While engaged recently on a careful analysis of the architectural detail of the Erechtheum, I chanced to observe certain peculiarities in connection with the north doorway which, as far as I am aware, have not been previously commented on, and which may be of sufficient importance to warrant my bringing them forward.

The date of the north doorway of the Erechtheum has been generally accepted as contemporary with that of the rest of the building, at least I have not found any published evidence which calls it in question: this of course excludes the thin inner linings which are supposed to have been added by the Christians when they turned the temple into a church. My investigations have led me to the conclusion that none of the original doorway is in situ, that the main jambs are of a period not far removed from the time of the building but not contemporary, and that the lintel, brackets and cornice are still later insertions. I shall endeavour in the following paper to state my reasons for these assumptions, and it may help us to follow them more clearly if we commence by observing the various parts which go to make up the composition of the doorway as it now stands.

The object of the following article is not to review the work achieved by the first editor of the newly recovered Ἀθηναίων πολιτεία, still less to discuss the plan adopted for its publication by the authorities of the British Museum. It would, however, be an exaggerated and perhaps a misleading reticence, if no reference were made to those preliminaries and mere points of procedure. Many sharp things have been thought and said in various quarters about the matter: but there are several sides even to these minor questions. The Museum from amid its priceless cuneiform and hieroglyphic treasures, all crying for publication, need not have regarded the mission of this small Greek argosy as marking so great an epoch. A committee, indeed, might have worked more surely, but it would have worked more slowly than our single industrious and indeed brilliant editor: had assessors been voted him, we might still be waiting the result. Now, as may be observed with satisfaction, the resources of the whole world of learning are being concentrated upon the new text, and the earlier murmurs of critical dissatisfaction are in a fair way to be lost in good-humoured collaboration for a reconstruction of the text. This work, indeed, has been carried so far already, as appears from the March number of the Classical Review, that it will not be deemed premature to raise some questions in regard to the value of the new text, viewed from the side of the historian. It is the design of the present paper to define some of the points which must be considered before the exact place of the new text among our historical sources can be determined. It is no reproach to the editor to say that he has dealt somewhat curtly with these problems in his Introduction and notes. It will require that many minds should independently be brought to bear upon the multitude of questions which present themselves in connexion with the more strictly historical criticism, or, as it was in some quarters too proudly termed of yore, ‘the higher criticism,’ before definitive results can be reached. If the present paper contribute to elucidate some of the points to be discussed in relation to the historical authority of the recovered treatise on the Athenian Constitution, it will fulfil its purpose, and not be considered a petitio principii.

At Easter-tide last year, while returning through the Peloponnesus from Olympia to Megalopolis, I passed through the picturesque mountain town of Dhimitzana and had the opportunity of paying a short visit to its Museum. This collection is attached to the Hellenic or second-grade school, the successor of a famous institution, which did much to keep alive the Greek language and literature in the darkest days of Turkish rule, and has been almost entirely formed through the archaeological learning and intelligent energy of the Archimandrite Hieronymos Bogiatsés, who has himself conducted excavations in the neighbourhood and whose interest in the antiquities of his country is as keen as it is exceptional. The Arcadian objects preserved in the Museum are of less importance; but a connection with Sparta, where many natives of Dhimitzana are resident, has attracted to it presents of Laconian antiquities from patriotic townsmen. Among these are the two supplementary Spartan stelai, those of Timokles and Aristokles, published by Milchhoefer in his ‘Antikenbericht aus Peloponnesus’ in the Athenian Mittheilungen; and the three archaic bone plaques, which are now published at Father Hieronymos' request (see Pl. XI.) are part of a similar gift. Unfortunately the details of their provenance cannot be satisfactorily ascertained, as they are not the fruit of any regular excavation but only of an accidental tomb-find. They were presented to the Museum about four years ago by Mr. John Kazákos, director of the telegraph-office at Sparta, and had been shortly before found by a Mr. Chronópoulos in a tomb in the neighbourhood, on the left bank of the Eurotas, at a spot called the ‘Bath of Helen’ (τῆς Ἑλένης τὸ λοῦτρον). This tomb, according to the report, contained also pieces of mirrors, coins, broken ornaments, and some curious cone-shaped objects of gilded metal, two of which if placed together resemble an egg and were to all appearances thus originally attached. All these objects are now at Dhimitzana, but during my short stay I had no time to examine them; the coins however need no attention, whatever their date may be, as the archaic character of the reliefs makes it almost impossible that they can be contemporary. We have before us probably older objects, which found their way into a later grave.

