The names given to plants in ancient and modern Greek are not only of interest in themselves but have some bearing upon a general point in the history of the meaning of words. Many of the names of plants in ancient authors can only be interpreted with a certain vagueness: of νάρκισσος we can only say that it is some sort of daffodil; κρίνον is pretty certain to be a lily of some kind; we can hardly go further. In these straits it is natural enough to enquire into the meaning of these words in Modern Greek, and here we certainly find no lack of information, but unless we scrutinise this modern evidence with some care we are apt, I think, to let it lead us too far, or even in some wrong direction. How this modern evidence ought, in my opinion, to be used is the subject of this present paper.

It has been demonstrated by F. Herrmann that the earliest issues of Larisean coinage, which are earlier than those of any other Thessalian city, are struck on the Persian standard. The Athenian tyrants of the Chersonese struck coins which conformed to the Persian as well as to the Attic system, but the adoption of the Persian standard by an independent Greek state is, so far as can be at present ascertained, an unique phenomenon. Nevertheless, though his conclusion is remarkable, the arguments of Herrmann appear to be incontestable and are accepted by numismatists. The purpose of this article is to shew that this discovery corroborates rather than conflicts with the evidence of ancient literary authorities. It is hard to reconcile only with modern interpretations of this literary evidence and with reconstructions of the period, which must accordingly be somewhat modified.

The main object of this addition to the paper published under the above title in JHS xlii. 133, is to make known a new discovery in the shape of an unanswerable argument leading to the same solution as before of the problem presented by the Greek notation. This problem is still considered to overshadow all other problems. After the conclusion of the argument the writer proposes to make a few necessary corrections in the former paper, and to lay further emphasis on certain points.

It is an unfortunate circumstance in the music of to-day that performers and composers alike, even those destined to spend their lives as devotees of opera and symphony, begin their careers with little or no acquaintance with the most important branch of musical knowledge, the theory of intonation. They have been taught to think in terms of a scale tuned by fifths (whether tempered or true makes no practical difference), and au fond their instructor is the piano tuner. This is quintal music, to borrow a term used by historians in speculation regarding primitive origins.

Tell me, Muse, of that resourceful Man who travelled far,

After he had sacked the sacred walls of Troy in war,

And looked on many towns of men, and learnt their mind, while he

In his own heart suffered many sorrows on the sea,

To save himself from death and doom and bring his comrades safely home—

Eager though he was, he could not save them; they were fools and ate

The cattle of our Lord the Sun-God; their own folly proved their fate—

Something of that story, goddess, child of Zeus, to us relate.

That, so far as the Muse is concerned, is a complete epic paragraph, the form marked by the chime, ‘Tell, Muse … goddess, child of Zeus, relate!’ The Man, his character and his adventures, his comrades and their folly, are to be the Muse's theme. And yet the pattern still awaits completion, since the Man is not yet named. The second paragraph fulfils an expectation. We are in suspense until we hear ‘godlike Odysseus’ at the end.

There can be little doubt that, as Eduard Schwartz points out, the problem of the political sympathies of Thucydides can only be properly approached if it is remembered that his history in its present form was revised and possibly rewritten after the end of the Peloponnesian War. He was living in an atmosphere of défaitisme. Many of his contemporaries tended to glorify Sparta and her institutions, and to regard Athenian imperialism as a disastrous mistake. As a man of the older generation Thucydides felt it his duty to counteract this tendency by drawing attention to the real idealism which had inspired the Machtpolitik of the Periclean age, and by pointing to the benefits which the rule of Athens had conferred on the Greek world. The Preface to Book I may be regarded as a veiled apologia for the Athenian Empire, which had secured for Greece the freedom of intercourse which the writer holds to be essential alike for economic prosperity and for cultural development. Similarly the contrasts which Thucydides draws between the Athenian and the Spartan character, and the glorification of Athens which is the main subject of the Funeral Oration are inspired by the hope that the disillusioned Greeks of the early fourth century might come to realise that the ideals of Pericles and other Athenian imperialists had been not sordid but noble, and that Greece as a whole had derived benefits from the rule of Athens.

