On p. 289 of the last volume of the Journal Dr. Roes refers to the discovery at Nineveh by Dr. Campbell Thompson of large quantities of‘the black-painted ware the like of which is found in South Mesopotamia and Persia,’ in Parthian houses erected among the ruins of the destroyed temple of Ishtar. She discourages Dr. Thompson's suggestion that they were part of the ‘collection’ of a Parthian antiquary and suggests that ‘the discovery must mean that in the days of the Parthians the vases were still being made somewhere.’

I also feel sceptical about Dr. Thompson's Parthian antiquary, but think that Dr. Roes probably does not realise the peculiar nature of the site. Quyunjik is an immense mound rising about 100 feet above the bed of the Khosr that flows under it.

The word ‘little-master cup,’ as I use it, covers, first, ‘lip-cups,’ ‘band-cups,’ and variants of them; second, ‘Droop’ (or ‘Antidoran’) cups. I shall not deal with Droop cups; for I can add nothing to Ure's admirable study. I confine myself to lip-cups, band-cups, and their variants. Much of what I shall say has been said already, and I draw attention to the concise and accurate treatment which these also have received from Ure.

Into the origin of the shapes I do not enter for the present. The forerunner is the Attic ‘Siana cup.’

At the crisis of Perikles' career, in the middle 'forties, Thucydides of the deme Alopekê, the son of Melesias, withstood the great man for a little while, until he was swept aside. He was ostracised (the last important ostracism of which we hear) and with that Perikles begins his fifteen years' principate.

Impar congressus Achilli, Thucydides is damned by another Latin tag also: he is magni nominis umbra. Thucydides, for us and for most ancient writers, means the son of Oloros, the historian; and it has long been recognised that the second Vita prefixed to our texts of Thucydides' History contains information about the son of Melesias. The difficulty of disentangling him from his namesakes, more perhaps than the overtoweringness of his rival, has deterred historians from constating about the son of Melesias things which I think can yet be constated and should be. For indeed Kimon's political heir, who resisted Perikles on behalf of the Attic aristocracy, in the days when this aristocracy (to Athens' own irreparable damage) was being ruined, is a sufficiently important figure.

Certain passages in Overbeck are generally supposed to refer to a statue by Scopas of Apollo Smintheus, an aspect of the god to which classical students were probably introduced in Strabo's time as they are to-day by the old priest's prayer in the first book of the Iliad. It seems at first a not very serious suggestion that one at least of these passages reads as though the mouse alone, not the statue, were the work of Scopas. But further investigation indicates that the ambiguity is a little more than apparent, indeed real enough to have sheltered a few scholars in their endeavour to escape the difficulties and confusion of reconciling the usual interpretation of the Strabo passage with coin types of Alexandria Troas, and with what can be surmised of Scopas's style.

Modern writers have generally assumed that the political affiliations of Aeschylus were aristocratic. That his sympathies were with the democrats has, however, been ably maintained by Sir R. W. Livingstone on the basis of a consideration of the Eumenides, a play which explicitly exalts the aristocratic court of the Areopagus, and has usually been taken as proof of Aeschylus' opposition to the democratic measures of Ephialtes and Pericles. Livingstone bases his argument upon the eloquent enthusiasm of the poet for Athens' future, and upon the fact that the functions assigned the Areopagus in the play are those which it still retained after the democratic reforms of Ephialtes, not those of which it had been despoiled.

In offering to readers of the Journal this summary of recent work in Greece, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to all who have contributed the material on which the compilation is based; most especially to Professor Karo, who kindly lent the typescript of his forthcoming article in the Archaeologischer Anzeiger. Professor Karo's detailed survey of the whole field is the basis of much of what follows, but it contains also detailed information which is not included in the following pages. It will be understood, therefore, that for almost all the excavations here described further reference should be made to the Archaeologischer Anzeiger.

The writers who discuss in detail the history of Macedonia during the years of ‘The Kings,’ Philip Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV (323–317 B.C.), state or assume that Roxane, the widow of Alexander the Great, fled to Queen Olympias in Epirus with her little son, after the death of Antipater, or else that she was sent or taken there by Polyperchon at the time when Queen Eurydice was putting Cassander in Polyperchon's place as her husband's prime minister. The stay of the mother and son in Epirus and their return with Olympias when she entered Macedonia to fight at Evia with Eurydice and Philip Arrhidaeus for the kingdom are mentioned by such authorities as Grote, Niese, Beloch, Kaerst, Staehelin (Berve, also, refers to Kaerst and Staehelin for this part of Roxane's history), Klotzsch, and Tarn.

To the readers of this Journal, and in particular to Mr. Avi-Yonah, the author of the paper on Three Lead Coffins from Palestine in JHS. 1930, p. 300, it may be interesting to hear that the Museum of Archaeology at Leiden possesses a well-preserved lead coffin, belonging to the same class as those published in that article. This sarcophagus, which entered the Leiden Museum in 1902, was reported to have been found at Byoud el Saied near Tyre, and shows in many of its main features a great resemblance to the fragments published by Mr. Avi-Yonah as his Pl. XII, a, b, c, d.

The four sides and the curved lid of the coffin, though much damaged, are in existence, whilst the bottom has entirely disappeared, as is generally the case with this class of monuments. The long sides measure m. 1·70 by 0·37, the short sides 0·41 by 0·45. The lid was fixed on to the coffin by clamps projecting from the longitudinal sides, two of which are still in place.

The structure and composition of the Iliad have been discussed often: usually, however, rather with the object of identifying the component parts and tracing their antecedents, than of apprehending and interpreting the design of the poem as a whole.

I. Homeric Epics as Works of Art

Some critics have argued, or assumed, that there was in fact little or no design; that the cantos or lays somehow fell into their present places like the books of the Old Testament, or at most, as Anaximander might have said, κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν in accordance with a traditional sagatheme, which may, or may not, have had historical background or mythical meaning. As to that historical background, again, opinions differ; and whether the myth was solar or sociological.

By the death of M. Gennadius in September the Society has lost one of its oldest and most devoted friends and supporters, and indeed in a sense one of its founders, for, as I have stated in my History of the Society, it was in conversation with M. Gennadius, then Greek Chargé d'Affaires in London, that in 1877 the idea of founding such a Society arose when he told me of the recent foundation in Paris of a Société pour l'Encouragement des Études Grecques. We were agreed that the French lead might well be followed in this country, and when, in the autumn of 1878, the co-operation of Professor Sayce made it possible for me to take the preliminary steps for carrying out the idea, M. Gennadius was helpful in suggesting the names of Englishmen whom he had known to have travelled in Greece, for it was to these in the first instance that our appeal was addressed. The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies was founded in June 1879, and, in recognition of the active part he had played in its inception, M. Gennadius was included in the first list of Vice-Presidents and attended many meetings of Council, for a time also serving on the Library Committee. From 1882 he was enrolled as an Honorary Member, and during the half-century which has since elapsed he never ceased to follow the progress of the Society with constant and sympathetic interest. I have before me the eloquent address which he delivered when, in 1904, the Society celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation.