It is a misfortune almost necessarily incidental to the excavation of any site so rich in ancient remains as the Acropolis at Athens, that smaller objects and such as have a less obvious archaeological value, are sadly neglected: and the fate of the bronze fragments excavated during the seasons 1885—9 affords the strongest proof of this fact. At the time of the excavation the Greek authorities selected those objects in bronze which had any obvious archaeological interest, and placed these in the larger Museum on the Acropolis. All the other bronze remains were indiscriminately and somewhat carelessly packed in several large boxes and stored in the small Museum. The evil results of this are twofold: in the first place, owing to careless storing and the piling of heavy objects on the top of light, a large number of fragments have been further broken up; and secondly, there is absolutely no record of the place or depth at which any of these were found. How important such a record would have been, will be well realized by any student of Dr. Furtwängler's great work on the Olympia bronzes, though this same also does much to lessen the gravity of our loss.

In the course of discussing Kleisthenes' reforms, the author of the Athenaion Politeia makes the following statement:

And he made those who were currently living in each of the demes demesmen of one another, so that they would not examine the new citizens by calling out their patronymic, rather they would announce them by demes; and from this practice, the Athenians call themselves after their demes.

If we are seeking an authoritative solution of the outstanding problems of ancient Greek music, it would seem that the most valuable assistance could be got from a consideration of the αὐλός, inasmuch as specimens more or less complete are to be found in plenty, scattered through the museums of different countries: in practice, this study has been found the most puzzling of all. Though many of the bodies of such flutes have been found, the mechanism of the mouthpiece, at once the most important and the most perishable portion of the instrument, has naturally disappeared, and all hope of extraneous aid from vase-pictures seems to vanish when we notice that in all the later pictures the mouth of the player, and consequently the mouthpiece of the instrument, is hidden by the ϕορβεία, a band passing across the mouth, and encircling the head of the player.

Still I hope to show that not all these difficulties are insuperable: for example, much of the mystery of the ϕορβεία disappears when we see two terracotta figures of dancers wearing the ϕορβεία without the flutes. It is then clear that this band held the flutes rigidly in place, and we are able to form some conclusion as to the shape of the mouthpieces; but this will be discussed later.

The identification and origin of this early type of Artemis, in which the goddess is represented standing erect and with wings on her shoulders, while in either hand she grasps an animal or bird, has long been the subject of much discussion, chiefly due to the fact that the archaeological evidence hitherto available, although consisting of some fifty representations, has come from various localities. The literary evidence likewise gives no sure clue, for the only certain mention of this type occurs in the description of the Chest of Cypselus, where Pausanias admits that he knows no reason why Artemis should be winged. Recently, however, at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta numerous examples of this type have been found, which, besides including several new and interesting variants both winged and unwinged, also extend the chronological range beyond the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Moreover, the numerical superiority of this series over the total number of examples previously known, together with the fact that the earliest representation was found with geometric pottery, seems to show conclusively that Sparta is a prominent early centre of this most interesting type. Consequently in the present paper the question of the identification and origin of the ‘Winged Artemis’ will be considered in the light of the recent evidence from Sparta.

Just after my paper on the Cretan Plays in the last number of this Journal had gone to press, a search for sources of the Erotokritos led me to the works of Luigi Groto, sometimes called Cieco di Hadria. The version of the Romeo and Juliet story which he embodied in his Hadriana (1578–1583) was not as close as I had hoped to the plot of Cornaro's Erotokritos, but there was sufficient evidence that the Hadriana was known to the Cretan poet. It was therefore with some excitement that I learned that Groto had also written a biblical play called Isach, published in 1586 just after his death. This play seems to be excessively rare, and neither of the specialists in Italian literature whom I have had the opportunity of consulting had ever seen it. It is therefore less surprising that it should never have been mentioned in connexion with the Cretan Thysia tou Avraam. It will no longer be necessary to drag in Feo Belcari or Theodore Beza. There is not the slightest doubt that the Thysia is directly modelled on the framework of Groto's Isach.

In his recent article on The Hellenistic Ruler-Cult and the Daemon W. W. Tarn regards the story of Callisthenes' refusal to drink the cup of unmixed wine at a banquet of Alexander's as apocryphal, having its sources, as he says, only in the later literature of gastronomy. His reason for doubting the authenticity of the story is that ‘Chares in both versions (i.e. of the Banquet at Bactra, where the proskynesis was performed by all but Callisthenes) is clear that Callisthenes did drink.’ Assuming for the moment that the story is true, he says of it: ‘The Greeks as a rule disliked unmixed wine; and Callisthenes was thus able to veil his refusal to drink “The King” by saying that if he drank Alexander's health (in unmixed wine) he would be ill.’ He argues that since Chares attests that Callisthenes did drink the King's health on the important occasion at Bactra, that Chares and probably Aristobulus, who are given as sources by Athenaeus, are both wrong in vouching for this remark, and the sole remaining authority Lynceus is only a third-century writer on gastronomy.

In preparing for the press an edition of Aeneas Tacticus, which was left in manuscript form by the late Mr. L. W. Hunter, I have had to consider a good deal the details of the fastening of the Greek city gate. The general principles are familiar to everyone: a gate with two wings (σανίδες) opening inwards only, with a wooden bar (μοχλός) placed horizontally across it on the inside, secured by a metal bolt (βάλανος) which passed through a vertical hole bored in the μοχλός and into a socket (βαλανοδόκη) in the stone beneath, the top of the βάλανος, when pushed home, being well below the top of the μοχλός. The βάλανος must have been a heavy iron pin, thick enough to stand a big strain, since if anyone tried to force the gate everything depended on the resistance of the βάλανος: I imagine it something like twelve inches long and two to three inches thick. It will be remembered that at Plataea in 431 B.C. a soldier fastened one of the gates στυρακίῳ ἀκοντίον ἀντι βαλάνου χρησάμενος ἐς τὸν μοχλόν (Thuc. ii. 4. 3).

This article reviews the historical accuracy of the account of the Spartan wedding ceremony in Plutarch’s Vita Lycurgi. It surveys the texts that are usually quoted in support of Plutarch’s account and argues that none offers a relevant parallel. It also suggests a different kind of wedding ceremony for Archaic and Classical Sparta.

This article examines the remarkable inscribed monument IG XII.4.132, a dossier of documents dealing with political strife and reconciliation in the small island polis of Telos, as an important new piece of evidence for democracy in the early Hellenistic period. Placing the monument in its historical, geographical and political context, I argue that the background to the strife was most likely the activity of ‘demagogues’ in the courts of democratic Telos. Furthermore, we should view the terms of the reconciliation against the backdrop of issues of community service, publicity and memorialization, all contested political topics in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods. The dossier shows that the kinds of ‘high politics’ and stasis that affected major poleis could be found also in the small cities of the Greek world, with important local variations. The document sits at a historical crossroads in terms both of judicial practices (including the use of foreign judges) and of constitutional forms (democracy and oligarchy).