The lamented death of Dr. Joannes Gennadius has severed a link which for two generations had contributed to unite Great Britain with Greece. No foreign diplomatist possessed such a complete knowledge of our language, which he wrote and spoke with elegance, and of our psychology; no Greek public man had lived so long in England, with which he had literary, no less than political, associations, going back to the early seventies of the last century. Of his diplomatic services to both countries, his own and that of his adoption, others have written; I propose here to say something of the noble library which will always be a monument to his patriotic father, one of the finest figures of the Greek struggle for independence, the διδάσκαλος τού γένους, to himself and to the distinguished English lady who was his wife and whose initials, with his own, are imprinted on many of the beautiful bindings which adorn the ‘Gennadeion’ upon the slopes of Lykabettos.

Like everyone else, I am much interested in the campaign of Marathon, and therefore grateful for the able reconstruction given us in the last number of the Journal by so great a student of military affairs as Sir Frederick Maurice. With the greater part of it I am in agreement, but I cannot help thinking that the soldier in the author has allowed the politics of the day to fall too much into the background. There was, and it was natural in the circumstances of the time that there should be, a party of men in Athens who regarded Persian domination (represented by Hippias) as a lesser evil than Spartan rule, with which they were threatened—or imagined themselves to be threatened. Then the shield. Surely we are to understand from Herodotus that it was flashed from a height. There are points on Mount Pentelicus from which not only the whole of Marathon field but also the city of Athens can be seen.

It has been thought desirable that, as I was perhaps mainly responsible for the dates originally suggested for the Laconian vase series and repeated in the final publication of the Orthia Sanctuary, I should give my view on Professor Ure's suggestion that these should be modified.

My view is that they must be modified to some extent, if Professor Ure's evidence is sound, which I have no reason to doubt, but much less than he appears to suggest. I do not think it is necessary to put the end of Laconian IV back from 500 B.C. to 560 B.C., but its beginning we must put back from 550 B.C. by about twenty years.

The dates originally suggested for Laconian IV (550–500 B.C.) and Laconian V (500–425 B.C.) are certainly contradicted by the date (560 B.C.) now assigned by Professor Ure to a grave at Rhitsona which contained one of the group of Attic cups that copy, as Professor Ure agrees with me in thinking, the form of stem usual in the Laconian V kylix.