Last June I received from Mr. Newton a set of squeezes from inscriptions which had been sent him by Mr. Petrides, in order that if unpublished they might appear in the Journal of Hellenic Studies. As to their provenance, Mr. Petrides has kindly supplied me with the following information. They were sent to him from the island of Symi, and as far as he can understand they must have been found either on the island of Cos or on the mainland of Asia Minor, opposite to these islands. From the inscriptions themselves it will appear that this view is in part at least correct; for the inscriptions numbered 6, 8, 9 and 10 are certainly from Cos. 1, 3, and perhaps 4, however, seem to belong to Rhodes: the rest bear no internal indication such as to enable us to assign their origin to any particular place. It is clear then, that the evidence as to provenance is not definite enough to override any internal evidence that may be inconsistent with it; but we are probably justified in assuming that the inscriptions come from the islands in the south-east portion of the Aegaean, or the neighbouring coast of Asia Minor. I am indebted to Mr. Newton for valuable help, especially in conjecturing the purport and locality of the Rhodian inscriptions.

Among the books of the Apocrypha two portions stand out in strong relief as bearing the marks of genius. One is the Book of Wisdom, with its sustained moral fervour and luxuriant yet devout fancy; the other, the noble tragedy of the Book of Judith. The latter work has the further interest of presenting a curious literary problem. Is ‘Judith’ in any sense history, or even based on history, or is it mere romance ? Certainly the writer takes great liberties with facts. Time and place have to yield to the requirements of the narrative. Famous names are mingled together in extraordinary combinations. Nebuchadnezzar reigns over the Assyrians at Nineveh; and he reigns soon after the Jewish return from Captivity. An Arphaxad rules at Ecbatane as king of the Medes. An unknown high priest Joachim is supreme at Jerusalem. The book opens moreover with a catalogue of nations brought under this Nebuchadnezzar's sway; and the list teems with contradictions of history and even of probability.

Learned opinion since the time of Grotius has been almost unanimous in pronouncing the book to be an historical romance, of the time of the Maccabees or later, wherein the writer sets forth in parable the hopes and fears of his nation, and stirs up his countrymen to heroic resistance to the oppressor.

Amongst the numerous Gorgon heads, dispersed through the different rooms of the British Museum, and unknown to me when I wrote my essay on the history of this type, there are several which deserve to be published and thus made known more generally to archaeologists than they could be by exhibition even in a Museum so justly celebrated and so well arranged. It is not the object, however, of this paper to give a supplement to the cumbrous catalogue I have published, as the interest in many an instance would be but small, and to most readers of this Journal none whatever; but I will try to give so much of the results of my researches as may exhibit the value of those monuments to which I wish to draw attention as these in some cases fill up a gap, and in others raise points of interest and even sometimes seem to confirm some of my suggestions.

Generally speaking the evidence drawn from the classic authors as to the types of Gorgon they were in the habit of seeing is confirmed by the monuments, but on the whole these are more fitted to explain the authors than the authors to explain them.

Among the Xanthian monuments brought over from Lycia under the direction of Sir Charles Fellows, in 1844, there is a square block of white marble, the only printed notice of which to my knowledge is to be found in the old ‘Synopsis of the contents of the British Museum,’ Lycian Saloon, no. 173: ‘Monument found in a Roman bath; on one side are Plutus and Tyche standing, full face; on the other is a Persian shooting arrows in a cave, in which are an ox, a stork, a dog, a boar, a lizard, grasshopper, and fox.’ (Comp. Vaux, Handbook, p. 162.) As to the locality, my friend George Scharf, Fellows' companion in that journey, informs me from his diary that the monument was disinterred on the Roman acropolis, in January 1844. The building, situated at the foot of a polygonal wall, the chief ornament of which was a mosaic pavement including a standing figure of Leda with the swan beside her, was ‘a house, palace, or bath.’ I am of opinion that the contents of the reliefs are not particularly favourable to the supposition of a bath.

The marble which is now placed in the new Lycian Room, no. 103, merits a greater interest than it seems to have met with hitherto. Plate LVIII. shows the two faces; the back view is on a slightly smaller scale than the front. Broken at the foot, the remainder has a height of 0·74 m. at the front, and of 0·81 at the back; width of each face 0·79. The sides as well as the top being but roughly cut, it is evident that the block was originally let into a wall or some other architectural construction.

