With but two exceptions, no trace now remains of the shrines with which this paper deals, or at least no trace has been revealed by excavation. Practically the sole record of these buildings is to be found on the coins struck in the district during the period of the Roman Empire, and more especially during the third century of our era. The earlier coins, from the beginning of the coinage towards the end of the fifth century B.C., tell us something about the cults, but little of their furniture. But in the Roman age, especially during the time of the family of Severus and Elagabalus, there was a considerable outburst of coinage, which, in its types, reveals certain details interesting to the student of the fringe of Greek and Roman culture.

The evidence thus provided is necessarily disjointed, and concerns only the external, official aspects of the Phoenician religion. The inner truth of these things, it is safe to say, is hidden for ever: even the development from the primitive religion to the weird syncretistic systems of the Roman age is hopelessly obscure. One can only see dimly what was the state of things during the period illustrated by the monuments.

It may be desirable to draw attention to an item of some interest for the history of literary genres which has just appeared in a Greek periodical which is not, as yet, widely accessible.

Angelos Matthaiou (ΗΟΡΟΣ iv [1986] 31–4) publishes two grave stelai from Nikaia, between Athens and Piraeus. The script is unusual, in that the texts are written retrograde and from the bottom to the top of the stele. The obvious parallel for this is a funerary text discussed by Missjeffery in BSA lvii (1962) 136 no. 42 and dated by her around 540; one of her last scholarly observations was to confirm that the new texts appeared to be in the same hand.

This review of recent books about Alexander the Great and related topics focuses in particular on how much attention scholars have paid to the eastern aspects of the history and historiography of the period. It traces the identification of Alexander as an essentially ‘western’ figure back to the period of the Enlightenment, and shows how the work of scholars in the 18th century set the terms of the subsequent debate. It goes on to show how work on the Alexander Romance displays a far broader and inclusive range of intellectual approaches than traditional Alexander historiography, and suggests that the study of the historical Alexander would benefit from seeing Alexander as belonging in a Near Eastern context as well as a Greek or Macedonian one.

In JHS lxviii (1948), p. 148, Mr. R. M. Cook drew attention to a problem concerning the name of the potter or painter Amasis and the chronology of Attic black-figure vase painting. So far as I know it has remained unanswered and discreetly ignored. Mme. Karouzou's fine study of the Amasis Painter prompts a further discussion of the problem which seems a very real one. It may be briefly restated as follows. Amasis, potter or painter, was named after the philhellene Egyptian king Amasis (A-ahmes) whose reign began in 569–568 B.C. As a citizen of Athens he would have received his name at his birth, which cannot therefore be earlier than 569–568. Cook thought it could hardly be before 565, and certainly the nationalist A-ahmes would not have made much of a mark as a philhellene early in his reign, as he had to seize the throne from Apries who was supported by Greek mercenaries. Yet by the current chronology of Attic black-figure the Amasis Painter had begun to work by about 555. If the signature Αμασιςμεποιεσεν means that Amasis was the potter, not the painter, we have to face the fact that his work too may go back at least as early because he made vases for the painter Lydos. If it means that he was the pottery-owner, the terminus is given by the earliest vase bearing his signature, and this is still around 550. The last explanation is the least satisfactory both for the interpretation of the signature and for the fact that it is easier to believe in a child artist than in a child industrialist. Unless Amasis was a prodigy, something is wrong somewhere in the argument. The fault must lie either in the accepted chronology for Attic black-figure or in the arguments about the name Amasis.

Among the fragmentary works of the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre are some reasonably substantial remains of his essay on the interpretation of cult images, On Statues (περì Ἀγαλμάτων). My study falls into two parts. Firstly, I assess the major source of our fragments, Eusebius of Caesarea’s Praeparatio Evangelica, and argue that the full text of On Statues would have looked quite different, and in particular much less Stoic, than the surviving fragments would suggest. Secondly, I turn to consider what these fragments tell us about Porphyry’s thoughts on the interpretation of images and the place of these thoughts in the wider history of viewing.

The Library of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum possesses a manuscript volume containing a large collection of notes on the antiquities of Lycia made at different times by Samuel Birch. A considerable part of the volume appears to be a transcript from the papers of E. T. Daniell, the scholar who accompanied Spratt and Forbes on their travels in Lycia in 1842. Daniell copied a large number of inscriptions in Lycia, the Cibyratis, Pisidia and Pamphylia, some of which were published by his fellow-travellers in the second volume of their journal. It is particularly unfortunate that Daniell did not live to publish the results of his labours, as they have clearly suffered very seriously at the hands of others. What became of his original MS. is not known, only one page apparently in his hand remaining incorporated in Birch's volume. Birch's copies must be received with a considerable amount of caution, particularly as regards the forms of the letters. At the same time there is much that is worth publishing, and I have to thank the Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities for his permission to publish what follows.

In JHS LXIX, 18–24, Mrs. A. D. Ure discusses some interesting vases supposedly of Mykalessian make. I am quite incompetent to criticise her remarks concerning their provenance and date, and wish merely to point out that her interpretation of one of them as alluding to Boiotian ritual is highly doubtful.