On travelling through Sicily in the spring of last year, I studied as carefully as my time allowed the classical remains in the museums of Palermo, Girgenti, Catania and Syracuse, and in the lack of any general catalogue of those antiquities and of any accessible information concerning them, the following notices accompanied by a few sketches from photographs I was able to take may be of slight service. I only wish to speak of the more important objects that, as far as I know, have not yet been at all or sufficiently published. Valuable as these objects are, I have been greatly surprised at the paucity of literary reference to them. The coin-collections and the architecture of the island have been carefully studied and written on: but an Englishman might seek in vain for much enlightenment in the archaeological publications of Sicily itself concerning its other antiquities. The art-journal entitled La Sicilia artistica ed archeologica refers almost entirely to mediaeval and modern paintings; and has published nothing classical except the Venus of Syracuse with two or three other statues of the goddess. Possibly the Bulletino della commissione di Antiquità e belle arti di Sicilia may have contributed much to classical archaeology, but unfortunately nothing of this publication is to be found in England except an isolated number of the year 1864 in the British Museum Library.

A few words will suffice to introduce the following report on the work of the Cyprus Exploration Fund at Salamis. It was intended to prefix a brief sketch of the history of the city, but it was found that to be of value the sketch would outgrow the limits defined by the occasion, and the present account is already too long. That history is often difficult and obscure, and I hope to handle it in another place, but the main outlines are sufficiently familiar, for which it is enough to refer the reader to the material accumulated by Engel in his monograph “Kypros,” a book which, although published half a century ago and by no means free from errors, still remains the standard authority on the subject. The site has been described by many travellers from Pococke and Drummond to the latest account by Mr. Hogarth in his ‘Devia Cypria.’ Our plans and Mr. Tubbs' narrative are a sufficient supplement to their notices.

Excavation at Salamis is no new project. General di Cesnola ‘spent large sums of money at this place on three different occasions, but with no result in any way satisfactory.’ His brother Major Alexander di Cesnola for some time kept a band of diggers at work among the tombs between the monastery of S. Barnabas and the village of Encomi. His extraordinary topographical remarks show that he had little or no personal acquaintance with the site. After the British occupation Sir Charles Newton took up the project on behalf of the British Museum, and through Mr. C. D. Cobham, the Commissioner of Larnaca, employed the well-known archaeologist M. O. Richter to conduct an excavation on the site of Salamis. Part of a Roman house, including a bath and small mosaic, was discovered, and is marked on our plan. Beyond a few remarks in the Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 1886, vol. ix. p. 204, I am not aware that any account of this excavation has been published. Herr Richter has also worked on the necropolis of Salamis, of which he has given some description in the Mittheilungen des Instituts in Athen 1881, vi. p. 191 and p. 244. Readers of this Journal will remember his account of the prehistoric ‘Tomb of S. Catherine’ in the fourth volume.

When a new field of view was opened to us some years ago by Schliemann's unearthing of Mykenae, there were no sufficient data already known to enable us to judge of the age of the civilization there presented to us. Since then the discovery of many other pre-Hellenic tombs in Greece, and the unexpected links which I have found in Egypt, afford some basis for an approximate chronology. We will therefore consider here (l) the comparisons between the objects found in the six tombs in the circle at Mykenae, and others found in Egypt, (2) the relation of these to other pre-Hellenic tombs, (3) the artistic and climatic data bearing on the Mykenaean civilization. I cannot profess these notes to be exhaustive; they are merely what occurs to a bystander who is more familiar with Egyptian archaeology; and many of the facts I am indebted to Mr. Ernest Gardner and Mr. Walter Leaf for pointing out to me, while examining the collections at Athens.

