The intrinsic interest of the two Cyrenaic kylikes, which I am now able to publish owing to the kindness of the authorities of the National Museum at Athens and of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, is not very great, but the desire to complete so far as is possible the list of the extant vases of this class is sufficient apology for making them known.

The following inscriptions, with the exception of No. 7, were copied during the cruise of Mr. Allison V. Armour's yacht ‘Utowana’ in the Eastern Mediterranean in the spring of 1904. The copying was done by Mr. D. G. Hogarth, of Magdalen College, Oxford, Mr. Richard Norton, Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, and myself; and in preparing the material for publication I have had the benefit of Mr. Hogarth's advice and assistance. The inscriptions Nos. 1 and 25, as well as the three stelae from Larnaca mentioned under No. 30, are now at the American School in Rome; No. 21 is in America.

Two extreme views obtain as to the numbers of this fleet. Many modern writers have unaffectedly accepted, sometimes with conviction, the 1,207 (or 1,327) triremes of Herodotus. In sharpest contrast, we have Prof. Hans Delbrück's estimate of not over 300 triremes for Xerxes' fleet at the outset, or anyhow at Artemisium. Delbrück discards all Herodotus' numbers as equally worthless, and sets out to deduce the true figure from criticism of the naval battles and of probabilities; it leads to the result that at Salamis the Persians were actually outnumbered, which is the point that really matters. Several intermediate views have also been put forward; Dr. H. Welzhofer and Prof. J. Beloch have taken the figure as 1,207 ships, not warships, Welzhofer putting the warships at something over 400; Prof. J. B. Bury and Dr. J. A. R. Munro have suggested 800 triremes at the outset; while Dr. E. Meyer gives 600–800 to start with, not all triremes, and 400–500 at Salamis, the fleet being brought up by transports, etc. to the popular figure of 1,000. Naturally, most of these figures are guesses from the probabilities of the case; but Dr. Munro has recognised the crucial fact of the four divisions of the fleet.

Of all the feudal lordships, founded in Northern Greece at the time of the Frankish Conquest, the most important and the most enduring was the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Like the Venieri and the Viari in the two islands of Cerigo and Cerigotto at the extreme south, the lords of Boudonitza were Marquesses in the literal sense of the term—wardens of the Greek Marches— and they maintained their responsible position on the outskirts of the Duchy of Athens until after the establishment of the Turks in Thessaly. Apart, too, from its historic importance, the Marquisate of Boudonitza possesses the romantic glamour which is shed over a famous classical site by the chivalry of the middle ages. What stranger accident could there have been than that which made two noble Italian families the successive guardians of the historic pass which is for ever associated with the death of Leonidas.

Once only—seven years after the battle of Leuctra—there was actual fighting within the sacred precinct, the Altis, of Olympia,—in the 104th Olympiad (364 B.C.). From time immmoreial, before and since that year, the inhabitants of Elis, as Polybius (iv. 73) phrased it 200 years later, ‘enjoyed on account of the Olympian games’ so unique and privileged a dispensation that Olympia and the whole of Elis was a Holy Land, and feared no ravages of war. The Eleans, by the same token, were ideally conceived of as living consecrated lives (ίερὸν βίον) and enjoyed immunity from battle and sudden death. In his account of the one and only battle of Olympia, Xenophon—writing after he had lived for twenty-three years within an afternoon's stroll of the Olympian Altis—alludes in passing to the θέατρον by way of explaining just where the fighting took place.

The beautiful bronze lamp, of which two views are here given, was recently acquired by Mr. T. Whitcombe Greene in Frankfort-on-Main. It is 146 mm. long, 76 mm. high, and is said to have been found in Switzerland.

The lamp is in the form of a boat, the raised bow of which contains the hole for the oil. There are two projecting nozzles on each side of the boat, pierced with holes for the insertion of wicks. Their position suggests that they are intended to represent the rowlocks. A border of small circles with centre-dots is engraved round the top margin of the lamp; five waves are incised on each side of the bow, and another wave at its point. Three pairs of engraved lines run under the boat, one pair along the line of the keel, and one on each side. Within a shallow depression at the stern end of the boat is a nude figure of the infant Heracles in a half-reclining attitude, with his right leg slightly drawn up.

It has long been recognised that the Egyptian history given by Herodotus is confused; but it is scarcely known that a single transposition will bring it into order. Before we assume that his information was wrong, we may at least consider how far it is likely that either the author or an early transcriber had made an accidental transposition of the rolls of manuscript.

From well known Egyptian history we can see that the correct order in Herodotus should be as follows:

—sect. 99, account of Egypt and Menes. Dynasty I.

124–136, the pyramid kings. Dynasty IV–VI.

100–123, 330 kings. Dynasty VI–XXV.

137- Sabacon. Dynasty XXV.

The inversion therefore is that 100–123 is interchanged with 124–136. This is the more likely as the catch words are the same.

