A very interesting symbolic picture of the battle of Lepanto executed in a miniature style has recently reached this country from Athens, and the owner, Sir Arthur Evans, has kindly allowed me to publish a reproduction and description of it.

The picture measures ·373 m. in height by ·275 m. in width, and is executed with a full range of colours on a sheet of vellum which has been at some time sharply folded across about half-way up the picture. Above and below and on the back there are inscriptions in Greek, but before we come to them it will be convenient to give some description of the picture itself. This is divided horizontally into two parts: above we see the saints and angels looking down upon the battle; below is the battle itself, and immediately above the centre of the fray, where the two fleets, Christian and Turkish, are in conflict, is a small medallion containing a throned figure of Christ.

‘No artist will ever surpass Pheidias: progress may exist in the world, but it is not so in Art. The greatest of all sculptors will remain for ever without an equal’ (Rodin).

It is agreed that the sculptures of the Western pediment represented, at the centre, the Contest of Athena and Poseidon; that this central action was terminated by two chariot groups, one on the left, the other on the right; and that beyond these were spectators. Further, it is generally accepted that a pair of figures of an old man and a maiden on the left of the central action were meant for Cecrops and one of his daughters. Immediately to the left of Cecrops, between him and the first figure in the angle of the pediment, Nointel's drawing showed a void space, and in a nearly corresponding position in the other half of the pediment the same old drawing recorded another gap (X and Y in Fig. 1). It had been supposed by many students that both spaces might have been left void intentionally; Leake and others thought that one or both would have been filled.

The problem of the neutrality of Delos has been the subject of a searching investigation by W. W. Tarn published recently in this Journal. The argument turns mainly on a purely epigraphical question, namely, the interpretation of the formula for the setting-up of a stele in the decrees of the Island League. Its historical importance is great, because, if Tarn is right, we should be justified in utilising the Delian Royal festivals for the reconstruction of the political history of the third century, which has rightly been styled the darkest period of Hellenism. As in the fourth Excursus of his large work Antigonus Gonatas, the distinguished scholar maintains the thesis that Delos became a member of the Island League, and that the varying history of this League is reflected in the establishment of festivals in turn by the Ptolemies, by the Seleucids, and by the Antigonids. The evidence for his theory he finds in the argument that the Islanders, if they wished to set up an inscribed stele in Delos, were not obliged to address a petition to the Commune of Delos, requesting the grant of a site in the sanctuary; the Islanders therefore controlled the site and ground of Delos, which implies that Delos belonged to the League. Although I raised objections to Tarn's thesis, as did Roussel at an earlier date, I would gladly be the first to agree with him, had he succeeded in bringing forward convincing proof of this theory. As this has not been the case, in view of the wide significance of the problem I think it advisable to break silence and to expose my objections to the criticism of experts.

My article has at least had the merit of evoking a most interesting paper from Professor Kolbe. His classification of the inscriptions differs from mine; but I cannot myself see that requests by a citizen to his own city for a particular site, or requests by one city to another for a site in some hieron (‘Please put it in your record office’), bear on my theory, which was that one independent city never asked another for a particular site as I defined it; on this, and on the reasons adduced for Delos not being a member of the League, I can only refer to what I have already said.

In 1928 Sir Arthur Evans generously presented an archaic bronze mirror to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. My thanks are due to the Keeper, Mr. E. T. Leeds, for his kindness in inviting me to publish this interesting accession and supplying me with the photographs reproduced in Plate II and Fig. 1.

The mirror is in the form of a disk, 15 cm. in diameter: its thickness at the edge is 7 to 8 mm., at the centre about 5 mm. It weighs 675.5 grammes. The face, slightly concave, was of plain, burnished metal surrounded by a narrow ornamented band round the edge: it is now badly pitted and covered over the greater part of its surface by a green patina (Fig. 1).

παρειλήΦασι ϒἀρ ψευδῆ λόϒον, ὡς ἒστιν αὐτοῖς ἡϒεῖσθαι πἀτριον This is Isocrates' judgment (IV. 18) on the claim of the Spartans to be the leaders of Greece. He rightly saw that the tradition of hegemony had been the force behind most of Sparta's active foreign policy for more than two hundred years down till his own day. He might truthfully have added that the hegemony exercised by contemporary Sparta was of a kind which Spartans no more than a generation earlier had never imagined. Though they had long desired to control all Greece, the particular form of control which they came to possess over the members of their second empire was determined for them by the Peloponnesian war.

Sparta did not enter upon that long struggle with the deliberate intention of creating for herself a subject empire. She desired to destroy the Athenian ἀρχή, which appeared as a threat to her own Peloponnesian league: and in opposition to Athens, she asserted a principle of city autonomy, which was to prove both then and later wholly incompatible with the conception of a subject empire. At the outset, the Spartans can have contemplated no higher success than that the Athenian democracy might be so humbled as to abandon part, at least, of its ἀρχή and perhaps even to return to its earlier position as a member of the Peloponnesian league. But the war with Athens compelled Sparta to develop her social, political, and military organisation, and the conquest of Athens offered Sparta the temptation of securing a new kind of supremacy—not ἡγεμονία, but ἀρχή.