Taking the graves in the order of their numbers (as adopted in the Museum and by Furtwaengler), we find in grave I. a group of glass beads which have been greatly changed by moisture: the original colour is seen where the outer scale is broken away, it was a clear prussian blue, decomposing to white on the surface.

The district which forms the subject of the following remarks is that which we know from Strabo, as well as from numismatic evidence, to have formed the kingdom of Olba, ruled over in ancient times by a family of priest-kings, priests of Jove, dynasts of Olba, and toparchs of Lalassis and Kennatis. Having made a careful exploration of this district, and collected therein the inscriptions which are to follow, I propose to treat the subject-matter under four distinct heads, into which the ground traversed naturally divides itself:—

First, the ruins of the three great coast towns between the mouth of the Lamas gorge and the plain of Selefkeh, namely Augusta-Sebaste or Elaeussa, Corycos, and Pseudo-Corasion.

Secondly, the first plateau above the sea, studded with ruined towers and villages, and chiefly remarkable for the three great caves or depressions in the ground, one dedicated to the Corycian Jove, a second to the Olban Jove, and a third alluded to only by Pomponius Mela as Typhoneus.

There is little danger of any reader nowadays sharing the sentiments of the Pseudo-Aristotle which I have placed at the head of this paper, or of being other than grateful to Mr. Bent for the remarkable discoveries made by him in Cilicia last year. Of the inscriptions which he brought home, either in copies or in squeezes, I have already published those from Eastern Cilicia in the last number of this Journal. Those that here follow are from Cilicia Tracheia. Shortly after Mr. Bent had been through these regions, Mr. Ramsay in company with Messrs. Hogarth and Headlam passed through the upper part of the Olban district, and made an excursion down to the coast expressly to re-copy the long temple-inscription, No. 27 infra. The heat of the lowlands prevented their doing more. They have rendered me all the help they could in editing these documents; several of them are from copies made only by Mr. Ramsay, and the long list of names from the temple over the Corycian Cave is here given from the careful copy of Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Hogarth.

Since I began to prepare these inscriptions for the Journal, Mr. Ramsay's remarkable work has appeared on The Historical Geography of Asia Minor. This makes it unnecessary for me to preface these documents (as I had intended to do) with a sketch of the history of Western Cilicia.

Amongst the many interesting discoveries made in the excavations carried on chiefly during the year 1889 between the Parthenon and the citadel wall were two inscriptions which were put together by Herr Lolling and published in the Athena for 1890. These show that a temple named the Hecatompedon existed at Athens previous to the Persian invasion. It is the object of this article to show that this Hecatompedon occupied the same site as the present Parthenon.

Previous to the discovery by Dr. Dörpfeld of the site of the great archaic temple between the Erechtheum and the Parthenon, and the views which he has propounded with respect to its theoretical restoration, every archaeologist was disposed to agree with Col. Leake that an earlier Parthenon had existed—and must have supposed that the sub-basement on the south side of the Parthenon and the entablatures which are so well known to visitors to Athens, which have been built into the north wall of the Acropolis, originally belonged to each other; and I propose in the first instance to endeavour to show what a high probability there is for the correctness of this view, and afterwards to discuss the newer theory both in its bearings on the substructure of the Parthenon and on such of the extant remains as undoubtedly belonged to the archaic temple itself.

The main object of the third season's work of the Cyprus Exploration Fund was the excavation at Salamis, of which the results were published in the last number of this Journal. But, as was there mentioned, a small additional sum of money was procured to continue the previous season's work at Polis tes Chrysochou. It was especially important that the field known to us as Site T should be excavated, both because it promised to yield objects of rare beauty and interest, and because the results of the previous operations were, as was pointed out in last year's report, of little scientific value owing to the character of the evidence on which they were based, and required to be tested by further excavation on more trustworthy sites. Before leaving England, therefore, I had written to Mr. J. W. Williamson asking him to negotiate a contract, which (our departure having produced a good effect on the owner's mind) he was fortunately able to secure. To him and to Mr. Cecil Smith, who was most active in procuring the funds, the execution of the project is largely due.