‘Since the discovery of the ῾Αθηναίων Πολιτεία in 1890’ the learned editors of the Oxyrhynchus papyri tell us, ‘Egypt has not produced any historical papyrus at all comparable in importance to these portions of a lost Greek historian, obviously of the first rank, dealing in minute detail with the events of the Greek world in the years 396 and 395 B.C.’ Drs. Grenfell and Hunt are indeed to be congratulated first on having made so great a discovery—a piece of luck which their long and arduous labours, systematically and scientifically conducted, have so richly deserved—and secondly they are still more to be congratulated on the success with which they have pieced together and deciphered the text and illumined their interpretation with clearly written and closely argued introduction and notes. They have not contented themselves, as they well might have done, merely with arranging and deciphering the text—a work demanding the greatest patience and the most exact scholarship—but they have boldly tackled, and with great acumen, the difficult question of the authorship of the work and many historical problems raised both by the fragmentary nature of the text itself and by comparison of its statements with those of other extant authorities.

I include in this paper seven Attic inscriptions, all previously unpublished with the exception of No. 5, which was published, from an incomplete copy, by Köhler in the Corpus (I.G. ii. 89). The first three are in the Athens Epigraphical Museum, the other four in the Acropolis Museum. The latter will be republished shortly in the catalogue of the Acropolis Museum, at present being undertaken by the British School at Athens, but owing to limitations of space I am unable to discuss in its pages the points raised by them with the fulness that is desirable. Nos. 2 and 3 owe their appearance here to their connexion with No. 4, which is a fragment of one of the records of the ‘traditiones rerum sacrarum’ of Athena and the other deities: for, while studying the other inscriptions of this class in the Epigraphical Museum, I found Nos. 2 and 3, which also belong to it, among the miscellaneous unpublished fragments, and therefore include them together here. The discovery of No. 1 was even more accidental, but the fact, which one could not fail to recognize at once, that it was a fragment of the famous ‘Quota-lists’ is enough to justify its publication here. I wish to acknowledge the kindness of Dr. Kavvadias, Ephor-general of Antiquities, and Mr. Leonardos, Ephor of the Epigraphical Museum, to whom I am indebted for permission to publish these inscriptions, of Dr. Anton von Premerstein of the Austrian Archaeological Institute for his ready help and advice, and of Mr. M. N. Tod for reading the proofs of this article and making several important corrections.

The Ashmolean Museum has recently acquired three. Attic vases with subjects of uncommon interest. The first (Pl. XXX.) is a b.-f. pelike with framed pictures. Each picture is bounded by a band of ordinary lotus-bud-pattern above, at the sides by net-pattern, and below by a clay line. A red band runs right round the vase immediately below the pictures, and a thinner red line, as is usual in panel-amphorae, surrounds the neck at the level of the handles. Red is also used for the beards and wreaths on side A, and on B for the beards, the front hair of 1 and 2, and patch on the goat's neck, the brim of 3's hat and the curved parts of his boots: white for the block and the joints of the folding-stool on A, and on B for the lines on the rock (which has also incised markings), and the chiton of 3 and the crown of his hat. The height of the vase is 40·6 cm., the width at the widest part 29·4 cm. and at the rim 18·4 cm.

If the famous sites on the mainland of Greece have been largely exhausted—and the only great classical cities now being excavated are Sparta and Corinth—the outlying parts of the Greek world continue to yield a harvest of discoveries, increasingly interesting as they are added to a constantly increasing body of archaeological knowledge. Thus Crete, Delos, Rhodes, and the great cities of Asia such as Miletus and Pergamon continue to give up fresh treasures, and the neolithic and bronze age remains of north Greece and the island of Leukas are adding a new chapter to the book of Greek prehistoric archaeology.

The one great mainland site not yet fully excavated is the most interesting of all, but owing to material difficulties Athens for the present reserves her secrets. The excavation of the Agora, the great task before the Greek Archaeological Society, has now indeed been begun by the clearing of an area east of the Theseum, and ancient walls have been found, but they cannot be identified with any known buildings, nor do the inscriptions discovered give any topographical indications. This is, however, only a beginning, and the area ultimately to be excavated is very much larger.

May I be allowed to correct and hereby to do penance for a blunder which defaces three or four passages in the recent British Museum publication on Ephesus ? A mental confusion between Lygdamis, the leader of the Cimmerians or Treres, who probably burned one of the earlier Artemisia, and Pythagoras, a pre-Persian tyrant, who is said to have had to build a temple at Ephesus in expiation for desecrating ‘the Hieron,’ took possession of me during the lapse of a year between writing Chapters I. and XIV., and led me to make the absurd suggestion on p. 245 that Temple B was completed ‘perhaps at the cost of Lygdamis by the middle of the seventh century,’ and to call the latter a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘traitor.’ The last epithet is particularly uncalled for, since the little we know of Lygdamis shows him as a bold tribal leader who died at the head of his horde. If he burned Temple A, neither he nor Pythagoras was the builder of Temple B; and if the latter built any Artemision it can only have been either Temple A (after desecrating a pre-existent hieron) or Temple C. But, as I have stated on p. 7, it is so doubtful whether there is any reference to the Artemision at all in the solitary extant passage regarding Pythagoras, that the suggestion of his responsibility for any of the primitive shrines on the site is hardly worth making. This mental confusion passed away from me in Syria while reflecting on the westward expeditions of Assurbanipal, in attacking whose Cilician vassal Lygdamis came by his death; but it was then too late to make amends even in a list of errata, as I had left the book passed for press on quitting England.