Thanks are due to all those who have contributed towards this summary—in particular to Dr. Marinatos and other officials of the Greek Archaeological Department, and to various members of the American, French, German and Italian Schools of Archaeology at Athens. The material was collected by the Director of the British School, but other duties prevented him from writing it up.

The year was one of exceptional achievement, and held promise of more to come. The palace of Nestor at Pylos, the treasure at Delphi, the further finds at Olympia, Dendra and Mycenae, the ashlar beehive tomb at Isopata, the Mycenaean tomb on the slope of the Areopagos, and the exploration of Thermopylae are all discoveries of unusual interest and importance, and the further development of some of them would, in normal times, have been eagerly awaited.

The excavations were directed mainly to four points: the ruins of the Greek temple on the summit and a large Mycenaean house on the east side of the acropolis, an area outside the Lion Gate, and the Treasury of Atreus.

The foundations of the Greek temple were cleared, surveyed, and studied in detail. As they survive to-day they are certainly of the Hellenistic period, and it is clear that neither the Hellenistic sanctuary, nor any earlier temple that preceded it, had a peristyle. Blocks from earlier structures had been built into the foundations, and all round a great variety of tiles from early archaic to Hellenistic times was found. Pottery found below the surface of the northern terrace of the temple area shows that a sanctuary had existed throughout ‘Geometric’ times, and the tiles and architectural fragments indicate that it was succeeded by an early archaic shrine. The temple, with the massive substructures that supported it on the north, lies south and north, and it is possible that it owes this abnormal orientation to the fact that it overlies the shrine of the Mycenaean palace, which faced south. It now seems that the early archaic sculpture in relief previously found did not belong to a temple, but, since it was all found in the southern part of the temple area, may have belonged to some structure, perhaps an altar, which stood before the south front of the sanctuary.

In my previous report (JHS, 1938, p. 247) I spoke of the work being carried on at Syracuse to bring to light the remains of the temple of Apollo. The east, north, and west sides had been freed by then, whilst the southern side was still hidden under seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, so that it had never been possible to dig trial trenches through their foundations to ascertain if any part of the temple was preserved there. The demolition of the houses and the excavation under the modern ground level beginning from the south-west angle have fully satisfied our hopes. Five columns of the southern flank of the peristasis have appeared, preserved to a height of over 2 metres, with the stylobate beneath them (Fig. 1): only the angle column had been destroyed during the building of the walls of the Spanish barracks. The cella is equally well preserved, and a third of its total length has already been liberated, although the work is in temporary suspense owing to unsettled disputes with the owners of the houses. The southern flank of the archaic Syracusan temple appears to be in much better condition than the others.

At the outset of the parallel lives of Alexander and Caesar, Plutarch warns his readers that what he offers them is biography, not history, and that consequently he will attend more to details which reveal character than to the great events. These he will either treat summarily or even omit entirely. Both the plan and the matter of the Life of Alexander are in harmony with this preface. The first ten chapters, which bring the story down to Alexander's accession, teem with anecdote and characterisation; then, after a rapid sketch of the wars in Illyria and Greece, the main narrative begins in ch. 15, with the crossing of the Hellespont. From thence to the end the biography is a historical sketch with digressions at intervals to illustrate various sides of Alexander's character. Thus the appointment of Aristotle as tutor to Alexander is followed by a disquisition on his attitude to learning and philosophy in general (7–8); the treatment of the captive women at Issus provokes a discussion (21, 5–23) on Alexander's continence, and subsequently on his temperance and habits of life. The journey to Siwah is followed by a general discussion of Alexander's views on his own deification (28), while the longest of such digressions, occasioned by the burning of the palace at Persepolis, deals with Alexander's generosity and his attention and loyalty to friends (39–42, 4). The common characteristics of these digressions are their disregard of chronology, their anecdotic content, and the prominence of the Letters of Alexander among the sources named in them; indeed, the only other sources appearing by name are Onesicritus (8, 2), Aristobulus (21, 9) and the official diaries (23, 4), each once.

In the following pages I summarise briefly the work published in the past two years relative to Greek inscriptions, following the same system as hitherto; I mark with an asterisk all books or articles which I have not personally consulted. Once again I tender my warmest thanks to those scholars who have lightened my task by sending me copies of their works.

Death has claimed in the period under review a number of men who have rendered notable service to epigraphical studies, among them A. Brueckner, R. Cagnat, J. Chamonard, P. Dareste, C. C. Edgar, P. Graindor, E. Loewy, P. Perdrizet and S. Ronzevalle; but some of the veterans continue in full vigour, such as F. Cumont, who attained his doctoral jubilee in 1937, and J. Zingerle, who celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1938. Mention must also be made of the successful International Epigraphical Congress, held at Amsterdam in August and September, 1938, with W. Vollgraff as President and J. J. E. Hondius as Secretary.

