monkey, or the shriek of a sea-bird. But there is one primitive pursuit that is still being carried on almost unchanged. On the shores and in the shallows of the Eastern Baltic sea men are still searching and dredging for the exudations of the primeval forest which go under the name of amber. It was ornament and amulet in the beginning, it is a desirable decoration to-day; at one time almost an equivalent of the precious metals, and perhaps in earlier esteem than they, and not destitute of magical influences, as well as of commercial worth; it stands now, as then, with coral and with pearls, as a thing greatly to be desired.

The later developments of black-figured vase painting in Boeotia are known mainly from the finds made at the Theban Kabeirion and from associated Kabeiric vases which are to be found in some numbers in the museums of Europe. Kabeiric is, however, only one of several B.F. styles that had their vogue in Boeotia in the later fifth and fourth centuries. A still commoner is one in which the decoration consists mainly of floral patterns in which the palmette predominates, with occasionally a bird, animal, or a grotesque human figure introduced in a subordinate position. Vases of various shapes with this decoration are found in some abundance in Greek museums, more especially at Thebes, Chaeronea, Schimatari (Tanagra), Chalcis, Nauplia (where the museum possesses two collections, the Nikandros and the Glymenopoulos Collections, both formed mainly in Boeotia), and the National Museum at Athens. They are not from the same potteries as the Kabeiric vases, though they are akin to them. Their artistic merit is slight, and this is no doubt the reason why so few have reached museums outside Greece, and why still fewer have ever been published. Nevertheless, the fact that they exist in considerable numbers of itself makes them historically important, especially as the fabric has well-marked characteristics which render it possible to trace a chronological sequence and perhaps local styles.

The inscription from Kythera (Fig. 1) to which Miss Thomas drew attention in the last part of the JHS (lviii, p. 256), is an early Babylonian cuneiform inscription which has already been the object of considerable study on the part of Assyriologists. It was first discussed by Hugo Winckler (SB Preuss. Akad. Wiss. 1897, 262–4) as part of an article by Ulrich Kohler (Ueber Probleme der gr. Vorzeit, l.e., 258–274). Winckler successfully deciphered lines 4 and 5, and established the correct reading of some of the signs in the first lines. He thought the inscription dated between 1500 and 1200 b.c., and thus, as Köhler added, from the finest period of Mycenean culture. Köhler (p. 265) further said that the cuneiform tablet might have been brought to Kythera at that time with other oriental bric-á-brac, like the Egyptian scarabs found in Rhodes and in the plain of Argos.

Many years later the study of this inscription was again taken up by Eckhard Unger (Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte xiii (1929) p. 313, pl. 58A), who went beyond Winckler and succeeded in reading the third line as well. On the other hand, his deciphering of the first two lines, his restoration of the third and fourth, his assertions on its place of origin (according to him Tilmun in the region of the Persian Gulf), and the date he gives it are not proof against criticism. For this, however, he is hardly to blame, since it is only very recently that the American excavations in Western Asia have shed light upon the author of this inscription.

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.

Exactly ten years ago the Italian Government wrested the territory of Tripolitania from the Turks, and the hope was at once entertained that archaeology, safe from the blind fanaticism that had so seriously hindered former expeditions, might reap a rich harvest from the ruins of the famous cities of the Pentapolis, and especially from Cyrene. This hope has not been disappointed. I do not intend to study here the recent discoveries under the Hellenistic Temple of Apollo of the remains of the Temple celebrated by Pindar, nor to anticipate the prospects of discovering its stips votiva, or of finding the site of the earliest necropolis. To study the former we must await the completion and publication of the excavations; to justify the latter a far more settled state of the country is indispensable. I will therefore limit myself in this paper to the discussion of some of the numerous statues discovered that can be ascribed to the Hellenistic age.

