Mr John Boardman's suggestion that the sickles dedicated to Artemis Orthia at Sparta were used as strigils is most enlightening, and perhaps I may be allowed to find support in it for a theory that I have advanced elsewhere, that this form of sickle is the ξυήλη of Xenophon, Anabasis iv 7.16; iv 8.25. It is true that the dedicating inscriptions never use the word ξυήλη. The sickle is only named twice, being called δρέπανον once and once δρϵπάνη. But this may be explained by the late date of all the inscriptions. Ξυήλη is only found in the two passages already cited from Xenophon, in the lexicographers (Hesychius and the Souda s-v.), who also give the Doric form ξνάλη, and in Xenophon's Cyropaedia (vi 2.32), where it means a spokeshave for smoothing the shafts of spears. It is probable that the word was obsolete even at Sparta in the Hellenistic period, and that even in Xenophon's time it was not in common use throughout Greece. Pollux (i 137) mentions the Laconian ξυΐνη in a list of weapons, including δρϵπάνη and δορνδρέπανον, and this misspelling (more probably that of a scribe writing from dictation than Pollux's own) does indicate the unfamiliarity of the word.