The vase in question is described on pp. 19–20. It is a pyxis, decorated with a human or divine figure shown wearing what looks like a fawn-skin and holding in the right hand something which may well be a while in the left there is, according to Mrs. Ure, who of course has examined the object itself, a faint but discernible fork; I cannot find it on her reproduction. The figure sits on a small elevation which the artist has covered withround spots, quite possibly intending it for a heap of threshed corn. This is flanked, on the spectator's left, by a basket of fruit, on his right by a small pig. The figure's head is adorned with horns, apparently those of a goat and growing from, not merely attached to the crown.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of the dimensions of the sun and moon wheels in Anaximander's cosmology. While the traditional reconstruction proposed by Tannery and Diels posits six measures for three different wheels (sun, moon and stars), it will be argued here that Anaximander gave only two basic measurements, one for the moon's wheel (19 times bigger than the earth) and one for the sun's (28 times bigger). These two values can be accounted for by their connection to the lunar month – a graphic representation of the wheels which includes motion accurately reproduces the relative positions of the sun and moon; in fact they are the smallest pair of figures from which a twowheel model can be made that represents the month correctly. Anaximander derived his two parameters by attempting to incorporate basic observational data into a cosmic model.

SGO I 01/01/07 is a highly refined 20-line elegiac epitaph from Cnidus which probably dates to the first century BC. Despite the poem's striking formal features and poetic qualities it has received almost no attention since its first publication by Sir Charles Newton in 1863. The first four sections of this article demonstrate that the inscription represents an important witness to certain epigraphic practices and epitaphic traditions, including those of inscribed dialogue and lament. The final section then presents a reading of the poem which centres on the competing poetics of consolation, memory and forgetfulness proposed by the epitaph's two speaking voices.

In view of the importance of ascertaining the limits of the influence of the early civilization of the Aegean, the existence of four Mycenaean vases in the little museum at Torcello has a certain interest.

This museum contains a miscellaneous collection of antiquities, some dug up in the island itself or coming from the ecclesiastical buildings close by, some from the adjacent islands in the lagoon. Amongst a number of vases of later date are the four in question.

The first of these (No. 727) is a small pseudamphora of somewhat flattened form. The buff slip is decorated all over the body of the vase with bands of red glaze-paint. The spaces on the shoulder of the vase not occupied by the spout and handles are filled with parallel strokes gradually decreasing in length, which thus form the triangles of bars common on late Mycenaean ware.

In Evolution, I tried to date tripod-cauldrons by the development of their shape and decoration, and by the style of human and animal figurines upon them, particularly by the style of horses on tripod-handles. I now want to compare tripod-horses with horses on stands, but first I must examine the foundations, and cast a glance at dating evidence afforded by fibulae.

In my former study I ventured to tamper with the order laid down by Furtwängler. Not unnaturally, some of his successors at Olympia resisted. They have not met my contention that tripods with solid legs and handles show a consistent development in section from solid to flat, in decoration from simple to elaborate, but they still find it necessary to insert elaborate plated tripods, decorated with advanced horses, into the sequence, so that late solid tripods can imitate their patterns. Plated tripods cannot go in the middle of the series, as Furtwängler said, because too many solid tripods are hybrids between his classes I and III. Hampe puts plated tripods before the decorative period of solid tripods and equates the horses of the last-named with Boeotian rabbits of the seventh century. A horse is a horse and rabbits are different. Early seventh century horses are not at all like rabbits. Let him look again at his own Boeotian brooches.

It is well known that Evans was not greatly interested in what happened in Crete after the devastation of the Knossian Palace, an event he placed at the very end of his Late Minoan II period. In his view, the Palace was not immediately re-occupied: some time after the catastrophe of 1400, it was inhabited by ‘squatters’, who repaired some of the damaged parts of the building but for the most part simply cleared away the rubbish deposited at the time of the destruction and lived in the Palace without substantially altering it. Evans believed that after the end of the Palatial period at Knossos the main vigour of the Minoan civilisation flowed into its Mycenaean branch and was responsible for the Achaean hegemony of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. However, the settlements at Knossos and elsewhere in Crete still preserved, though in a muted form, basic elements of the venerable native culture. The contents of the tombs in the Zapher Papoura cemetery, in use both before and after the great destruction, showed that the continuity of Minoan burial customs and pottery styles was not arrested. Evans nowhere tried to resolve the paradox which confronts anyone who takes his view of Late Minoan III Crete. On the one hand, we have the picture of a more or less impoverished country which had lost most of its importance, lying outside the main developments of the Mycenaean world and above all preserving its own culture at a time when the rest of the Aegean had been absorbed into a Mycenaean koine. On the other hand, both the Iliad and the Odyssey speak of a well-populated island of many cities which provides, under the leadership of Idomeneus, one of the largest of the Greek contingents before Troy; nothing in Homer suggests that Idomeneus is not as thoroughly ‘Achaean’ as Agamemnon himself.