This article examines the compilation known as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. More usually mined for the material it preserves from the sophist Alcidamas, here I advance a reading that seeks to make sense of the compilation as a whole and situates the work ideologically in its Imperial context. An anecdote early in the compilation depicts the emperor Hadrian enquiring about Homer's birthplace and parents from the Delphic Oracle; he is told that Telemachus was Homer's father and Ithaca his homeland. When the text says that we must believe this self-evidently absurd response on account of the status of the emperor, its author is satirizing Hadrian's ambitions to participate in the Greek intellectual world and the pressures on scholars to accept Hadrian's authority in their field. Moreover, the compiler has linked this anecdote to the long account of the poetic contest between Homer and Hesiod in order to draw an unflattering parallel between Hadrian and King Panedes, who, as writers such as Lucian and Dio Chrysostom suggested, exposed his ineptitude in choosing Hesiod over Homer as the victor of the contest.

Whenever our store of Greek sculpture is enriched by a new example of major importance, the new-comer naturally arouses great interest. The question immediately arises whether it conforms with what is already known of the Greek sculpture of that period or whether it reveals new features. In either case it becomes the object of keen discussion, for we are almost as eager to test the soundness of the edifice we have tentatively set up as to enlarge it.

The newly-acquired archaic marble statue in New York (Pls. IV, V) is such an important new-comer. Under the circumstances I have gladly accepted the invitation of the Editorial Committee of this Journal to present a short note on the statue pending its more detailed publication in Metropolitan Museum Studies and Brunn-Bruckmann-Arndt, Denkmäler.

The significance of the New York statue lies in the fact that it is the best preserved and so the most representative example of the earliest ‘Apollo’ figures—or kouroi as we now preferably call them—of Greece. That is, it stands at the beginning of the long line of development which began about 600 B.C. and culminated about a century and a half later in the Apollo of Olympia. Its only important contemporaries are the famous colossal figures from Sounion, one extensively restored, the other a mere torso, and the Dipylon statue, of which only the head and one hand have survived. The preservation of the New York statue, on the other hand, is astonishingly good.

A few years ago R. M. Ogilvie argued against the widely-held view that Theocritus in Idyll i represents the cowherd Daphnis as another Hippolytus, martyred in the cause of Chastity. Nevertheless the view he attacked has been revived in a recent study of Theocritus' pastorals:

‘The chaste Daphnis … died rather than submit to Aphrodite … Both Hippolytus and Daphnis are chaste and wish to preserve their purity at all costs, even that of death … Both heroes are deeply committed to chastity … Daphnis … a true tragic hero, resists all temptation and so pines away to his death.

At the start of the play Prometheus is brought on stage by two agents of Zeus, Kratos and Bia. He is to be fastened up against the side of a rock and exposed to the elements. Hephaestus, who enters with the others, is to provide the tackle and the skills to do the job. Hephaestus shows extreme reluctance to perform his duties, both in his initial utterances (17-21, 39-54) and during the actual process of fastening, particularly when dealing with the chest (66) and legs (78); Kratos, however, browbeats him brutally, at which Hephaestus acknowledges that he has no choice and obeys.

In JHS LXIX, 18–24, Mrs. A. D. Ure discusses some interesting vases supposedly of Mykalessian make. I am quite incompetent to criticise her remarks concerning their provenance and date, and wish merely to point out that her interpretation of one of them as alluding to Boiotian ritual is highly doubtful.

The vase in question is described on pp. 19–20. It is a pyxis, decorated with a human or divine figure shown wearing what looks like a fawn-skin and holding in the right hand something which may well be a while in the left there is, according to Mrs. Ure, who of course has examined the object itself, a faint but discernible fork; I cannot find it on her reproduction. The figure sits on a small elevation which the artist has covered withround spots, quite possibly intending it for a heap of threshed corn. This is flanked, on the spectator's left, by a basket of fruit, on his right by a small pig. The figure's head is adorned with horns, apparently those of a goat and growing from, not merely attached to the crown.