H. van Thiel demonstrated only 16 years ago that the text of Longus's novel rests on two manuscripts, Laur. conv. sopp. 627 (s. xiii2) and Vat. gr. 1348 (s. xvi1). The descripti nevertheless yield historical information, and so it is as well to establish their relationships. Three scholars who knew them at first hand have tried: A. Kairis in his edition (Athens 1932), H. Dörrie in De Longi Achillis Tatii Heliodori memoria (Göttingen 1935), and E. Vilborg in his edition of Achilles Tatius (Gothenburg 1955). None of them arrived at the truth. Perhaps the same applies to me, because I have contented myself with collating at most book i and checking a few passages elsewhere; but I can give reasons for my disagreement.

I will first set out my stemma. As everyone's symbols conflict, I will use none except F for the Laurentianus and V for the Vaticanus, but in my discussion I will abbreviate the shelfmarks. Relationships that I do not discuss are adequately treated by Kairis, Dörrie, or Vilborg.

This article uses evidence drawn from hymenaios and wedding ritual to reach a new interpretation of the third stasimon of the Hippolytos, and its rôle in the play. There is longstanding contention about whether a second (male) chorus participates in the ode, singing in antiphony with the existing tragic chorus. Even scholars who accept that a second chorus is present have tended to regard it as an aberration which needs to be explained away, rather than a deliberate choice with poetic significance. I discuss the cultural implications of such a chorus, examining our evidence for real-life mixed choruses, and then applying this to the ode itself. The evidence for mixed choruses suggests they are strongly associated with marriage. Looking more closely at the language and imagery of the ode, there are allusions to the topoi of wedding songs and ritual running through it. The ode can use these as a device to trigger deep-rooted responses and associations from the audience, as these motifs are drawn from the cultural tradition which the audience shares. The topoi tie in with the theme of marriage and sexuality within the Hippolytos as a whole. But while their usual purpose is to set up conventional models and ways of thinking, the way they are deployed in the ode in fact serves to undermine these models, and to put a darker spin on the norms of sexual behaviour. This strand of imagery therefore also provides a filter for interpreting Hippolytos' own attitude towards sexuality, and a guide to how we are meant to respond to it.

The showcases of the antique-dealers in Odos Pandrosou are full of little lekythoi which were painted for the tombs of humble men of the people, and which to-day are destined for modest purchasers or for the Inspectors of the Archaeological Section of the Ministry of Education, while for more important purchasers there are hidden away somewhere else works of much greater value. It is seldom that we are stopped by the art or the subject of one of these lekythoi.

In 1943 when I was making an inventory of the stock of one antique-dealer—that which was on show—I picked out one lekythos which the owner gladly presented to the National Museum (Plate IVa, Figs, 1 and 2). From the funeral pyre the surface of the vase has taken a brown-grey colour, and the many joins show that it had been thrown to be broken and burnt with the dead body.

A curious male figure wrapped in a himation up to the top of the head, so that only the -eye and the upper part of the head remain free, walks rapidly to the left, raising one leg vigorously. He lifts his himation with his hand to help him move. High boots cover his legs to a point just below the knee. The hanging wreath does not appear to be related to the interpretation of the picture, but is taken from the commonplaces of funeral lekythoi, especially white ones.

Messer Giannozzo Manetti—if we may give credit to his enthusiastic biographer—was accustomed to say that there were three books which he had got by heart from long handling—Saint Paul's Epistles, Augustine's De civitate Dei, and (among the heathen) Aristotle's Ethics. There may be some exaggeration here; but there is no doubt that Manetti, from the beginning to the end of his long literary career, was deeply interested in the moral writings of Aristotle. Vespasiano tells a story of him in the early period of his studies. He used to give a Latin Ethics to somebody, and taking the original himself, would reel it off so fast in Latin that his hearer was unable to follow him.

