That Rome's victory at the Aegates insulae in 241 B.C. put a definite end to the sea power of Carthage has long since been recognized, for subsequently the Italian fleets sailed unmolested wherever they pleased in the Western Mediterranean. It has not, I think, been realized with equal clearness that thereafter Rome was the only first-rate naval state in the entire world of ancient politics, for the more complex relation of the eastern powers has obscured the fact that after 241 B.C. Egypt, hitherto the Carthage of the Orient, followed the example of her African neighbour and rival in the West, neglected her fleet, and left it to her garrisons and money to maintain the empire and protect the commercial interests which the navy and diplomacy of the first two Ptolemies had won. The fall of Egypt, moreover, as I shall try to show, was the result of a coalition of Rhodes and Macedon, which left the control of the eastern Mediterranean in the possession of a group of second-rate naval states. This condition Philip V. sought to end in the year 201 B.C., but Rome at once interfered and prevented him from carrying out his plans; nor did she allow Antiochus III. and Hannibal time to reopen the question of maritime supremacy. The sea-fights won at Side and Myonnesus in 190 B.C. with the aid of Rhodes and Pergamum over the extemporized and disunited fleets of Asia settled it once and for all that no new first-class naval power was to arise in the East. The events of 241 B.C. were thus decisive for the unification of the ancient world into a single state. I shall try in this paper to establish with some precision what they and what their antecedents were.

This paper is the sequel to one dealing with the chronology of the battles of Andres and Cos, published in the last number of this Journal: in it I propose to consider such information as we have about a great ship belonging to Antigonus Gonatas, which may throw some little additional light on these two battles. It is perhaps unnecessary to recall the fact that the third century B.C. was distinguished by a colossal series of experiments in the building of large warships, and that the limits of the effective history of these in action, so far as known to us, coincide pretty well (omitting Antony's revival) with those of the effective action of the Antigonid dynasty at sea: that is to say, ships larger than hexereis are not heard of in action earlier than the time of Antigonus I. or later than the time of Philip V. I make one assumption in this paper, if it be an assumption and not an axiom: I shall suppose that what is true alike of the earliest flint axes and of the modern battleship was true of the naval war-machines of the third century B.C., and that the advances made in building, dimly as we can distinguish them, were due, not to this or that chance or whim, but to a linked process of development.

By the courtesy of Professor Ferguson and of the Editors of this Journal I have had the opportunity of reading Mr. Ferguson's article in proof, and the editors have kindly offered me space for a short reply.

While I agree with much in Mr. Ferguson's valuable paper, and am delighted to see that he ascribes Andros to Gonatas, I find myself unable to accept his dating of the two battles. To go fully into the questions involved is, of course, impossible here; and I confine myself simply to the objections which Mr. Ferguson has raised to my view.

If Sophron could not have commanded for Egypt in 246 (on which I express no opinion), it proves that Sophrona is not an admissible conjecture for Trogus' prona; nothing else.—That Trogus mentions Andros alone is a real difficulty. But we have to choose between him and the contemporary evidence of the coins. Mr. Ferguson agrees with me that the two sets of tetradrachms refer to Lysimacheia and Cos; if Andros was the decisive victory, why no corresponding coin? In my view, too, Egypt had ruled the sea unbeaten for forty years, and this or that writer may well have treated her first defeat as the crucial point.—I know of no reason for supposing that Plutarch's reference to Antigonus at Cos is from Phylarchus.—Ephesus Miletus, and the other towns that fell to the Seleucids in the second Syrian war were presumably taken from the land side.—As to the death of Alexander of Corinth, the events recorded Plut. Arat. xv. must come before Euergetes.” expedition (as de Sanctis pointed out), and Gonatas at the time is back in Corinth; ergo, Alexander was dead by 247.

In 1897 Professor Furtwängler, whose loss we feel more and more, published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Munich certain early bronzes from various parts of Greece and Italy, and belonging to various Museums. He then observed how great is the importance of these bronze statuettes of good Greek work, seeing that larger bronze statues have almost wholly disappeared, and the masterpieces of the great bronze-casters survive only in marble copies of the Roman age. With this suggestive observation I fully concur.

The excavations of recent years have brought to light a considerable number of important Greek bronze statuettes, which can be in some measure dated by the circumstances of finding, as well as by style. Many of these are in the National Museum at Athens, published by De Ridder. A certain number, as is natural in the case of such small and valuable objects, have been exported from Greece and Italy and purchased by great Museums or by private collectors. Unfortunately in regard to many of these the place and circumstances of finding must always be doubtful, as it is not in the interest of the seller that the truth should be known.

