House-Pits or ‘bothroi’ have been uncovered on various sites of the Early Bronze Age in Greece, notably at Korakou, Gonia, and Zygouries in the Korinthia, at Asine in the Argolis, and at Eutresis and Orchomenos in Boiotia. They vary considerably in size and shape and the explanations of their purposes advanced by archaeologists are scarcely more uniform. They have been interpreted as common or as sacrificial rubbish pits, as hearths or slow ovens or as ‘silos’ (that is, cupboards for the storage of grain or other food).

The theory that such bothroi were underground ovens has recently been championed by Dr. Mylonas, who found one in a neolithic deposit at Olynthos in Macedonia, and who gives an illuminating account of the construction of such an oven at the present day in the neighbouring village of Myriophyto, inhabited by refugees from Asia Minor. The modern oven, or ‘ταντοῦρι,’ was prepared in the following manner.

Much of our knowledge of the ceremonies of Greek mystical religion comes from the Christian Fathers, who denounced them as wicked and licentious. Their condemnations, however, carry little weight: they decried the outward and visible form without even seeking to understand the inner and spiritual meaning—a method which might have been turned by their opponents against themselves. And, although their evidence is important, it needs to be used with caution, because it cannot be taken for granted that what they tell us of the Mysteries in their own day was equally true of the days of Aeschylus or Sophocles. Here the testimony of Plato is especially valuable. It would not be conclusive in itself, because for the most part he does not speak of the Mysteries directly, but merely describes other things in language borrowed from them, and the extent of his borrowing can only be determined by reference to the direct descriptions of later authors. When, however, his testimony is compared with theirs, it is found that at all important points of contact they correspond. The evidence as a whole is consistent.

The main lines of the development of South Italian pottery from its beginnings shortly after the middle of the fifth century to the period about 380 when provincialism or local characteristics began to make themselves felt have already been laid down by the researches of Beazley, Moon, Watzinger and others, but a detailed study of the great bulk of South Italian pottery which falls after that date and its division into its several fabrics has yet to be made. Patroni blazed the trail, and Macchioro tried to map out the new territory, but his frontiers have so often been proved inaccurate or arbitrary that a new map is badly needed.

One of the most clearly defined of all the local fabrics is that attributed to Paestum. Walters was the first to recognise a style of Asteas, Patroni extended this to Paestum, and since then it has been generally accepted as rightly named. The evidence of recent finds in a necropolis at Spinazzo Sta. Venere near Paestum helps to confirm this attribution, which I am taking for granted here, though I hope to go more fully into the question later in a paper on Paestan pottery after Asteas, with which the new finds are mainly concerned.

One of the Dura parchments (Dura Perg. 23)—a sale of a slave in 180 A.D.—recently transcribed and translated by C. Bradford Welles in his preliminary report on the Dura documents of private character shews a very elaborate and unusual date. First comes the consular date and the name of the emperor, then the date according to the Seleucid era and the month, and finally the place and the municipal date: l. 4 ff. ἐν Εὐρώπῳ τῇ πρὸς ᾿Αραβίᾳ ἐπὶ ἱερέωυ Διὸς μὲν Λυσανίου τοῦ Ζηνοδότου τοῦ ῾Ηλιοδώρου ᾿Απόλλωνος δὲ Θεοδώρου τοῦ ᾿Αθηνοδότου τοῦ ᾿Αρτεμιδώρου, τῶν δὲ προγόνων ῾Ηλιοδώρου τοῦ Διοκλέους τοῦ ῾Ηλιοδώρου, βασιλέως δὲ Σελεύκου Νικ[ά] τορος Δανύμου τοῦ Σελεύκου τοῦ Δανύμου.

Dating a document, not only by consuls, the imperial year and the year according to a provincial or municipal era, but also by eponymous priests of the municipal gods was not the common practice at Dura in Roman times. We have now a rather large and representative group of various private documents found at Dura, some of them with the date completely preserved. In no one of them is mention of the eponymous priests found. The date consists of the name of the consuls, the name of the emperor or emperors, and the number of the year according to the Seleucid era. Sometimes when the emperors are themselves consuls the second step is omitted. Nor is such a dating by the priests very common in other parts of the Roman Empire. In contracts or similar documents found in Egypt in most cases the imperial date only is used.

Plate VIII and fig. 1 are from a red-figured vase in the Wisbech Museum and Literary Institution, Wisbech, Cambs. It is a skyphos, shape B, 8·45 cm. high and 11·3 broad (17·65 with handles). It was given to the Museum on October 7th, 1836, by William Peckover. Its provenance is unknown.

A narrow reserved line runs all round the vase below the pictures.

