This article attempts to summarise the results (1) of those excavations carried out in Greek lands in 1924 of which no report was available in time for my account printed in the last volume of the Journal, and (2) of the excavations of 1925 of which reports had come to hand before the end of September. This system will be followed in the accounts which I hope to contribute annually henceforward.

American School

The varied activities of the American School included excavations at the sites of Corinth, the Argive Heraeum, and Eutresis in Boeotia. At Nemea and Phlius, the opening campaigns at which sites were described in my report of a year ago, no further work was done in the summer of 1925. At Corinth, thanks to a generous subsidy by, and the personal enterprise of, Professor T. L. Shear, substantial progress was made with the Herculean task of clearing the theatre, where, on the south side of the orchestra, the depth of the deposit of earth proved to be 12 metres; before the season closed, over 5000 tons of debris had been removed to a dump a quarter of a mile away. In the west of the cavea the seats proved to be all destroyed, but a remarkable discovery was made, in the form of a wall, originally ca. 2·80 metres high, surrounding the orchestra. This where cleared was preserved to a height of 1·70 m., and was painted in fresco with scenes of life-sized figures engaged in combat with lions. One combatant, in action with a lion which charges him from the left, is clad in a long purple under-garment, with a white over-garment fastened at the knee; another wears a short garment which hangs down in front, leaving the legs bare to the hips, and white sandals; other figures, variously clad, and also fighting lions, appear in other scenes.

In 1903 the Russian Archaeological Commission purchased a hydria from a dealer at Olbia which is now in the collection of ancient vases in the Hermitage (Fig. 1). Being considered by some authorities a forgery, the vase was not published in the Report of the Commission. I can assert that there is no doubt as to the authenticity of the vase. Apart from small injuries there are no important parts broken off or restored. The shape, but for some slight variations, is that of a typical late archaic hydria; sharp divisions are avoided, the shoulder being connected with the body by a soft curve and the same profile used for the foot. The ring above the foot is quite flat and not separated from the foot. On the lip of the vase there are two sharp projecting tongues instead of the “rotelle” of the archaic type (Fig. 2).

The handles are round and curved slightly upwards. The varnish is very bad and dull, being laid on very thin, so that the surface of the clay shows through. There are spots where the fire has turned the black varnish red. The clay is of a dull yellow colour, badly cleansed, with holes in the polished surface, evidently in consequence of small stones and pieces of glimmer which have broken away. The surface of the clay, in the panel reserved for the design, is of a reddish colour. The greater part of the foot, the stripes under the horizontal handles, the inner parts of all three handles and the outer part of the lip are left unvarnished. Judging from the quality of the clay and the special character of the varnish, the vase appears to be Etruscan work.

This Index owes its origin to the deciphering of a folio printed in Greek in Paris in 1628. As other books came under my eye, I found that in addition to the ligatures which I had analysed there were still many others, and I was so beguiled by their manifold and often obscure forms that I went far afield in my researches. It was surprising, no less than disconcerting, that with the exception of Proctor, to whom reference will presently be made, no one in modern days had occupied himself with a phase of Greek typography which, owing to its crabbedness and elusive contractions, based no doubt upon the Tironian practices of the scribes, had estranged students from the study of later Greek literature.

Beginning with the Baskerville fount of 1763, I worked backwards, overtaking the Paris fount, till, with a Froben as a complication, I was entangled in an Aldine. This led me to Proctor's erudite monograph on The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century, which was of great value, for by its means I was able to verify my own decipherings and at the same time to add to my list fresh examples from the texts and founts which he had analysed.

Apart from Proctor's work only three lists were accessible. The first was that of Aldus Manutius (1494–5), who gave clues to the more complicated sorts in one of his founts, adding that he passed over many ‘connexiones’ as they could be identified very easily. The next list was that printed at the end of the Greek Grammar of Ramus (Hanover, 1605), in which the Aldine ‘connexiones’ were included and others as well, a thoughtful proceeding if the Grammar was to be of any use, for it was printed almost entirely in ligatures.

This fragmentary vase was discovered in 1895 in a tomb at Curium by the British Museum Expedition (Turner Bequest) and was first published in the Excavations in Cyprus. Since then references to it have been made by various scholars, chiefly because of its unusual decoration with female figures inside ladder-pattern frames; these frames have been commonly interpreted as windows', hence the name ‘window-crater’.

The same tomb in which the ‘window-crater’ had been discovered was re-excavated by the expedition of the University Museum, Philadelphia, in 1939, and thirty-five new fragments of the same vase were found. These have now been restored to the main body of the crater in the British Museum, and it has been suggested that in its more complete form it should be re-examined and published with better illustration.

