The periodic festival known as the Χρυσάνθινα celebrated at Sardis in the late Imperial period is known already from numerous inscriptions, noted below. This note concerns an unpublished letter of the year 1838, which contains a brief allusion to an inscription, apparently now lost, in which the festival is mentioned.

In 1838 Henry Wentworth Acland, aged at the time 23, and an undergraduate of Christ Church, visited the Troad from H.M.S. Pembroke, in which he was cruising in the eastern Mediterranean for the sake of his health, to study the topography of that region.

From August, 1894, till the middle of last year, the explorers of Pompeii were employed in excavating the house of A. Vettius, a house distinguished among its fellows by its sumptuous marble fittings and lavish decoration, and still more so by the splendid series of brilliant frescoes with which its walls are still adorned.

According to the official plan, the position of the house should be defined thus:—Regio VI., insula 12.

It lies opposite the Casa del Labirinto, close to the north-east of the Casa del Fauno, to the south of the third tower of the North Wall, counting from the Gate of Herculaneum eastwards. It possesses no tablinum, but a very fine peristyle, the Corinthian columns of which have not (as is usually the case) flutings filled for one-third of their height with stucco painted red or yellow.

Mr. W. R. Paton, who is very well acquainted with the Gulf of Cos, has been good enough to send me some impressions and copies which he recently made of inscriptions at Keramo, the site of the ancient Ceramus. So few are the documents hitherto published from this town, that I readily consented to edit these copies for the Journal, the more so because I had been led to study the history of Caria somewhat minutely in connexion with another town of this region, Iasos. It happens also that one of the very few instances where Ceramus is named, even in inscriptions, is in a decree of Ephesus, discovered by Mr. Wood and now in the British Museum, which I have recently prepared for the press. We shall have occasion to refer to it presently.

Before proceeding to examine the inscriptions, I am glad to transcribe an account of the neighbourhood of Ceramus which I begged Mr. Paton to draw up, knowing well how interesting such particulars are to less-travelled students of Greek antiquities.

Upon the discovery of any great monument of ancient art, a series of objects of minor importance which had hitherto been awaiting identification are immediately seen to connect themselves more or less closely with the newly discovered work. Whence it comes that the course of historical development of ancient art is continually being exhibited with a nearer approach to completeness. The present article is an attempt to add another minor work to the list of statues and reliefs which group themselves round the frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamon.

The plate represents a somewhat mutilated work, No. 679 in the gallery of bronzes in the Museo Kircheriano at Rome. The subject is Athene engaged in no uncertain combat with her constant antagonist the giant Enceladus. The goddess has drawn back a little from herenemy: and whilst herself protected by the shield with its gorgoneion which she carries on her left arm, she is on the point of delivering the final thrust with the weapon she holds in her right hand. Enceladus, on his part, is at the same time recoiling somewhat from Athene, and collecting all his force for a blow.

The vase of which an illustration is given on Plate IV. is one that has lately been acquired by the British Museum, and is in many ways of exceptional interest. It is a specimen of a peculiar class of local vases, which first became known through excavations made in 1888 on the site of the Kabeirion at Thebes. A full account of these excavations and their results was given by Dr. Winnefeld and other writers in the Athenische Mittheilungen for 1888, Vol. xiii. pp. 81, 412 ff.

The vase under discussion is not the only one of this kind in the Museum; two similar vases were acquired in 1889, one of which is illustrated in the Museum Catalogue of Vases (1893), p. 75. These two vases (numbered B 77—8) are skyphoi of the same shape and technique as our present one, and bear designs of a very similar character, though not of such great interest.

The remains of pottery discovered in the Kabeirion are not confined to this local class; vases and fragments covered with plain black varnish were found, and a fair number of examples of Athenian pottery or imitations of the same, mostly with red figures.

The objects which form the subject of the present paper, and which may be easily identified by the accompanying cuts, Nos. 5—8, have for some time been a puzzle to students of Mycenaean archaeology. Certain specimens exhibited in the cases of the Mycenae Room in the Polytechnic Museum at Athens are described as ‘objects of unknown use’; and although some suggestions have been thrown out in various publications of isolated examples, I do not think any satisfactory explanation of them has yet been offered. The cause of this failure seems to be the impossibility of understanding properly any such specimen, apart from the whole class to which it belongs. I will therefore begin this paper with a list of instances which, while not pretending to be exhaustive, is at least representative, and so will give some notion of the character, size, shape, and material of the objects now before us.

Perhaps an apology is due to the readers of the Journal of Hellenic Studies for venturing to call their attention to so fragmentary a vase as the one depicted in the accompanying illustrations, Figs. 1, 2; the excuse must be that the design offers certain points of interest which make one regret its mutilated state.

All that are preserved are the stem and part of the interior design, cm. 5·5 × 4·8, of a r.-f. kylix which was purchased at Orvieto and purports to have been found there. The clay is fine and well worked, the black varnish of the stem of a brilliant lustre. Of the exterior design there remains only a small section of the ring indicating the ground, and one long, slender foot.