The object of the following pages, the substance of which was read before the Cambridge Branch of the Hellenic Society in 1883, is to examine into the true nature of the land-system of the Greeks of the Homeric age by means of the evidence contained in the poems themselves.

On à priori grounds we might have expected, or at least should not be surprised, to find in the Iliad and Odyssey some traces of that primitive system known as the ‘Open-Field’ or ‘Common-Field’ system of agriculture, which the researches of recent years have proved to have once prevailed over a great part of the earth, and of which many survivals still exist.

In the earlier number of the present volume (p. 143 sqq.) I gave some account of a MS. collection of inscriptions made by C. R. Cockerell in 1810–1814, and also gave copies of all those from the mainland of Greece, which appeared to be hitherto unpublished. The present paper will cover the rest of that collection, which is mostly derived from Asia Minor.

I add a complete list of the remaining contents of Cockerellľs volumes. Those unpublished are reproduced below; in the case of all those previously edited, a collation with the published copy has been made and kept, and I should be very glad to show these collations to any one interested in the matter.

The Attic Tragedians—for the use seems to have extant examples there only—several times apply the word σȗριγξ to the wheel of a chariot or some part of it. The passages are these:—

Aesch. Supp. 181:

Id. Sept. 205:

Soph. Electra, 720:

Eur. Hipp. 1234:

Id. Iph. A. 227:

The current explanation of the word in this application is given by Liddell and Scott thus: ‘σȗριγξ, II., anything like a pipe; 1. a spear-case = δορατοθήκη, II. 19, 387. 2. the box or hole in the nave of a wheel,’ with references selected from the above.

I have already had occasion (Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. V. p. 220) to speak of a collection of antiquities discovered by Mr. Biliotti in his excavations in Rhodes. These objects it will be remembered were transmitted to England with a diary of the excavations in which were noted the contents of each tomb as it was found; and a running number was pencilled upon every object as a reference to the tomb which had contained it. Unfortunately, these numbers have in many cases been lost, owing to the wear and tear of packing, breakage and cleaning; and even in other cases where these are preserved, it has been difficult sometimes to identify the object in its cleaned state with Mr. Biliotti's description on the spot: so that the most that can be done is to deduce general inferences only. I propose in the next volume of this Journal to publish the more interesting portions of the Diary, with references, wherever it has been possible to identify the objects, to Messrs. Sotheby's Sale Catalogue, in compiling which I have classed all the objects according to their style and have given a description of the more important. The results are I think likely to prove valuable for the study of Rhodian vase-fabrics.

In the last number of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (VI. No. 1) Mr. Wroth tries to prove that the torso of a Roman Emperor from Cyrene in the Graeco-Roman Gallery at the British Museum originally belonged to a statue of Hadrian. This torso is described in my Guide to the Graeco-Roman Sculptures, 1877, Pt. I. p. 21, No. 46, as the ‘Torso of a Roman Emperor’; it was found at Cyrene in a building which Messrs. Smith and Porcher in their History of Discoveries, p. 76, conjecture to have been the palace of a Roman governor, but which in the ‘List of Sculptures,’ which forms one of the Appendices of the same work, p. 104, may, it is suggested, have been an Augusteum, inasmuch as two busts and one head of emperors of the Antonine period were found in the same building.

Mr. Wroth supposes that the torso in question is that of Hadrian, because ‘when complete it constituted a substantial replica’ of a statue found at Hierapytna in Crete, which is published in the Gazette Archéologique for 1880 (pp. 52–55, Pl. 6), and is now in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople. But how far can the Cyrene torso be considered a replica of the Cretan statue, of which latter I have before me a photograph? I cannot agree with M. Sorlin-Dorigny, who, in publishing this figure in the Gazette Archéologique, states that it is worthy to rank among the finest Iconic statues of the Roman Empire.

In the last number of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (p. 175) Mr. John B. Bury advocates the emended reading of the corrupt verse 1172 of the Agamemnon,

ἐγὼ δὲ θϵρμὸν οὖς τάχ' ἐν πέδῳ βαλῶ.

He does not exactly explain this (in my opinion it is inexplicable), but he says θϵρμῷ in 1278 seems to prove that θϵρμὸν is right in 1172. But θϵρμῷ refers to shedding the warm lifeblood, while θϵρμὸν οὖς, if I understand Mr. Bury aright, means an inspired or prophetic ear—‘an ear that used to listen to the utterances of the victims.’ Between the literal and the figurative senses there is no resemblance at all.