In the spring of 1935 I was commissioned by the Trustees of the British Museum to examine the possibilities of excavation in North Syria. The object which I had in view was the discovery of any links that might exist between the civilisation of Minoan Crete and that of the Asian mainland, and to a large extent therefore the search was conditioned by the geographical nature of the country. If such connexion existed it would require trade-routes, and it was only along those that material evidence of inter-communication could be found; therefore the first requisite was a harbour as a terminus for the oversea traffic and easy communications between the harbour and the interior, i.e., communications not merely with the immediate hinterland, but also with the known cultural centres of the Near East. By the latter consideration the southern coast sites were ruled out; Palestine was never other than a poor country; South Syria was not likely to be profitable, for, in spite of its importance, Damascus is difficult of access from the sea, and from it the caravan route to Mesopotamia has to make the big detour round the north end of the Syrian desert.

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.

Miss W. Lamb has kindly asked me to publish the terracotta sarcophagus in Cambridge, which comes from Rhodes. Fig. 1 explains the system of reference to the various parts of the face of the typical Clazomenian sarophagus. Unless it is otherwise stated, figures and heads of men and animals face towards the centre of the sarcophagus.

The sarcophagi listed below consist of five found in Rhodes and presumed to be of local manufacture, and of three probably from Clazomenae which are loosely related.

This account owes much to the kind co-operation of those who at short notice supplied me with information and photographs; I would here offer my thanks to them, and also to Professor Karo, who generously placed at my disposal the typescript of his article for the Archaeologischer Anzeiger, to Mr. T. J. Dunbabin, without whose assistance it could not have been completed, and finally to Professor Myres, who has kindly read it.

Athens and Attica

A stretch of the north wall of the Acropolis was threatened with collapse by a fracture in the rock which supports it; the rock has accordingly been underpinned with solid masonry at this point, and extensive reinforcements of the same kind have been provided at other weak points. The character of the rock face has been considerably altered by this work, but a disaster has been averted; care has been taken to preserve such ancient features as the underground passage from the Aglaurion.

Broneer has followed up his investigations on the north slope of the Acropolis by an examination of the cave at the east end. In removing the top of the dump from the entrance to the cave a number of important pottery fragments were found, some of which join with the Acropolis vases. Within the cave a stele cut on the right-hand side of the entrance provides the solitary evidence of occupation in antiquity.

Polybios, in the course of a long fragment on the knowledge necessary for a general, preserved in the Codex Urbinas (IX, 17), has an account of an ineffectual attack on the town of Cynaetha in North Arcadia by Aratos during one of his early generalships. Aratos, he tells us, had made full arrangements for a simultaneous attack on the town from traitors within and Achaean troops without, and as a signal to the latter a man was to go and stand on a certain hillock dressed in a cloak. Unfortunately a sheep-owner, while looking for his shepherd, went and unwittingly stood on this very hill, whereupon the Achaeans attacked too soon and were disastrously repulsed. What was the cause of the failure asks Polybios, and answers ‘῾τὸ ποιήσαοθαι τὸν στρατηγὸν ἁπλοῦν τὸ σύνθημα, νέον ἀκμἡν ὄντα καὶ τῆς τῶν διπλῶν συνθημάτων καὶ παρασυνθημάτων ἀκριβείας ἄπειρον,᾿’ because the general was still young and ignorant of the principle of signals and counter-signals.