I am indebted to Sir Leonard Woolley for his invitation to publish the red-figured vases found in his excavations at Al Mina; to Mr. Martin Robertson, who has helped me in many ways, and was the first to notice many of the joins; to Mr. C. O. Waterhouse for the drawings and photographs. I give only a selection of the finds, but have omitted, I think, little of importance. The red-figure is all Attic.

The black-figure from Al Mina is scanty, poor, and no older than the earliest red-figure sherds found there, which are from eye-cups:—

1. Three fragments of an eye-cup. The largest measures 0·041 m. across. A, part of the left-hand eye; shank and heel of the figure, cutting across the tear-gland. B, part of the left-hand eye and of the ground-line. The fragment not figured gives another bit of eye. Not one of the very earliest eye-cups: about 525.

2. There is no saying whether a third fragment of an eye-cup belongs to the last or not: the cup was bilingual, and part of the b.f. interior remains, a centaur with a stone in his right hand: greatest breadth 0·060 m.

Red-figure does not become plentiful at Al Mina until well on in the third quarter of the fifth century. In the fourth century the import increases. There is little archaic red-figure, and most of what there is belongs to the end of the period.

It has been assumed for many years that the Strategi, though elected earlier in the year, did not enter office till the first day of Hecatombaeon (July or August), at the same time as the other yearly magistrates. There was considerable controversy about this in the nineteenth century, but the question was thought to be finally settled then, and it may seem presumptuous to reopen it so long after. But two important discoveries have been made since the ‘orthodox’ theory was generally adopted; and together they involve certain difficulties, which suggest that the whole question should be reconsidered. These are, first, the recovery of the Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία, which fixes the date of the election in the Seventh Prytany (44 § 4); and, second, Merritt's work on the Attic Calendar, which supersedes Keil's system of chronology, and fixes the beginning of the Seventh Prytany in the second week of February.

Both these authorities were unknown to Beloch, whose arguments in favour of the ‘orthodox’ view (Attische Politik seit Perikles) have been generally accepted as the last word on the subject. Beloch's name deservedly carries weight, but his conclusions have perhaps been adopted over-readily by many who have, not studied the evidence on which they are based. It will suffice here to say that most of his arguments are devoted to showing that the election took place in April—a date now disproved by the Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία—while his arguments with regard to the time of entering on office are slight and unconvincing.

Conplura enim in finitimis insulis simulacra postea fecere, sicut in Delo, quibus subiecerunt carmen, non vitibus tantum censeri Chion, sed et operibus Archermi filiorum. So Pliny of Bupalus and Athenis (HN 36, 12). It may be worth trying to reconstruct the Greek epigram read by Pliny or rather his authority.

We could do with an epithet for XIoϛ in the pentameter, an unessential word that would be omitted by Pliny in his prose version. The regular epithet for Chios is παιπαλόεσσα:—

(Od. 3, 170.) (H. Hymn. Ap. 172).

That gives the pentameter.

In the hexameter we need an equivalent for vitibus. άμπέλοις will not scan, and the diminutive άμπελιοις is not in tone; σιαφυλῆισι would be uvis or racemis, not vitibus. οἱνάνθαι or οἱνάνθης might do, but Prof. D. S. Robertson suggests oïνηισι and I am sure this is right. So ούκ οϊνηισι μόνον. Mοῦνον, however, is the Ionic form, not ndvov. But we do not know that the epigram was composed by an Ionian. Simoriides, an Ionian of Ceos, uses μόνος; in his skolion for Skopas (Dieh1 4, 7, protected by the metre), but I do not press this, and if anyone objects to μόνον, let him read οῦκ οοἰνηισ᾿ οἰον.

Now we need a verb. I cannot think of a word that is an exact equivalent of the censeri, and at the same time has the right scansion and construction. Censeri in the sense of ‘ to be famed for,’ ‘ noted for,’ is a favourite verb in Silver Latin, as may be seen from the Thesaurus, and I take it here to be a matter-of-fact translation of some poetic expression, such as κλέοςᾶρνυται, suggested to me by Mr. A. S. F. Gow.