The battered stone which bears the bouleutic oath and a decree of the demos about the boule has the same width as and is universally agreed to be a companion piece to IG i2 115. That text begins with a decree of 409–8 ordering the anagrapheis to obtain Draco's law on homicide (from the basileus, as R. S. Stroud will show) and write it on the stone. On the face of it, they are merely to make a copy, and, though the stray voice has been raised to suggest that they altered the text, most discussion has been about the age of the text before them and the changes that it might have undergone before 409.

The bouleutic stone is unprotected by a decree, as it stands, and encouragement for those who might wish to suppose that it represents a revised text comes from Philochorus F 140, which suggests a change in legislation about the boule in 410–9. There has not, to my knowledge, been any very great enthusiasm for massive revision or new formulation. To put it at a minimum, (1. 34) and (l. 41) do not sound like consitutional procedure or even formal language of 410, and there has been at least one attempt to carry the whole document back beyond the Persian War. The archaisms convinced even Hignett ‘that it was to some extent a copy of an earlier law’, but he found it ‘incredible that in 410, when the full democracy had just been restored after an oligarchic interlude, a law on this subject should have been no more than a faithful copy of a previous law; some additional safeguards suggested by previous experience must have been inserted.’

D. E. L. Haynes' 1964 booklet The Portland Vase and Bernard Ashmole's article of 1967 ushered in a spate of renewed speculations concerning the scenes depicted on the Portland Vase (FIG 1). Despite the considerable literature since then, I venture to propose a new interpretation of part of the vase. First of all, it should be said that I accept the view of Ashmole (and others) against Haynes (and others) that the vase depicts two separate scenes and not one continuous one. I also accept (with many others) Ashmole's interpretation of the first scene as the love or marriage of Peleus and Thetis; the two lovers are figures A and C, Thetis being marked out as a sea-goddess by the sea snake in her lap, with Eros (B) and Zeus or Poseidon (D) looking on.

Pl. V, 1 and 2 shows a plastic vase in the British Museum, in the form of an antelope's head, cut off flat at the base of the neck and with the orifice in the right ear. The clay is light reddish-brown with a very smooth surface, the glaze brownish-black. The horns, ears, eyelids, pupils, muzzle and outlines of jaws are black, the face is covered with fine black dots, the neck and throat and the burr of the horns with short black strokes; there are white dots on the muzzle, red in the interior of ears and nostrils, and an incised line round the pupils. Under the base is a black rosette with a white dot on each petal (Pl. V, 2). Horns and ears are broken off, but are preserved complete on a replica in Berlin (Fig. 1, a and Pl. V, 3). Mlle. Maximova pointed out the connexion of the two vases, though she wrongly stated that the London vase had no orifice. She mentioned two others with the orifice in the ear—a bull's head in Berlin and a ram's head in Florence, both also cut off flat at the neck. The bull's head has no other resemblance to the antelopes', but the ram's appears from the description to be of similar style. The main peculiarity of the painting of the antelopes' heads—the covering of some areas with fine dots and others with short dashes—recurs on a number of other vases.

In August 1968 the Athens Centre of Ekistics (ACE) launched a large-scale study of settlements within the territories of city-states in ancient Greece. The aim of the project is ‘to come to a better understanding of the problems of human settlements by the study of their past’, their evolution through time and their relationships with total space (physical, economic, cultural), so that solutions may be offered ‘to many of the problems related to human settlements, from which humanity is at present suffering’. A method is being employed which synthesises the researches of archaeologists and historians with the work of architect-planners and topographers in an attempt to test by sample studies the validity of eight hypotheses about ancient settlements which have been advanced by C. A. Doxiadis on the basis of ‘general ekistic experience’. Doxiadis, an architect and planner of wide experience and considerable insight, has formulated the inter-disciplinary scientific study of human settlements and called it Ekistics. His hypotheses about ancient settlements are given at length in the first annual report on the Ancient Greek Settlements Project, but they may be summarised as follows.

The Italian occupation of Valona has drawn attention to what has been called one of the two keys of the Adriatic. It may, therefore, be of interest to trace the history of this important strategic position, which has been held by no less than twelve different masters.

The name αὐλών ‘a hollow between hills,’ was applied to various places in antiquity, and from the accusative of this word comes the Italian form ‘Valona,’ or, as the Venetians often wrote it, ‘Avalona.’

The three marble statue bases found in February 1922, incorporated as integral parts of the wall of Athens, are unique records of Attic art. While their supreme importance was recognised from the moment of their discovery, their exact contribution to our knowledge of Attic art is a matter upon which a variety of opinions has been expressed.

M. Philadelpheus, who as Ephor of antiquities of Attica was responsible for their custody at the time of discovery, was the first to publish them. He describes each briefly. No. I. he dates to the end of the sixth century B.C. No. II. he leaves undated, and No. III. he assigns either to the Peisistratid period or to the period of the Republic before 480. He makes no attempt to deal with the works in detail or to analyse their artistic significance.

M. Oikonomos has published a brief account of II. b, in which he suggests an interpretation of the so-called ‘hockey’ game. He disregards the problems of style and date.

Dr. della Seta of the Italian School at Athens is the only authority at present to discuss the artistic value and significance of Bases I. and II. and to attempt to place them chronologically in the Attic series. His exhaustive and attractive articles deserve the closest attention.