The cold, dry, and stable air above the summits of the Antarctic plateau provides the best ground-based observing conditions from optical to sub-millimetre wavelengths to be found on the Earth. Pathfinder for an International Large Optical Telescope (PILOT) is a proposed 2 m telescope, to be built at Dome C in Antarctica, able to exploit these conditions for conducting astronomy at optical and infrared wavelengths. While PILOT is intended as a pathfinder towards the construction of future grand-design facilities, it will also be able to undertake a range of fundamental science investigations in its own right. This paper provides the performance specifications for PILOT, including its instrumentation. It then describes the kinds of projects that it could best conduct. These range from planetary science to the search for other solar systems, from star formation within the Galaxy to the star formation history of the Universe, and from gravitational lensing caused by exo-planets to that produced by the cosmic web of dark matter. PILOT would be particularly powerful for wide-field imaging at infrared wavelengths, achieving near diffraction-limited performance with simple tip–tilt wavefront correction. PILOT would also be capable of near diffraction-limited performance in the optical wavebands, as well be able to open new wavebands for regular ground-based observation, in the mid-IR from 17 to 40 μm and in the sub-millimetre at 200 μm.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give us an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the transient sky at radio wavelengths. In this paper we present VAST, an ASKAP survey for Variables and Slow Transients. VAST will exploit the wide-field survey capabilities of ASKAP to enable the discovery and investigation of variable and transient phenomena from the local to the cosmological, including flare stars, intermittent pulsars, X-ray binaries, magnetars, extreme scattering events, interstellar scintillation, radio supernovae, and orphan afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. In addition, it will allow us to probe unexplored regions of parameter space where new classes of transient sources may be detected. In this paper we review the known radio transient and variable populations and the current results from blind radio surveys. We outline a comprehensive program based on a multi-tiered survey strategy to characterise the radio transient sky through detection and monitoring of transient and variable sources on the ASKAP imaging timescales of 5 s and greater. We also present an analysis of the expected source populations that we will be able to detect with VAST.

Eight ring-ditches and several stretches of pit alignment have been excavated between 1981 and 1985, as part of the investigation of an extensive cropmark complex on a gravel terrace in the Upper Severn valley at Four Crosses, northern Powys. Excavation of the ring-ditches, which form part of a more scattered barrow cemetery, has revealed a long and complex pattern of development of barrow types and burial forms in the period between the Middle Neolithic and the Middle Bronze Age. This is compared with the recently published sequence from the neighbouring upland barrow cemetery at Trelystan, and subdivided into four hypothetical phases. There is evidence of activity in the vicinity of some of the sites in the Iron Age, Romano-British, and possibly the early post-Roman period.

Now that many students of ancient civilization, whether at school or at university, are necessarily studying the ancient sources in translation, it has become more important than ever that the translations should be accurate. It is true that some errors make little or no difference to the interpretation; for instance, it does not really affect Thucydides' explanation at 3.15 of the reluctance of Sparta's allies to take part in a second invasion of Attica in 428 to bring relief to Mytilene that Warner (Penguin Classics, revised edition 1972, p. 201) translates ἐν καρпο ξυγκομιδσαν as ‘were busy in harvesting their corn’, when the chronology makes it clear than the time is August and well after the corn harvest. It is true also that a good many errors will be noticed by the teacher or tutor who knows Greek (or, as the case may be, Latin) or suspected even by his pupils as a result of reading some modern comment or interpretation (as in the case cited above) or of comparing different translations, although either of these exercises, especially the latter, may merely suggest that there is legitimate doubt and one may have some degree of choice about which version to follow. I should like, however, to offer one case affecting a historical episode which falls within a good many syllabuses, where the translations are in agreement, but seem to me to have got it wrong, where the structure of the Greek has not, as far as I know, been discussed in any commentary and where, I think, it does matter which meaning is taken.

In speaking of Demosthenes' conduct in the period between his return to Athens after the peace agreement with Macedon (late 338 B.C.) and Philip's death (July 336) Aeschines refers to only one specific incident, the attempt by Demosthenes to have himself elected What this position was has never been satisfactorily explained.

In a particularly entertaining section of Metamorphoses i, lines 253–437, Ovid retells the old Greek version of the myth of the Flood, the survival on Mount Parnassus of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and their repopu-lation of the earth.

The purpose of this article is to discuss at greater length two problems raised by Mr. D. J. Mosley towards the end of his discussion of the Athenian Embassy to Sparta in 371 published in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society N.s. viii (1962), 41 ff. The first of these problems concerns the policy pursued by Callistratus at this peace-conference, the second the effect on their audience of the divergent speeches of three of the Athenian ambassadors, Callias, Autocles, and Callistratus, which Xenophon reports.

Glos, who had been in command of the fleet and was married to the daughter of Tiribazus, fearful that it might be thought that he had cooperated with Tiribazus in his plan and that he would be punished by the King, resolved to safeguard his position by a new project of action. Since he was well supplied with money and soldiers and had furthermore won the commanders of the triremes to himself by acts of kindness, he resolved to revolt from the King.

At Book 15, chapter 76, Diodorus Siculus says that during the Attic year 366/5, at the same time as the Thebans won possession of the Attic border district of Oropus, the King of Persia sent ambassadors and persuaded the Greeks to put an end to their wars and to conclude Common Peace )); this peace, he adds, was more than five years after the battle of Leuctra.