In my last Bibliography (J.H.S. xxxix. 209 ff.) I attempted to cover the three and a half years from July 1915 to December 1918 inclusive, though I was only too well aware that, under the conditions of the period of war and armistice, I could not claim completeness for my record. In the present article I deal primarily with the years 1919 and 1920, but I have inserted references to a number of books and articles which actually appeared earlier though they did not become accessible to me until the years under review. Excavation has not yet been renewed on anything like the pre-war scale and the number of Greek inscriptions published for the first time is correspondingly small, but gratifying progress has been made in many directions in the restoration of mutilated texts and the fuller interpretation and utilisation of documents already known. The reader who glances even cursorily through the following pages will, I hope, be struck, despite the compression necessitated by considerations of space, by the vitality and interest of the study to which they relate, and by the many-sided contribution it has made to the understanding of Hellenic language, literature, religion and history.

The question when, and by whom, our constellations were invented, will probably never lose its fascination, because it is never likely to find its solution. For those who have allowed themselves to be brought under its spell the name of Cleostratus has a special interest. If we could by any means learn more about the man who is said to have been in some sort the deviser of our zodiac, we might obtain a light upon the history of the celestial globe which at present seems likely to be for ever withheld, unless some Egyptian papyrus should reveal some part of the lost History of Astronomy by Eudemus.

By his careful collection—in the December number of this Journal, 1919—of all the notices that we have of Cleostratus, Dr. W. K. Fotheringham therefore deserves a gratitude which I am the more anxious to express because I cannot at all agree with the theory of Babylonian influence which he deduces from them, nor with the interpretation of Greek and Latin passages which he puts forward in support of that theory. The latter point I could willingly leave to the criticism of scholars abler than myself, whom I cannot think likely to be convinced by Dr. Fotheringham that the passages bear the sense which he has endeavoured to extract from them.

The bronze statuette reproduced for the first time on Pl I. and Fig. 1 has for many years past formed part of the national collections. The earliest date to which it has so far been traced is 1885, when it was included in the category of ‘unclassified or suspect bronzes.’ Beyond 1885 it enjoys at present the happiness of having no history; but as in that year it bore no mark of registration, the inference may be drawn that it entered the Museum with the ‘old collections,’ perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. It remained in retirement until the early years of the present century, when attention was called to its affinities with the newly discovered art of prehistoric Crete; and the publication, in 1912, of the Tylissos praying figure (Fig. 2) supplied a parallel sufficiently close to establish beyond doubt that the British Museum bronze was a work of the same school and period.

It has occurred to me more than once that there was yet some work to be done on this topic, even after the meritorious and very accurate labours of Steele, the notes and indices of a series of editors, notably Ernesti, Orelli, and Tyrrell and Purser, and the dissertations of Bolzenthal, Font, and Laurand. Of these, the editors are concerned chiefly with establishing a correct text, and explaining the meanings of the words, which last task has for the most part been satisfactorily performed (see Tyrrell and Purser, passim, also Boot's excellent edition of the Letters to Atticus). Laurand mentions the matter only incidentally, and gives a list, not very reliable, of the words used in the rhetorical works; Font's chief interest is not lexicographical, but rather an attempt to answer the question why Cicero should ever use a Greek word at all when a Latin one was available. Bolzenthal I have not been able to consult, but gather from Font's synopsis of his work, pp. 3, 28 sqq., that it is largely superseded by Steele. Steele sets out to study the whole vocabulary of the letters, including quotations, but omitting the Greek words in the other works; and his chief interest, apart from tracing the quotations to their sources, is in a grammatical analysis of the words used by Cicero and his correspondents, with a list of those words which occur only or for the first time in the letters.

In Vols. XVIII. (1898) and XXXI. (1911) of the Journal I gave some account of black-figured vases acquired by the British Museum subsequently to the appearance of Vol. II. of the Catalogue of Vases in 1893. On page 1 of the latter volume a promise was made that another paper should follow, describing red-figured vases similarly acquired; but its appearance has been delayed by the war and other circumstances, with the result that the number of vases now included amounts to nearly fifty. Seventeen other vases acquired during the period 1895–1920 are omitted here as having been already published elsewhere, but a list is appended on page 150. The total number of red-figured vases added to the collection since 1894 is thus over sixty.