The article by Mr. J. Wells in a recent number of this Journal, in which he endeavours to disprove the genuineness of the Γῆς Πϵρίοδος commonly ascribed to Hecataeus, comes as a timely warning against the prevalent tendency to treat Hecataeus as if his contribution to the scientific development of Greek thought could be estimated with any degree of certainty. The poverty of content of the extant fragments purporting to be from Hecataeus, and the scantiness of allusions to this author by other ancient writers, leave but a precarious basis for generalisation on the scope and value of his work; and they certainly do not suffice to determine his influence upon Herodotus and the chroniclers of the fifth century. Furthermore, they quite bear out Mr. Wells' contention that the claims recently made out on behalf of the scientific eminence of Hecataeus have been exaggerated.

The construction of the Frogs of Aristophanes is of a normal conventional type. From the appearance of Dionysus in his strange garb, appropriate to the patron of a heroic stage run mad on realism, to a Dionysus whose wine is new and his bottles old, the customary series of comic incidents develops the conventional situation. This introduction presents us with the antecedents, the background, and the grouping of a comic dispute, The contest forms the main part of the drama; and, quite conventionally, it is separated from the introduction by a parabasis which offers a mixture of serious and comic advice. That the background is the nether world: that the disputants are so eminent a pair as Aeschylus and Euripides: that the judge is the god of all tragedy and comedy himself, and the chorus blessed spirits of the sanctified—all this illumines the old forms with a fresh and unrivalled originality. But the mechanical structure is simple and conventional, as has been said.

This paper contains some notes on miscellaneous inscriptions of which all but two are in Athens. The two exceptions are, firstly, the Ἀστραγαλομαντϵία inscription at Adalia, of which I publish a copy which will, I trust, be found more accurate than any of the previous versions; and, secondly, a recently discovered inscription from Northern Phocis dating probably from the end of the second, or the beginning of the third, century A.D. The remainder of the paper is devoted to some corrections in previously published copies of inscriptions in the Acropolis Museum.

During a recent visit to Adalia (Attalia) in Pamphylia I copied again the well-known Ἀστραγαλομαντϵία inscription which is built into a wall there in one of the streets not far from the harbour; and it seems worth while to publish here the text of the inscription in minuscules, with a few critical notes. The most accessible copy of the stone is that given in Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca No. 1038, but it is very faulty, and since that work was published other copies of the same inscription, or of similar inscriptions which are almost identically worded, have been found in Asia Minor. The most complete version was found by Sterrett at Ördekji (Anabura) in Pisidia (Papers of the American School at Athens, iii. [The Wolfe Expedition to Asia Minor] pp. 206–214; Hermes xiii. pp. 532 foll.), and enabled many of the previously uncertain readings on the Adalia stone to be cleared up; and a fragmentary inscription of the same class which is in places identical with that at Adalia was found at Aghlasun (Sagalassus) in Pisidia more recently.

§ 39.—In contrast with the Silli dialect spoken in one place only, we have here to do with a dialect in use in many villages, in each of which it varies slightly. I leave out of account the dialect of Sinasos. As recorded by Archelaos it differs, or rather, since the purified language has made great strides in Sinasos, it differed widely from that of the Poutak Ovasi villages, chiefly however in being less corrupt, no doubt owing to long contact with Constantinople and the outer world. Mr. Archelaos assured me that the idiom now spoken at Tshalela and Potamia closely resembles this old Sinasos dialect. Of Arabison also I can say nothing; it is said to be a recent colony with a dialect like that of Misti. It would be of great interest to examine these northern villages, including Anakou and Silata, and with them the Lazic colonies north of the Halys, keeping especially in view the points of contact between Pontic and North Cappadocian, such as the tendency to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects in the declension of nouns, which is a mark of Pontic and is increasingly prominent in the Cappadocian dialects as one passes from the southern to the northern villages, the use at Sinasos of the Pontic κί as a negative by the side of δέν, the dropping of unaccented i and u and the preservation of the old possessive pronouns.

In antiquity Apollodorus wrote a work upon the Greek Catalogue, Demetrius of Scepsis one, in thirty books, on the Trojan; both were used by Strabo, who surpassed, fortunately, either in judgment. Titles of similar works are ascribed to the logographer Damastes and the rhetor Polus. Its literary merits are extolled by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Comp. Verb. 102, and though a considerable number of MSS. omit it, Tribonianus of Side in the Byzantine period was found to execute a special metaphrase of it.

