In this Journal last year, in the first part of this paper, we began our discussion of Mattingly's proposal to lower the dates of several fifth-century documents: we began with the two from which he started, namely D7 and D14. These two he proposed to put in the late twenties. We and Malcolm McGregor had put them in the early forties, and after discussing what we took to be Mattingly's most formidable arguments we found no cogent reason to change these dates. We therefore did not go again in detail into their historical contexts, into the numismatic consequences of D14 or into the traces which D7 may have left in the long appendix to quota-list 8.
In this second part of our paper we shall discuss the other documents to which Mattingly has assigned more or less plausible new contexts later than those assigned hitherto. In our judgment, the early date of most is indicated by their script, particularly by the fact that most of them write sigma with three bars instead of four, so that it requires arguments of some cogency to move them much below the mid century.
For three documents, Mattingly has alleged reasons of such cogency: for D11 (Miletos); for Tod 40 = SEG x 30 (Nike priestess); for SEG x 24 (epistatai for Eleusis). All these use the three-barred sigma, and if the positive reasons which he alleges for their late date are valid, then he is entitled to refuse our sigma criterion.