The incident has been inexplicably neglected: Beloch, Tarn and Ferrabino omit it entirely; Niese omits it from his article on Aratos in Pauly-Wissowa, and in his large work writes simply ‘Aratos unternahm einmal einen Versuch, sie (sc. Cynaetha) zu überrumpeln,’ vaguely indicating a date in the neighbourhood of 245–40; Pieske writing on ‘Kynaitha’ in Pauly-Wissowa, has a bare reference, and Freeman, mentioning it in a note, declares that the attack was one of the first of a series of events leading up to Cynaetha's joining the Achaean League. The words νέον ἀκμὴν ὄντα can, he adds, refer only to one of the earliest of Aratos' generalships, or possibly to some subordinate command held before he was general. In short, the incident has been almost completely ignored, and no attempt has been made to set it in its historical context. The purpose of this paper is to shew that it offers important evidence both for the date of Aratos' birth, and also for Achaean and Aetolian policy during the years 245–35.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evidence for early Greek enterprise in the Adriatic, and to ascertain, within such limits as the scanty material imposes, its nature and extent. The Greek cities of Illyria and the eastern coast of Italy were always unimportant, though not, perhaps, quite so unimportant as has often been supposed. But it may be worth while to try to discover why no literary tradition has survived and why these cities remained without influence on, though not uninfluenced by, he main current of Greek history.

I. The sources and the credibility of Greek enterprise in the Adriatic.

Alcman is the only seventh-century author whose fragments betray an interest, albeit an incidental interest, in the Adriatic. He wrote for a Spartan audience, and would write what they could understand, and his poetry was sung at festivals in which many must have joined. Spartans of the late seventh century had heard something of the tribe in the northern corner of the Adriatic and of the Illyrians on the eastern shore or farther inland. In the sixth century Greek knowledge of Adriatic geography, human and physical, began to take shape. Not only the allusions in the poems of Mimnermus of Colophon and Ibycus of Rhegion, which shew that Greek legends were thus early being attached to the coasts of the Adriatic, but the systematic works of Scylax of Caryanda and Hecataeus of Miletus are as old as the sixth century.

In a paper on Ancient Oil Mills and Presses I touched upon Heron's screw-cutter, an instrument for cutting an inside screw thread in wood, described by him in his Mechanics (iii. 21). In relation to the oil-presses, it was a mere side-issue; but since the editor of the text, L. Nix, did not seem to have understood the instrument fully, I gave my own interpretation of the text, and a reconstruction, on paper, of the instrument.

This interpretation, or rather, the reconstruction, has been called in question by Mr. E. J. Andre Kenny, who in Antiquity, 1933, 7. 249, declares, that it is ‘ technically impossible.’ If that is the case, either the text, or my interpretation of it (or both), would seem to be at fault. Quite apart from the general inadvisability of starting an argument against a review it seems clear that such a question could only be satisfactorily answered in one way: by a practical experiment.

Plate V represents a small Attic bell-krater in the collection of Mr. Edward Armytage, who has kindly permitted its publication. The subject is novel: it appears to be the arrival in Attica of Theseus, and shews in detail a close correspondence with our main literary source, the seventeenth ode of Bacchylides. The two youths on the left are the two companions of Theseus, Peirithoos and Phorbas—δύο (F)οι φῶτε μόνους ὰμαρτεῖν λέγει (l.c. line 45). They are in travelling costume, booted and cloaked, wearing ephebic fillets and bearing pairs ofspears—ξεστοὺς δὲ δύ᾿ ἐν χέρεσς᾿ ἀκοντας (1. 49, though said of Theseus himself, not of his comrades).

Among the simpler and cheaper types of pottery in common use in the fifth century B.C. and later, one of the most attractive is the black-glaze ware decorated with incised and stamped patterns. A certain quantity of this has been found in undisturbed single burials or in other contexts which provide external evidence for its dating and development, notably in Sicily and South Russia, at Rhitsona in Boeotia and more recently in the Agora at Athens. Further and still more reliable evidence is to be found in the series of vases, mainly cups, in which similar incised or stamped patterns are found combined on one and the same pot with red-figure painting. The use of incision and stamping in the interior of the cups instead of the normal painted medallion no doubt made for cheapness, and the red-figure work is never of a very high standard. Nevertheless, some of the fifth-century examples have sufficient merit to be looked at for their own sake, while the combination of the two styles gives a useful equation.