On the front is a warrior crouching to left, no doubt in ambush. He wears a Corinthian helmet with a horse-tail plume pushed back on his head, and carries a shield shewn in three-quarter view, but with the device, a facing bull's head, shewn as though the shield were seen in profile. He has a patterned garment round his waist, and holds a spear horizontally. On the other side is an archer moving to the left and shooting. He has an Eastern cap and bow, a garment round his waist and a quiver on his left thigh.

Sing, Goddess, of the Wrath of Achilles son of Peleus,

Fatal and accurséd Wrath: for on the Greeks it laid

Innumerable Griefs, and many souls of stalwart Heroes

Hurl'd headlong to the house of Death, and of their bodies made

A prey for dogs, a feast for birds; fulfilling the Design

Of Zeus:—Begin the story when the King, the son of Atreus,

First fell apart in quarrel from Achilles the divine.

δῖος is one of Homer's favourite heroic epithets. He uses it for hero after hero, when the name scans suitably. It must be part of an inherited stock-in-trade. Yet here, where the form of the paragraph gives it emphasis, the ‘faded’ epithet is vivid and significant. The music haunts us.

It haunted Homer when he made the Odyssey:— ‘Muse … the resourceful Man … his Wife … the Nymph, bright among goddesses … the gods … godlike Odysseus.’ It haunted Virgil:— ‘Arms and the Man … Fate … Juno's Wrath … the Gods … the walls of Rome,’ and Milton:— ‘Man … One Greater Man … sing, Heavenly Muse….’

The following inscriptions, one from the realm of the Attalid kings, the other from that of the Ptolemies, came to light last year. Both are city decrees issued in the second century B.C., and affinity in date, if not in matter, seems to justify their being here published together.

I. Decree from Apamea-ad-Maeandrum

Dinar. Two fragments of a marble stele excavated in 1934 near the ‘Therma’ spring (Ramsay, C.B. p. 401), soon afterwards copied, photographed and measured by W. M. Calder. At the top a plain moulding; broken at base and on both sides, no part of edges preserved; h. 0·39 m., w. 0·37 m., th. 0·08–0·10 m.; letters 0·007 to 0·0125 m.

In the last number of this Journal (liv, p. 206) Mrs. Arnold makes the interesting suggestion that the god associated with Athena Itonia at Coronea, whom I have regarded as being her predecessor and more or less vanquished rival, may have been not Hades but Ares. The evidence for regarding Ares as originally a chthonic deity is to be found in Mrs. Arnold's note, but I should like here to direct attention to a Boeotian vase in the Louvre which has some bearing on the question. It is a black-figured lekane (figs. 1–3) belonging to the last quarter of the fifth century, painted in the style prevalent in southern Boeotia at this period. Fortunately for us the painter has taken the unusual step of inscribing the names of the figures. On the outside is a combat between a mounted Ares and Athena. They do not bear the full brunt of the conflict, but are coming up to the support of henchmen who are the protagonists, on Athena's side Heracles, on the side of Ares a figure with the significant name of Gagenes. Both Athena and Ares are somewhat removed from the fray, Ares on a hill (which causes his head to disappear over the edge of the bowl and break into the meander on the rim) and Athena behind a tree indicated by a tall trunk topped by the familiar conventional palmette.

This vase was formerly in the Lambros collection; it passed thence to the National Museum at Athens, where it now is. The provenience is unknown, but in view of its obviously Corinthian manufacture, it is interesting to record that the fragments of earth which the vase still contains are of a light yellowish-white colour and very crumbly, full of small root-slivers, perhaps from vines. This rather distinctive earth would seem to point to the Corinthia, and it is a probable conjecture that the vase hails from a Corinthian grave.

The vase is 88 mm. tall by 55 mm. broad at the base. The form is unique among Corinthian plastic vases; the shape is that of a round-topped cone; a section of the periphery equal to about one-third of the circumference is flattened to form the front of the vase. On this flat side is modelled in high relief the head of an early archaic seilen, whose general characteristics will be easily gathered from the accompanying photographs. Below the neck of the seilen is a horizontal painted strip, evidently indicating some garment which he is wearing.

The story of the fragmentary head illustrated in fig. 1 is, in the words of Colonel Charles Healey, C.M.G., as follows:

24 Sussex Mansions,

London, S.W. 7.

8 July, 1935.

This fragment from the frieze on the Acropolis was given to me about the year 1890 by my father-in-law, Baron Ernst von Poellnitz. He was an officer in the Bavarian army when Prince Otto of Bavaria was placed on the throne of Greece. Baron Poellnitz' company was camped on the Acropolis with strict orders that no one should carry away any relics. On the long march back to Bavaria my father-in-law noticed one of his men obviously hampered by the weight of his knapsack, which contained this fragment. After making numerous efforts without success to return it to Athens, Baron Poellnitz retained the fragment, which he gave to me.

