A year ago I had the honour of speaking to you on the need of a History of Greek Commerce, and of proposing to you a way in which this Society might make an important contribution to that history, in the shape of a commentary on the three books of Strabo which deal with Asia Minor. That proposal, I am happy to think, has been warmly taken up by the Council; a Strabo Committee has been appointed, and has settled the main outlines of the work, which will consist of a Greek text, a translation, and a commentary laid out on broad lines. Large portions of the work have been assigned to the men who are best fitted to deal with them, and even under the shadow of the great preoccupation some progress has actually been made in putting on paper materials already in hand. The war must of necessity delay the completion of the task; in some cases it will be desirable that contributors should make special journeys to their districts, and Asia Minor is at the moment a sealed land to us. But there is much which can be dealt with already, and we can make progress not merely with spade-work, but with actual construction.

While I was staying for a few weeks in Athens during the early summer of 1912, my interest was particularly engaged by two figures (Nos. 6614, 6615) among the Acropolis bronzes in the National Museum. Though by no means equal in artistic value, both deserve to be more widely known than they have become through catalogue notices, being apparently the work of one school which, as I believe, has not yet been accurately identified. Dr. Staïs was kind enough to allow me to examine the figures closely and to photograph them, and has now courteously given me permission to publish my impressions.

When I wrote my former notes I was undecided as to the meaning of two of the sculptured fragments. No. 1215 is described in the Catalogue as ‘Fragment of sculptured pier, with portions of two figures wrestling; one is half kneeling, and his left thigh is clasped by the hand of his opponent—perhaps the contest of Herakles and Antaeus.’ (Fig. 1.)

The high relief shows that the fragment indeed belonged to a pedestal, and in re-examining it more carefully I find that a portion of the right-hand return still exists. Small as the trace is, it is enough to fix the place of the fragment in regard to the angle of the pedestal together with the vertical direction. It is plain, further, that the hand which grasps the leg is a left hand.

The uncritical excesses of those theorists, chiefly German and some English following them blindly, who discerned ‘faded gods or goddesses’ in most of the leading figures of Greek mythology, has produced a reaction which may be equally uncritical. We ought not to believe in the original divinity of an Agamemnon, an Achilles, or a Diomed. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a small group of personages, who may be called hero-gods or heroine-goddesses, whose godhead is the primary fact and whose humanity is secondary. The usual mark of these is that their legend is hieratic wholly, that they have little or no secular character, not to say ‘epic’ or ‘heroic.’ Of these the most prominent and important is Ino-Leukothea; and the interpretation of her character and personality and the problem of her origin are among the difficult tasks of the historian of Greek religion. What has been written hitherto on her cult and legend cannot be regarded as satisfying.

Of the Nicomachean Ethics many manuscripts are in existence, thirteen in Paris, ten in Florence, six at Vienna, and so on. The smaller Italian libraries have many of them a manuscript each. Thus, there is one in the biblioteca arcivescovile of Udine, one in the biblioteca Classense at Ravenna, one in the biblioteca comunale of Perugia. These manuscripts are mostly of the fifteenth century, and their number is one of the many testimonies to the enthusiasm which the Nicomachean Ethics aroused among the scholars of the Renaissance. Unfortunately the text which they give is, as a rule, bad—full of sophistications and interpolations.

In the following paper, certain reliefs are described and illustrated, which have been added in comparatively recent years to the collection of the British Museum.

(1) Votive relief of Zeus Stratios. This relief, which was acquired in the summer of 1914 from a private owner, is of exceptional interest as an addition to the Museum which contains the remains of the Mausoleum.

The relief is of white marble, and consists of a sculptured panel 35·5 cm. wide, and so far as extant, 21 cm. high. It is surmounted by a pediment, with acroterial ornaments. The whole subject measures 49 × 45 cm.

‘In 1868 it was in the court yard of a house at Piali (Tegea) in the neighbourhood of the temple of Athena Alea. It had been found on the spot with some other antiquities.’ So M. Foucart, who has recently discussed the relief at length in the Monuments Piot.

The seal impressions here described were obtained in 1906 by Mr. C. T. Currelly for the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, from a native dealer in Egypt, who stated that they had been found in a large pot at Edfu. This account of their finding is possibly correct. The impressions are on lumps of clay, which have evidently been used for sealing rolls of papyrus: in most cases the back of the clay shows the traces of the papyrus fibres, and nearly all the lumps have longitudinal holes through them, in which calcined remains of papyrus binding can sometimes be discerned. Presumably these impressions are the remains of a collection of rolls similar to those found at Elephantine, which were bound round and secured by lumps of clay placed on the binding and sealed with signets: the rolls have been burnt, and thereby the clay was baked and the sealings preserved. As regards the find spot being Edfu, this is to some extent corroborated by the internal evidence of the types, more especially those of the Egyptian class, as will be seen below.

In my recent article on the Ionian Confederacy I omitted to mention an important piece of evidence relating to the League in its most critical days. It has been shown by Prof. P. Gardner that during the Ionian Revolt a monetary convention was established among a group of insurgent cities. Several Ionian towns, whose number cannot at present be shown to have exceeded nine or ten, but may be extended by further research, issued a set of electrum coins with an identical reverse pattern on the same standard of weight. The common type would appear to have been derived from Chios; the standard of weight is that of Miletus.