Professor I. Noshy, in a paper read to the 1968 conference of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Libya and published in its proceedings, has re-formulated Chamoux's view of the chronology of the reign of Arkesilas III, to which I proposed an alternative in JHS lxxxvi (1966) 99–103. Noshy upholds Chamoux's view that Arkesilas' appeal to Samos (Hdt. iv 162–3) was made to Polykrates before 525 (when he medized during Cambyses' Egyptian expedition (Hdt. iii 13 and iv 165), after which, according to Noshy (p. 73) he could only have appealed to his Persian patrons). He attempts to reduce the awkwardly long interval between these events and Arkesilas' murder by updating Aryandes' Libyan expedition, which followed the murder, to 519. Like Chamoux, he connects Aryandes' rebellion against Darius and his execution with the visit of Darius to Egypt, recorded by Polyainos (vii 11) and fixed to 518 by the date of the death of the Apis bull which Darius mourned. In Noshy's view, Aryandes' Libyan expedition was not authorised by Darius, whose impending visit caused him to recall it before the wider purpose of subduing the Libyan tribes was accomplished (pp. 64–5). He suggests further, that, contrary to the testimony of Herodotus (iv 164.4–5.1), Arkesilas' sojourn at Barka, which he places between 525 and 519, was by his own choice, with the object of subduing aristocratic revolt in western Cyrenaica, and that he never had to take refuge there, but was able to return to Cyrene between expeditions, only handing over the government to Pheretima while he was away on campaigns (p. 69). During this period, Noshy supposes that he founded Euhesperides to serve as an outpost in western Cyrenaica (pp. 70–1).

In examining and dealing with the fragments of some Flutes found by Professor Garstang during his excavations at the Royal City of Meroë, about fifty miles from Khartoum in the Sûdân, a brief consideration may perhaps be permitted respecting the conditions which obtained at this old Nubian capital on the Upper Nile, so far as they appertain to a phase of music long passed away. It may aid in tracing the origin of these particular flutes, and determining whether they are of local workmanship, or imported.

Kush, an ancient kingdom comprised in Ethiopia, later became one of the dependencies of Egypt proper. From the period of the invasion of Cambyses, B.C. 530, his seizure and destruction of Thebes, the island city of Meroë, decreed by the conqueror to be the capital of the province, became a great trade emporium. Greek influence then began to obtain in the land of the Nile. Although of course the customs, arts, and learning of the more ancient Egyptians extensively prevailed among these more southern people, Meroë was a place of great importance, possessing enough rich and cultured persons to import for use and enjoyment products of art from notable places beyond the Egyptian shores of the Mediterranean.

This paper does not profess to give anything more than a brief account of the important results obtained by the German and Austrian excavators up to the time of my visit to these sites in June. I should like in particular to direct the attention of English archaeologists to Western Asia Minor as a field of research that is practically untouched, especially as regards remains of the Hellenistic period. Brilliant results await the scientific explorer of important sites such as Sardis, Tralies, Laodicea, and Apamea, and all these are extremely easy of access. The English traveller cannot help feeling ashamed of English archaeology when he sees the unintelligible mass of ruins and brushwood that covers the site of the Artemisium at Ephesus.

Mr John Boardman's suggestion that the sickles dedicated to Artemis Orthia at Sparta were used as strigils is most enlightening, and perhaps I may be allowed to find support in it for a theory that I have advanced elsewhere, that this form of sickle is the ξυήλη of Xenophon, Anabasis iv 7.16; iv 8.25. It is true that the dedicating inscriptions never use the word ξυήλη. The sickle is only named twice, being called δρέπανον once and once δρϵπάνη. But this may be explained by the late date of all the inscriptions. Ξυήλη is only found in the two passages already cited from Xenophon, in the lexicographers (Hesychius and the Souda s-v.), who also give the Doric form ξνάλη, and in Xenophon's Cyropaedia (vi 2.32), where it means a spokeshave for smoothing the shafts of spears. It is probable that the word was obsolete even at Sparta in the Hellenistic period, and that even in Xenophon's time it was not in common use throughout Greece. Pollux (i 137) mentions the Laconian ξυΐνη in a list of weapons, including δρϵπάνη and δορνδρέπανον, and this misspelling (more probably that of a scribe writing from dictation than Pollux's own) does indicate the unfamiliarity of the word.