In modern times the latest work dealing with the Catalogue apart appears to be the short treatise of Benedikt Niese, Der homerische Schiffskatalog als historische Quelle betrachtet, Kiel, 1873. Written at the blackest moment of Homeric and historical science, before the first light from archaeology had begun to illumine the gloom of Higher Criticism, before even Wilamowitz had lit his corpse-candle, the book naturally cannot influence our opinion now, and would not have needed mention but for the singular uis inertiae owing to which it is still currently cited. Niese's principal conclusions were: the Catalogue involves late political circumstances, contains geographical inaccuracies, especially in regard to Thessaly, and is the result of the contamination of an old geographical document or periegesis dating from 770–740 with names of heroes and peoples taken from the Cypria: the Trojan Catalogue is made out of the Trojan Catalogue again in the Cypria with additions from the body of the Iliad; and the editor of both may be found in a Milesian of 630–600.

Cette figure, d'un beau dessin, est peinte en noir sur un fond blanc. Les traits de l'intérieur, au lieu d'être tracés à la pointe, le sont ici en relief noir, comme sur les figures rouges. This is the Duc de Luynes' description in 1840 of the technique of a lekythos, with a hoplite in black swinging his lance, wearing a helmet and holding a shield, in outline, and wounded by two arrows. It was then in his collection, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. This description, in which so distinguished an amateur can hardly have made a mistake, the object being in his own hands, is fully corroborated by Plate XVI. of his work, made as all those of this publication, not with a view to the subject, but in the intention of rendering the art. Here this design of black on black has been rendered by deeply bitten etched lines, standing out in velvet-black relief on an even tint of gray so dark that it looks black on the white paper. I need hardly add that a mechanical reproduction of this plate is impossible.

That this technique is not altogether unknown I shall soon show by a few examples.

We possess few contemporary records of the Ionian expansion, even in its later stages, and the gradual hellenization of the coast-lands of southern Asia Minor is a process that, in the absence of historical documents, has largely to be inferred from later developments and by archaeological research. At least as early as the eighth century the sea-faring Greeks were known to the Assyrians, under the generic name of Ionians, as pirates and freebooters who troubled the coasts of their maritime provinces. That they should occasionally come into armed conflict with the Assyrian power was to be expected, but it has not hitherto been realized that at the beginning of the seventh century they were sufficiently numerous and powerful within the area of Assyrian control to join other adventurous and discontented elements in conducting a land campaign of some magnitude, and in defying, for a time successfully, the Assyrian forces. That they were capable of doing so may be taken as evidence of a considerable Ionian expansion eastwards at the close of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, and, though the Assyrians had little difficulty in checking the movement, it is probable that fresh conflicts of a like nature would have been recorded in the later Assyrian annals, were it not that a few years afterwards the centre of Ionian power in Western Asia Minor began to be held in check by Lydia, and later, in company with Lydia, was shaken to its foundation by the Cimmerian invaders. In fact those Ionians, whom Sennacherib met and defeated, achieved little political success, and that of a temporary character. It is possible that the effects of their cultural relations with their conquerors were more lasting.

The six graves catalogued below were excavated in 1907 and 1908, at the same time as those already published by Professor Burrows and myself in B.S.A. xiv. and J.H.S. xxix. Their position in the cemetery is indicated on the Plan, B.S.A. xiv. p. 230, Fig. 1. Their contents consist almost entirely of Proto-Corinthian and Corinthian vases. None contained any vases of what we have called Boeotian Kylix ware, and only Graves 4 and 14, the latest of the six, show any direct connexion with graves that did contain it.

This connexion is worth noting in detail for its bearings on the view, put forward B.S.A. xiv., that the Boeotian Kylix style was, in part at least, the result of Corinthian influence. Indeed the chief importance of the graves here published lies perhaps in the confirmation they afford this view.

Since the last of these reports was written, two new excavations of great promise have been begun, Cyrene and Sardes, both by American archaeologists, and the work of the British School at Sparta has been brought to a close. The most interesting new discoveries are perhaps those from Crete: the Late Minoan I cemetery found by Mr. Seager at Gournia and the tomb-chapel and great Early Minoan rock-cut cistern from Knossos.

The activities of the Greek Archaeological Society have been very numerous. Dr. Brueckner has continued his work at the Dipylon cemetery locating the enclosure of the Τριτοπατρεῖς Dr. Stais has published his excavation of the Sanctuary of the Nymphs at Phaleron, Dr. Sotiriades has worked at Chaironeia and Dr. Arvanitopoullos has carried forward his work at Pagasai, which led two years ago to the discovery of so many painted grave stelai. This year, the lower part of the stele with the picture of a woman dying in childbirth has been found.