Winter made a seemingly exhaustive classification when he divided Clazomenian sarcophagi into two main classes, which he called A and B (Anz., 1898, p. 175). His class A is the small class to which belong the big, deep, rectangular sarcophagi with copious decoration in Clazomenian B.F. style (i.e. B.F. without incised lines) like the sarcophagus in the British Museum (Murray, Terracotta Sarcophagi, Pl. 1–7). This has a gable-roof, as had, probably, all the others of this class. His class B is the big class, to which belong the large number of open, trapezoidal sarcophagi with decoration ranging from seventh-century pure East-Greek style down through different phases with different techniques to the most developed Clazomenian B.F. style of the end of the sixth and beginning of the fifth centuries. Recently, fresh evidence has enabled Kjellberg to add a third class, which he calls C (Jahrb., 41, p. 51). The sarcophagi of this new class have features both of A and B, but the style of decoration and the simple, rectangular shape seem to show that they must be considerably earlier than all of A and earlier than the earliest of B.

In selecting for the purpose of illustrating Herodotus' conception of the proper relation of ἀπὀδεξις to ἱστορίη his account of the Lydian emigration to Italy, I have not had in mind the requirements of the Etruscologist alone. The Lydian setting of the story raises the whole question of the sources for the reconstruction of the Dark Ages of Aegean history which Greek historians, at the time of Herodotus and earlier, had at their disposal.

It is well known that from the point of view of Etruscologists this migration story, which is usually accepted by them as a genuine tradition of origin, is dated five centuries too early; and although the arguments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which mainly stress the total dissimilarity of Etruscan and Lydian culture, are insufficient reason for discrediting Herodotus after the lapse of so many centuries and in an age when philology was not a science, to suppose without further investigation a mistake of 500 years is not only unfair to Herodotus, but may remove whatever basis of fact the tradition originally contained.

‘The critics who have brought forward such arguments will, it is to be hoped, soon come to realise that once the sculptures can be openly submitted to the judgment of science, ill will it go with a scholar's reputation if his doubts of their genuineness are known.’ With such quasi-papal thunder does a certain professor conclude his six-hundred-word panegyric of the group recently published by Studniczka (Fig. 1). True, that at the time he wrote he had not seen the group. But since he goes on to declare that ‘in dealing with works of this quality the judgment of style made possible by good photographs is even more important than the observation of technical details on the marble itself,’ I do not hesitate to put forward a study based on such observation. For although judgment on aesthetic grounds is important, it has no ulterior sanction; and if I say—as I think—that the piece of sculpture is ugly and not of ancient style, this opinion may have as much or as little validity as the professor's, that the sculptor was a late archaic Greek and one who could hold his own with the best of his period.

The appearance of the Cambridge Ancient History has revived interest in a number of problems not yet solved. Here are four of the fifth century, on which the authors of the C.A.H. take what is on the whole the prevalent view, and on which something still remains to be said.

I. The Peace of Callias

Mr. Walker (C.A.H. v. 469–471) argues that the embassy of Callias (Hdt. vii. 151–2) must have been sent about 460, for the simultaneous Argive embassy was asking for a renewal of an old friendship by Artaxerxes, and so had set out soon after the latter's accession. He forgets to add that Herodotus expresses doubts whether any such embassy was ever sent by Argos. He also says that the embassy ‘must have been sent at a time when Argos was in danger of being attacked, obviously by Sparta,’ and so before 451.

In the Greek writings of the first millennium of the Christian era we find our earliest evidence of that remarkable body of doctrine known as Alchemy. Arising perhaps in the traditional knowledge of the Egyptian priesthood, it flourished as a living science and creed for seventeen centuries. The earliest alchemical works that have survived are all written in Greek, and the extant Greek alchemical writings run to more than eighty thousand words. The bulk of these documents is evidence of the attraction which the science possessed for the philosophers of the Byzantine age. Alchemy was then no mere by-way of thought, but one of the major departments of knowledge.

The alchemical writings have affinities with other contemporary works. It is, therefore, well to decide on the meaning we shall attach to the word Alchemy before discussing its methods and origin.

Miss Hutton's valuable article on the archaistic reliefs in Oxford contains two errors, which may as well be corrected at once. The first was pointed out to me by Mr. W. H. Buckler. Of the left-hand nymph in the representation of Pan teased, Miss Hutton writes that the artist ‘twisted the upper portion of her body round into a three-quarters frontal position, which he balanced by flinging the right arm back to fill the empty space behind the body. There is therefore no physical contact between the first nymph and Pan.’ As a matter of fact she was grasping the end of Pan's leopard-skin with her right hand, just as in the other reliefs with the same subject, and swinging not her right but her left arm back.

The second slip is in the account of the Rhodian nymph relief. According to Miss Hutton, ‘the whole surface has been so much rubbed down to conceal damage that the right-hand figure, whose heavy peplos had originally a pleated kolpos with swallow-tail points, appears to be clad in a transparent veil over an equally transparent tunic.’

The fragment illustrated above was offered for sale in London last summer. It should belong to the new replica of the Sardanapalus from Castel Gandolfo, which was kindly shown me by Commendatore Paribeni in 1926, soon after its discovery. The broken surfaces correspond pretty exactly, if my memory serves me aright; the execution is similar, and does not belie Curtius' date, the end of the first century A.D., though I should prefer to think it some years later.

Less vapid than the replica of the Sala della Biga, and free from retouching and restoration.