It was near the end of June before work was started at Poli. H. A. Tubbs had been called home by other engagements, so that I was deprived of his cooperation for the remainder of the season. Poli is not to be commended as a summer residence. The heat in the valley is intense, fevers are more easily caught than avoided, and every drop of water fit to drink has to be brought an hour's journey on a donkey. The excavation was uneventful. The only incident which interrupted its course was an attempt by the joint-owner of one of the sites to conclude a contract on his own behalf and defraud his partners of their share of the price, a malpractice which was at once detected by the ever watchful Commissioner, and cost us a couple of days.

The high degree of interest possessed by the subject-matter of the design upon the two fragments numbered 2351 in the National Museum at Palermo, and here published for the first time, has induced me to bring them to public notice earlier than I intended, and apart from the wider subject with which they are connected by their style. I am indebted to the kindness of M. Salinas of Palermo for the drawing of the fragments which was executed there by Signor Carmelo Giarizzo. They have been noticed already on several occasions by Klein, Euphronios, pp. 53–4, by Koepp, Arch. Ztg., 1884, p. 42, note 21, and recently by Hirsch, De Animarum apud Antiquos Imaginibus, p. 10, No. 19, and are described in greater detail by Klein, Meistersignaturen, p. 113, No. 11. Klein has classed these fragments on which ἐποίησεν twice repeated is still preserved with the group of red-figured vases signed ἐποίησεν only. Certainly the master who painted them belongs to the earlier group of painters of red-figured vases, the so-called ‘Epiktetic school.’ To this point, however, further reference will be made at a later point.

Any one who investigates the mythology of Athens is confronted first and foremost by the figures of Cecrops and his daughters, Pandrosos, Herse, and Aglauros. Such shadowy personalities as Porphyrion, Kolanios, &c., are obvious interpolations from other local cults, and as such quâ Athens may be disregarded. In visiting the outlying demes Pausanias was told of other kings (P. i. 31, 5) who preceded Cecrops. Well and good for the demes, jealous of their local heroes and anxious to interpolate their names in the genealogical table of the pre-eminent Athens; but for Athens herself, and for the Athenian Apollodorus (Bibl. iii. 13, 8), it is with Cecrops the autochthon that the real live mythology of Athens begins—he is a person in art as well as in literary tradition. Above all, for our present purpose he has three famous daughters, whose personalities and activity are considerably more vital than that of their father.

In dealing with Athenian local cults (Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, p. xxxiii.), and especially on examining the ceremony of the Hersephoria, I was constantly haunted by the conviction that behind the personalities of these three sisters more was hidden than came to light on the surface. Father and daughters alike seemed to me too personal—if I may be allowed a seeming contradiction—to be mere impersonations. Cecrops we are usually told is the eponymous of the Cecropidae; his three daughters some mythologists hold are impersonations of the dew, a view I hope I have shown is unsatisfactory, if not untenable (op. cit. p. xxxiv.), or else they were incarnations of certain attributes and aspects of Athene, bearing to her much the same relation as Erectheus to Poseidon. If so, these incarnations are very vivacious, and their activity is strangely independent and even adverse to that of the goddess herself. Such solutions somehow fail to carry conviction. The subject has been so long and so ably investigated that it is with considerable deference I offer for criticism a solution I believe to be wholly novel.

An interesting contrast may be drawn between the results obtained from the study of Vitruvius in the early years of the sixteenth century and the exposition of his meaning and text by the scholars of to-day. This contrast is almost always to the advantage of the latter-day scholars. Archaeology has done everything in recent times to clear up by consideration of existing monuments a host of difficulties not dreamed of in the days of the Renaissance, and archaeologists—so far as they are agreed as to the testimony of recent discoveries—have little or nothing to learn from remote predecessors. But a serious disagreement exists among them in regard to the stage of the Greek theatre. This want of agreement is reflected in the current interpretations of a difficult passage in Vitruvius. About this very passage the scholars of the early Renaissance were agreed, and since their explanation of it differs in some material respects from any now offered, it may be of some use to us to-day.