Colonel Healey has in turn given it to me, with this note of its origin.

The head is in low relief, facing right, with the lower part of the face broken away. The back of the marble has been knocked off, probably to lighten it. The upper side is preserved; and on it is to be seen the edge of the raised section behind. The distance from this edge to the face of the marble (the background of the head) is ·013 m.

1. For the word κόθορνος (high boot which Greek men and women used on their travels) we have no Greek etymology. Herodotus points to Lydia: after the Persian conquest the Lydian soldiers and wide Lydian clothes. Many Lydian coins of the Imperial period shew κ., whereas I am not aware of any specimen of non-Anatolian origin shewing them. We do not know of any other people wearing κ., so that we may safely take it for granted that those boots were introduced from Lydia into Greece with the word for them.

The Lydians were famous for their boots: we know yet another sort mentioned by the Greeks: the ἀσκέρα. Buckler rightly placed this word in Index IV (‘ Words possibly Lydian ’) of Sardis, VI, 2. When Croesus is called in the Delphian oracle: Λυδέ πυδαβρέ (Hdt. I, 55), it is for these luxurious boots.

The purpose of this article is somewhat ambitious. It is proposed to adduce evidence in support of the thesis, which the writer has already briefly maintained elsewhere, that the majority of the dates, earlier than the period of the Persian Wars, which pass current in our Greek history text-books, are wrong, and should be ‘scaled down’ by a certain proportion of their distance from 500 B.C. The virtue of 500 B.C. as a base-line lies simply in the fact that it falls in the middle of the generation that saw the beginnings of Greek historical prose writing in the hands of Hekataios of Miletos and others.

The genius of Herodotos, the considerable amount of contemporary information gleaned by later Greek scholars from the early elegiac, lyric and iambic poets, the vivid personalities of these poets themselves, and the systematising labours of generations of logographers and historians, ultimately reduced to order by Eratosthenes and transmitted to us by Eusebios—all these conspire to obscure from us the fact that the whole Archaic period in Greece is not an historic but a proto-historic age; an age known to us, not from contemporary historical writings, but through a synthesis of archaeology, references to historic events in a literature still exclusively poetic, references to our area in historical documents from a more mature adjacent region (such as Assyria), and genealogies and oral traditions that survived long enough to be written down later.

Two ‘ Droop cups ’ (see Ure in JHS. 52, pp. 55–71) bear the signature of Antidoros, Αυτιδοροσεποε (NdS. 1897, pp. 231–2, whence Hoppin Bf. pp. 52–3; Ure, l.c. p. 67, nos. 112–13). A third Droop cup is also signed. The British Museum fragment B600. 53, from Naucratis, published in WV. 1890–1, pl. 6, 4a and c (not ‘ 4a-c ’ as Hoppin writes, Bf. p. 209, no. 22: 4b is not from the same vase), is the foot of a cup; and of a Droop cup, for it has the distinctive features of the Droop-cup-foot (see Ure, l.c., p. 55)—black edge, and the outer part of the ‘ kick ’ black. (The latter feature is not quite clear in the reproduction: the underside of the foot is reserved, the black band is in the hollow). Moreover, the signature, Νικοσθ[ενεσεποιεσ]εν, is in the same unusual position as on the Antidoros cups, round the inner edge of the underside of the foot.

Some remarkable discoveries were made in Greece in the year ending at midsummer 1935; not all of them, by any means, from official excavations, for, as often, ‘chance finds’ produced much of the most interesting material. In the following account, much of the information as to the results of official excavations is taken from Karo's forthcoming report in the Archaeologischer Anzeiger, proofs of which, thanks to the author's generosity, I have been able to use. I would here express my thanks also to others who have provided me with information or photographs.

Athens And Attica

The fifth campaign of the American excavators in the Athenian Agora has again led to important topographical discoveries. The first results are described by Shear in AJA 1935, 173 ff.; and a general idea of the lie of the land may be obtained from the plan, loc. cit. 175, which embodies the identifications made possible last season by the discovery of the Tholos and of the Altar of the Twelve Gods.

P. M. Paciaudi was first librarian of the ducal library at Parma upon its opening in 1769, and an antiquary of some repute, having already published two books on Greek epigraphy in 1751 and 1761 respectively. As librarian he procured from the Jesuits of Milan a fifteenth-century manuscript of Thucydides, now no. 342, and on having this rebound, he inserted between the front guard-leaves and the MS. proper a quaternion of stout white paper. This, in an irreproachable hand, he filled with a dissertation of his own composition, which, after a preamble on Thucydides, gives valuable details of the previous owners of the book. He then returns to the historian, and relates a remarkable discovery once made by himself. We will let him tell the story in his own words.