A detailed description of its form and fabric is given in BMC Vases and the CVA It is probably the largest of its kind (height, 43·5 cm.; diameter, 43·2 cm.); the fabric represents Mycenaean ware at its best: buff pinkish clay, dark red lustrous paint. Each panel between the two handles is decorated with a chariot scene flanked with groups of female figures.

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).

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.

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.

The fabric of the group of sherds examined by me was certainly indigenous and, in spite of the strong Minoan influence visible in some cases, no imported Cretan ware was traceable.

The evidences of Cretan influence, however, are unmistakable.

The large cups or bowls, of somewhat thin make, showing white rosettes on a dark ground, which are here exceptionally forthcoming, may certainly be regarded as derivatives of the egg-shell cups, with dark, metallic lustre ground and similar white rosettes, that characterise the finest M.M. IIa technique. That exquisite bowls of this class presenting decorative details that point to the Knossian Palace fabric were actually reaching the Syrian Coast by the approximate date of 1900 B.C. is now demonstrated by the fragment—the first-fruits of a still unexplored Ras Shamra tomb—kindly lent by Monsieur Claude Schaeffer and the authorities of the Louvre Museum to the Minoan Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. In the case of the Tal Atchana specimens, where the parallels belong to only one comparatively simple class of decoration and the whole fabric is of an inferior and imitative kind it is obvious that we may have to deal with a distinctly later dating. The white on dark rosettes themselves were still a common decorative motive in the later phase (b) of M.M. II which carries us down to about 1700 B.C. But the survival of this in a local style may clearly have gone down still later.

The American excavations in the Athenian Agora were resumed in February 1933, and continued till the middle of July. An account of the work up to May 1 has been published in AJA. 1933, 305 ff. The work is being carried on in four sectors (see AJA. pl. 35)

The wells and cisterns cleared during the latter part of the summer of 1932 are described by Homer Thompson in AJA. 1933, 289 ff. These provide clear evidence of the existence of houses where all traces of walls and foundations have disappeared, notably along the north foot of the Areopagus and north-east of the Theseum, and their contents shew that the inhabitation of this area goes back at least to the early sixth century B.C. In some cases (wells closed in the late sixth and early fifth centuries) the pottery found in the wells seems to indicate the proximity of potters' workshops or warehouses, and pots have been found which had contained miltos. This is further proved for the fourth century by the presence of misfired vase-fragments and lamps. Several pieces of archaic pottery found in these wells are illustrated in the article mentioned above— notably a large one-piece amphora of the earliest class, decorated with a massive sphinx (loc. cit. fig. 3), and from the same shaft an exquisite plastic vase (loc. cit. fig. 5, here Pl XVI)—Ionian, or Ionising, work of about 540 B.C., and without question one of the finest of all existing plastic vases.

Thucydides' and Herodotus' comments on a portentous (and unique) Delian earthquake contain the same phrase, but date the event almost 60 years apart and mutually rule out each other's datings. Two additional problems in these passages – geology demonstrates that Delos has never in fact had an earthquake of any significance and κινεῖν is not the word for an earthquake – point to an explanation for the historians' treatment. They are based on the Delphic oracle quoted by Herodotus which promised to ‘move unmoved Delos’, a paradox based on the island's mythical transition from floating to fixed (Pindar), but liable to confusion with its equally well-known aseismicity. Normally κινεῖν τὰ ἀκίνητα is used of interfering with religious sites; but the oracle's prediction was interpreted as an earthquake, that was assumed to have occurred in due course (although it had not). Both historians accepted the interpretation, but followed different datings since they invested it with different symbolism, Herodotus of the evils of the Persian and subsequent Greek wars, Thucydides of excited anticipation on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, since for him κίνησις meant ‘mobilization’ (1.1).

Among the sepulchral epigrams comprising Book 7 of the Palatine Anthology, these two by Meleager occur in a sequence (189–216) having to do with animals, mainly birds or insects, that appears to derive from Meleager's Garland. The prose translation above will reveal that the interpretation to be proposed differs considerably from previous readings of either poem, specifically in that it runs counter to the following common beliefs or assumptions. 1. That the poems, while having many features in common, are to be read as two discrete works with no integral connection between them. 2. That the two epigrams, being non-sepulchral, are included in this part of the Anthology, perhaps erroneously and only by reason of their affinities with those insect poems that are sepulchral. 3. That the narrator of each epigram is a human being; the poet himself or some persona such as a ‘love-sick swain’. 4. That the addressee of each epigram is a pet, probably kept in a cage as such insects sometimes were, and so the vegetable mentioned in v. 7 of 195 is to be presented, along with the dew drops, by the human master. 5. That the phrase στóμασι σχιʒομένας in the final verse of 195 is difficult or impossible. (All attempts towards an explanation or emendation of the text are premised on points 2 and 3 above.) 6. That the word άντῳδόν in v. 5 of 196 indicates a response to a musical performance by Pan.