In a former paper in this Journal (Vol. viii.) it was maintained that the Greeks had a weight standard long before the introduction of coined money from Asia, the unit of which was the same as the Attic-Euboic system (130—135 grains Troy) of historical times, and that in the Homeric poems the gold Talanton and cow represented the same value, the unit of metal being adjusted to the more primitive unit of barter. The evidence then adduced was of a purely literary nature, as it was not in my power to appeal to any actually existing weights. I have since obtained some data of a concrete kind which, I think, lends some support to my former contention.

Dr. Schliemann (Mycenae and Tiryns, p. 354) found (in the tomb south of the Agora at Mycenae) ‘four spirals of thick quadrangular, and seven spirals of thick round gold wire, five plain gold rings, and a similar one of silver, of which a selection is represented under No. 529. ‘I remind (adds Dr. Schliemann) the reader that similar spirals and rings of thick gold wire occur in the wall paintings of the Egyptian tombs. They are supposed to have served as presents, or perhaps as a medium of exchange.’ These rings are now at Athens, and my friend Mr. E. A. Gardner of Gonville and Caius College, the Director of the British School at Athens, has kindly procured for me their weights. Before going further I wish it to be clearly understood that I do not assume the rings to be what is called ring-money, but I think that I am justified in assuming that they are ornaments probably made on a given weight.

Pausanias, in a number of familiar passages, has given us the names of certain ancient monuments associated with Tantalus and Pelops, and visible in his own day on Mt. Sipylus; he speaks as a native of the district. In the problem of identifying these with the various monuments known today in the Smyrna-Magnesia region, there is still no agreement; opinion, after much discussion, has divided itself into two main camps, one of which finds them in the immediate vicinity of Magnesia (Manisa), while the other locates them in the hills north of Smyrna, near the old ‘Aeolic’ acropolis of that city.

In his work Potter and Painter in Ancient Athens Sir John Beazley proposes a more detailed study of the shapes of vases in order to obtain a better knowledge of the relations between potters and painters. By this article, written in honour of his sixty-sixth birthday, I hope to contribute to the discussion of the problem.

It is well known that the development of Greek vase-shapes follows a regular course, from heavy and plump forms to slender and more elegant ones. The illustrations in Richter and Milne, Shapes and Names of Athenian Vases, will confirm this opinion, and Miss G. Richter maintained it lately in her Attic Red-figured Vases 1946, 18. The chronology of vases of the fourth century B.C. depends mainly upon this development (Buschor, FR III, 152; Schefold, Untersuchungen zu den Kertscher Vasen, passim), R. Zahn calls it a rule (FR III, 204), and W. Technau used this rule as a firm starting-point when dealing with the chronology of the works of Exekias.

Old rules tend to lose their efficacy if they are not periodically endowed with new vigour, and thus enabled to keep their activity throughout the next stage of development. In the field of Attic vase-shapes one of the most decisive renewals of this kind took place about 510 B.C. at the time of the fall of the tyranny and the institution of the Kleisthenic democracy. A new impetus revealed itself not only in the invention of new shapes, such as the stamnos, the pelike, and the kalpis (Beazley, ABS 24), but also in the modification of long-established forms.

Thus far I have tried to show that the fully developed legend of Cadmus the Phoenician does not appear before the fifth century. This of course leads to no certain conclusion. Apart from the possibility (which I think an unlikely one) that the fragmentary state of our knowledge of the earlier writers forbids our coming to any conclusion, however tentative, on a subject like the present, it is still possible that the fifth century writers represent an older and better tradition than the poets before them. There is no more unproductive idea than that which assumes that every story bears the date of the writer who preserves it. We find Pausanias especially citing legends which are manifestly older and truer than many told by earlier writers, and Asius the Samian—to take a parallel case—giving a better version of a Boeotian myth than the local Pindar. But if it can be shown that writers of the fifth century, Herodotus and the logographi, were less interested in local tradition than in learned theory, especially when the latter was based on researches in foreign countries, we do then get some probability for the view that a statement found in them, but in no earlier writer, may be theory and not tradition. To do this we must get some idea of their methods.

