The precise nature of Solon's σεισάχθεια has long been a matter of dispute. There can be no reasonable doubt that Solon abolished arrears of rent, and passed something analogous to an Evicted Tenants' Act. He certainly abolished debts for the nonpayment of which personal freedom had been forfeited, and for the future forbade loans of this type. This does not amount to a wholesale abolition of all debts, both public and private. It is equally certain that mere devaluation, while it would have affected all debts expressed in money, would not have been sufficiently drastic to meet the case of the evicted tenant and the enslaved artisan. Yet there is something to be said for the view that the reduction of the standard coin by some 30 per cent, was an integral part of the σεισάχθεια. The other measures affecting debt would no doubt restore those who had fallen under the load. But in all commercial communities, ancient and modern, in times of economic stress there are business men, industrialists and farmers, who are struggling along under burdens of debt, and who bravely continue the struggle. These are the persons whose activities constitute the mainspring of economic life in any profit-making economy. It is precisely this class whose economic circumstances would have been alleviated by the currency devaluation which Solon certainly enacted.

The following account of recent discoveries in Greece is shorter than usual, for the sake of economy of space in the JHS. There is, moreover, actually less to report, since, largely owing to the economic situation, there has been unusually little excavation in Greece, and work on many sites has been virtually, or entirely, held up. The source of the greater part of what follows is the forthcoming report in the Anzeiger of the Jahrbuch of the German Archaeological Institute. To Professor Karo, the author of that report, I owe a special debt of gratitude for his generosity in allowing me to make free use of his manuscript; and I would here offer my thanks to others who have supplied me with information or photographs.

We are familiar only with the highlymoralised version which appears in Genesis. There it has been moulded by the teaching of the Hebrew prophets as to the nature of God and His relation with mankind. In Genesis the myth is used as the vehicle of a meditation on the origin and nature of sin, the permanent value of which is not in dispute. But what was its original form before it had undergone this moralising process ? I do not know whether any information is available. But it is not impossible that in the original form of the myth, common to all the Semitic peoples, the moral character of God was not beyond criticism from the Christian standpoint; which every modern writer does, in fact, adopt instinctively. An a-moral or immoral deity may be a contradiction in terms to us. But only to us. Such a being might well be defied by man, and perhaps eventually defeated by him. The Babylonian version of the story of the Flood, which is older than the one in Genesis, shews that the idea of a deity hostile to mankind presented no difficulty to the Semitic mind. This conception, with Prometheus in the role of Adam, might help to solve the problem of the relations between Prometheus and Zeus which Mr. Kitto regards as the heart of the difficulty (p. 14).