The Florentine Leo Battista Alberti reproduced the meaning of Vitruvius, without undertaking to construe his text, then very corrupt. In 1511 was printed the text of Vitruvius which, in spite of many subsequent labours, has bravely held its own up to the present day. This text we owe to Fra Giocondo, a Franciscan friar who was equally great as an inspiring teacher, a painstaking scholar, and a daring and original architect. The condition of the text in the three first editions was lamentable, as appears in the passage describing the Greek theatre which especially concerns the present inquiry.

It was my intention to publish in the Journal of Hellenic Studies a cylix by Phintias in the Central Museum at Athens, together with the substance of a paper read at a meeting of the British Archaeological School in March of this year. Learning, however, that Dr. P. Hartwig was anxious to publish the cylix in his forthcoming Meisterschalen, I entered into correspondence with him, and by his kindness am enabled to publish in its place the well-known hydria in the British Museum (Klein, Meistersignaturen 3) and fragments of a stamnos in the possession of Dr. Friedrich Hauser, now at Stuttgart, whose kindness in furnishing me with drawings by his own hand I would gratefully acknowledge.

A.—The first vase to be discussed is the hydria in the British Museum (E 264) found at Vulci. The form is the older one with sharp divisions between neck, shoulder, and body, which is characteristic of b.f. hydriae, and disappears after the ‘severe’ period of r.f. vase-painting, shoulder and body passing into one and leaving only one field for decoration. On the inside of the lip, in front of the junction with the handle, are three round knobs suggesting pegs or nails. These are in this case painted purple, whereas usually when they appear they are varnished—cp. Petersburg 1, 337 and Berlin 1897 = Gerhard, A. V. 249, 250. The handles are left unvarnished, which is also comparatively uncommon. The main field of the vase is occupied by a scene, which if not of surpassing originality or interest, is at least unusual. Three naked ἔφηβοι, are represented in the act of carrying water from a fountain in hydriae which are of the same form as the vase itself, except that that which is carried by the second youth from the right on his shoulder is apparently of a more developed form, in which the sharp division between shoulder and body is given up. On the extreme right a stream of water issues from a lion's head of admirable execution, worthy to stand beside analogous portions of the work of Sosias and Peithinous, and a youth fills his hydria.

Mr. Schultz in his paper upon the above subject, published in the last number of the Journal of Hellenic Studies, pointed out some interesting facts which had not been hitherto noticed, and also advanced several new theories. My object in writing the following notes is to draw attention to one of the theories put forward by him and which I do not think he has proved. And I do this the more willingly as Mr. Schultz at the close of his article expressly states that he gives his theories in order to open up further discussion on the subject. The point I refer to is the contention that the present door-jambs are not contemporary with the rest of the building, and that the decorations of the original doorway were much simpler.

Towards the end of the article, classed under points of miscellaneous evidence, mention is made of some iron cramps ‘the principal use for which would have been to steady the jambs, not actually to tie them back.’ Now these cramps, which Mr. Schultz considers of such slight importance, appear to me to be the main evidence as to whether the present jambs are original or not, for if it can be proved that the cramps have been in any way altered, or if they are not fulfilling the purpose for which they were placed in the wall, then we have certain proof that the jambs are later.

A rectangular slab of marble, measuring 14⅜ in. × 12 in. × nearly 1's College, Cambridge; said to have been found in the neighbourhood of Memphis.

Dated the nineteenth year of Antoninus Pius, A.D. 157.

The letters are not all of the same size or shape, being squarer in the upper part of the inscription, 1–3, as and in the rest, especially the last three lines, approaching to the shape of written characters, as They have been coloured red, and many of them still are so.

(2) Μάλαλις, (4) Πιαθρηοῦς: I can find no trace of these places. The second, Prof. W. R. Smith suggests, may be the Place of Hathor.

(6) Iota adscript kept in this old formula, although it is omitted in (l).