It is usually taken for granted that throughout the first part of the fifth century B.C. until her defeat by Athens in or about 457 Aigina was a member of the Peloponnesian League and was consistently hostile to Athens and to the formation and growth of the Confederacy of Delos. I believe that the evidence for this view is weak, and that Aigina was never a member of the Peloponnesian League but probably was a voluntary member of the Delian League from its formation.

About 494 King Kleomenes of Sparta invaded the Argolid and defeated the Argives at Sepeia. For this invasion he used some ships belonging to Aigina, which he had taken by force. This implies that some kind of fight must have taken place recently between Aigina and the Spartans, or their allies. How could the Spartans, who were a land and not a sea power, capture ships from the Aiginetans, who had one of the largest fleets in Greece at that time? Only with the help of an ally whose naval power was stronger than Sparta's. Obviously this ally must have been Corinth. Corinth was always a naval power, and at this period she was hostile to Aigina, and she was undoubtedly a member of the Peloponnesian League. So the forces of the Peloponnesian League fought and defeated Aigina shortly before they defeated Argos in the middle 490s. There were, of course, traditional connexions between Argos and Aigina. Argos had assisted Aigina in a war against Epidauros and Athens long before; while after her defeat at Sepeia Argos demanded a fine of 500 talents from Aigina as an atonement for her treachery, and she could not have made this demand if she had not had, or claimed to have, some kind of alliance with her. It is therefore not surprising that the Peloponnesians should attack both Argos and Aigina at the same period.

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.

It is a pleasure to record this year that the promise of more substantial results held out in the previous slender reports from Greece has not been disappointed, and that the discoveries made in the latter part of 1949 and the year 1950 challenge comparison with any prewar years. The Archaeological Society has undertaken a number of new excavations in different parts of the country and has already achieved some remarkable successes. The foreign Schools have not lessened their endeavours; the Italian School has resumed its activity in the field, and the French have supplemented their achievements on land by commencing a systematic investigation of inshore waters. The Herákleion Museum is now open again. In Eleusis and Tegea the museums are being reconstituted, and that at Sparta has been reopened; the Hermes of Praxiteles has been brought above ground again at Olympia. A new wing comprising an exhibition gallery and workrooms has been added to the Corinth Museum. The museum in Thera is to be set in order, and the archaeological collection at Syra has been re-assembled in the Town Hall. In Athens, there are now six exhibition galleries open in the National Museum with a splendid selection which ranges from early Hellenic to the fourth century B.C.; a new gallery has been constructed in the Byzantine Museum to hold select exhibits, and a library and rooms for study are being fitted out in the cellars of the main building there. Under Prof. A. Orlandos' direction many Byzantine churches and monasteries which needed attention have been put in order in the last year.

§ 1. It is less easy to forgive Xenophon for telling us so little about the foundation of Megalopolis than for telling us nothing at all about the foundation of Messene. We would give much to know the details of the building of the city on the slopes of Ithome and the synoecism of Messenia; but Megalopolis, in its double character of a federate city and a federal capital, presented such complicated problems that the silence of those who could have best told us how those problems were solved is more aggravating than many of such silences to the curiosity of posterity. In this paper I propose to deal with one problem which seems never to have been quite realised.

Every large museum contains some portraits, which can with certainty be assigned to the Flavian period: a layman indeed can recognize the ladies of this age by the high and ugly coiffure then fashionable, but the majority of these are quite second-rate works. Not even the glamour of an imperial name will awaken much interest in such. But there are a few others really of superlative excellence which are consequently, as the commoner chronological sign-posts are wanting, assigned in most catalogues to whatever period the individual writer regards as the ‘best period’ of Roman art. Three or four of them I have ventured to select and I have added notes upon one or two others, which help to explain the group and justify further the date to which I assign them. No doubt the list could be extended considerably, but a few will perhaps suffice as a beginning, if they are typical of the best which the age could produce.

The Italian occupation of Valona has drawn attention to what has been called one of the two keys of the Adriatic. It may, therefore, be of interest to trace the history of this important strategic position, which has been held by no less than twelve different masters.

The name αὐλών ‘a hollow between hills,’ was applied to various places in antiquity, and from the accusative of this word comes the Italian form ‘Valona,’ or, as the Venetians often wrote it, ‘Avalona.’