Of the four cups signed by the painter Sakonides (ABS pp. 16–17 note 3; JHS 52 p. 201; Rumpf, Sakonides) two—those in Munich and Berlin—are lip-cups decorated on each half of the exterior with a female head in outline—‘ head-cups ’ (JHS 52 pp. 174–5) or ‘ little mistress cups ’ (AJA 1927 p. 346). Other head-cups, unsigned, are in the same style and must be by the same hand (ABS loc. cit. and JHS 52 p. 201). A cup in Sydney is also by Sakonides. It is described by Louisa Macdonald in the Catalogue of Greek and Etruscan Vases in the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney (Sydney, 1898: no. 39), and I owe a photograph, and permission to publish it, to the kindness of Prof. J. Enoch Powell (Fig. I). It is specially close to the unsigned side of the Munich cup (Rumpf Sakonides pl. 28, d) and to cups in London (B 402 : CV He pl. 12, 10) and Orvieto (291: phot. Armoni, whence Rumpf pl. 28, b). One of the particulars it shares with them is the small reserved space right in the middle of the lower termination of the peplos: it represents the bare arm, as may be seen from the London cup B 401 (CV He pl. 14, 9), but seems strangely misplaced. The inscription on the Sydney cup, +ΑΙΡΕΚΑΙΓΙΕΙΤΕΔΙ, recurs on the signed cup in Munich, as well as on contemporary cups in Cambridge and the Vatican (see Raccolta Guglielmi p. 54).

The number of Melian reliefs has slightly increased in the last few years.

On 5–6th July, 1938, Messrs. Sotheby sold a piece—it is No. 184 in the Sale Catalogue—of which little is known. J. D. Beazley, who drew my attention to it, tells me that most of it was modern plaster: only a small part was antique, it showed something of a draped female figure on an animal's back, Helle or a Nereid.

A fragment of a winged Artemis, figured in Melische Reliefs, p. 26, fig. 3, after a good drawing by Schoene, was rediscovered in one of the drawers of the Athenian National Museum by Mrs. Papaspyridi-Karousou, and is figured in BCH 61, 1937, p. 354, fig. 1.

The dancer (no. 42), the whereabouts of which were unknown to me in 1931, is now, as Mr. Chr. Karousos kindly informs me, in the Nomikos collection in Thera.

Of Melian reliefs—in a wider sense (see Melische Reliefs, p. 89 sq.)—I mention a cock, a Sphinx and a Gorgo, published by Mrs. Papaspyridi-Karousou in Arch. Deltion 1934/35, p. 30, fig. 15; they were found together in an Argive tomb which is dated by its other contents to the second quarter of the fifth century roughly—a welcome date for these conservative works.

It was inevitable that somebody should suggest a Koine Eirene in the year 346 B.C. True, no ancient document or author records one. But these two words were much in the mouths of Greek statesmen in the 4th century, and much valuable work has been done on the subject in recent years. Indeed it is an interesting comment on the history of our own times that it has been reserved for the present generation of historical writers to reconstruct and understand the chapter in Greek experience which these words represent. It is probably true to say that few Greeks in the 5th century (or even earlier) regarded war as anything but a bad thing; but on the Greeks of the 4th century the greatest war of their history had left its mark without leaving an immunity from further visitations of the same disease, and as a result responsible statesmen (and not merely ordinary men and women) were now agreed that war was a very bad thing, to be preferred, in fact, only to a worse thing still, namely (for small states) to loss of autonomy, and (for the great states) to a fatal loss of prestige. The visible outcome of these feelings was a new kind of peace, Koine Eirene.

Exact records of the purchasing of the Greek vases in the Winchester College Museum are not available, but the bulk of the collection was bought in Athens with a part of the sum subscribed for the Memorial Building in 1897. That the quincentenary memorial, failing a new chapel, should take the form of a museum, was in large measure the idea and wish of the late Dr. Fearon, then headmaster, and the purchase of antiquities was further facilitated by his private generosity. Since then there have been a few additional presentations, but the vases originally acquired form the main part of the collection.

Among the black-figured pieces are three of particular merit: a skyphos and an eye-cup by the Theseus painter, and a second eye-cup of similar style. I thought this cup to be also by the Theseus painter. While differing in some respects from the other cup, it is very similar in shape and in scheme and detail of decoration to the only other cup attributed to this painter's hand, the one in Copenhagen with Hephaestos riding a horse. Prof. Beazley has, however, been kind enough to examine my photographs, and does not endorse my attribution.

The two pieces by the Theseus painter are included in Miss Haspels’ list, p. 251 no. 36, p. 252 no. 76. The skyphos had been previously recognised by Alan Blakeway as belonging to Mingazzini's white Heron Group, and the one sound painter that Prof. Beazley has differentiated from his hack colleagues in this workshop is now established by Miss Haspels as the Theseus Painter.

In the seventh speech of Isaeus (§27) there occurs one of the few references to the Pythais, the occasional sacred pilgrimage from Athens to Delphi. This allusion used to be misinterpreted as a reference to the Pythian games, and was used to date the speech. Elsewhere (§38) the same speaker alludes to the system of trierarchies organised in symmories, and as this was established by the law of Periander, dateable to 357–6 B.C., it is clear that the speech was delivered after that date. Hence it was taken that the Pythian games intended were those of 354 B.C., as it seemed unlikely that Isaeus' speech was written as late as the subsequent festivals of 350 B.C. or thereafter.

In 1918 Boethius (Die Pythais, pp. 19 ff.) showed conclusively that the reference was not to the celebration of the Pythian games, but to the special form of sacred pilgrimage known as the Pythais. In the fourth century B.C. this procession used to be dispatched from Athens in response to certain omens of lightning-flashes which were looked for on certain days during the three summer months. The priestly observers were stationed at the precinct of Zeus Asteropaeus near the Pythion, and watched in the direction of Harma on Mount Parnes. Only if the proper omen was reported, was the Pythais prepared and sent off. But the irregularity and infrequency of the manifestation had become proverbial.

There is nothing to answer in Rizzo's amusing pamphlet, whatever its value as a document of taste. I will therefore limit myself to correcting the errors of fact which it contains, or at least those of them that have any bearing on the matters at issue, and to remarking that the points of my original argument in the last number of this Journal, in so far as they are mentioned at all, remain unshaken after the thirty-five-page torrent of sound and fury has passed.

I did not, of course, object to the use of plaster casts in Prassitele, but of plaster restorations; and not irrelevantly, since the improvements on Greek art in Saggi Preliminari are of a piece with them, as is the specimen of Latin verse in the latest pamphlet. Evidently false quantities matter no more than false noses.

The statement attributed to me in Saggi Preliminari that a certain class of Syracusan coin first appeared in 485 B.C. is repeated here. But where is this statement? What I said was that the earliest of the class was about 500, the latest about 485. Comment is unnecessary on the method, already familiar, that will now take one of the earliest coins (die-linked with one which I actually described as the earliest), place it beside a coin of 478 B.C., and ask if it is conceivable that only seven years separate the two. It is the same method that silently omits one of the two coins which I said were falsely described in Saggi Preliminari, and instead illustrates the other (about which I said there might exist a slight doubt) twice.

At a time when a shortage of paper is likely to hinder scholarship, the last thing I should wish to do would be to waste space indulging in controversy with Prof. Gjerstad. Nor, owing to more pressing duties, have I much time to spend on his evasions and inaccuracies. But some comments seem desirable on his review of my book Ancient Cyprus in JHS vol. LIX p. 142.

He charges me with ignorance in failing to detect the fact that the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, under his leadership, identified fully the Neolithic Period of Cypriot archaeology. I regret that I must adhere to my original view that the Expedition made no such discovery. They hinted at the existence of such a period and found certain potsherds of a new type, but the discovery was made by M. Dikaios of the Cyprus Museum, and not by the Swedish Expedition. The sites of Erimi and Khirokhitia were found and excavated by M. Dikaios, and not by Prof. Gjerstad—or I have been seriously misinformed. The former site showed the more developed Neolithic and the Chalkolithic material, the latter the earlier stages when pottery was unknown. In all, some thirty sites of the Chalkolithic and Neolithic periods are now known in Cyprus. But Prof. Gjerstad, despite his exhaustive researches, found only three. Of these one, Petra tou Limniti, he labels as ‘ Pre-Neolithic ’ (as I pointed out in my book, p. 21). And yet he attempts to claim the discovery of Neolithic Cyprus as his own. I regret that this claim cannot be agreed to by any student. Prof. Gjerstad should resign himself to realities.

In the Museum of the Society of the Friends of the Sciences in Wilno is preserved a stone thus registered in the inventory-book: ‘No. 556/4—slab with Greek inscription bequeathed in 1910 by Jan Szwański.’ The Keeper of the Museum asked me to decipher this inscription, and as I supposed that it had not been published, he kindly granted me the permission to take a photograph of it and to publish it.

The inscription is engraved in 7 lines on a slab of smoke-discoloured marble, the dimensions of which are: height, 0·22 m.; breadth, 0·26 m.; thickness, 0·06 m.; height of letters, 0·02 m. The middle part of the front surface is so much worn and has become so smooth, as if by long attrition, that there remain no traces whatever of the deeply engraved letters. There is also a serious breakage at the right-hand margin which has carried away the last letter of l. 2 and damaged two letters of ll. 2 and 3. The lowest part of the stone is broken off in such a manner that only the top of the right-hand portion of l. 7 remains. All mutilations and gaps seem to be very ancient, and no damage of recent date is noticeable. The back has been left rough. The accompanying photograph (fig. 1) shows the actual preservation of the stone, while the following facsimile, based upon a squeeze (fig. 2), represents the legible letters and the remaining portions of the damaged letters.