My subject in this paper is the familiar one of the impact of civilised on uncivilised in the widest extension of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation. In dealing with the earliest relations between the Aegean and Italy, I do not propose to discuss the parallels which have been drawn between the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age pottery of the two sides of the Adriatic. The unquestioned likenesses may be due to sharing a common heritage, and do not prove direct contact between the two areas.

Probably as early as the Middle Minoan I period, at the end of the third millennium, Minoan navigators occasionally reached Sicily. The earliest Cretan objects in the West are sporadic, and may have passed from hand to hand. But from the close of the Early Minoan period liparite is found regularly in Crete, and it is natural to suppose that the Cretans, went to the Lipari Islands to get it. It is suggested also that tin, which from the same period was increasingly used in alloying copper, was brought from the Western Mediterranean. On the other side, there are many Sicilian II swords and daggers which imitate L.M.I. types. Most of these cannot be so old as their prototypes. Though there are no weapons in Sicily which are certainly Minoan, it is clear that Minoan swords must have been imported, and served as models for a Siculan type which had a long currency.

K. M. T. Atkinson's study of two tomb-groups from Selinus in a recent volume of the Papers of the British School at Rome deserves attention for several reasons. It is the first time that the contents of any of these graves, excavated over fifty years ago, have been published as a whole. It is not easy in Palermo Museum to isolate and study individual grave-groups from Selinus, owing to the vicissitudes they have been through since they came out of the ground. Any publication of grave-groups has a value above that of the original vases; and many of these vases, particularly the bucchero, belong to classes which are interesting and too little studied. Mrs. Atkinson therefore deserves our gratitude for her careful and well-illustrated publication.

She goes on to draw conclusions which, if well established, would be of great historical value. No one has satisfactorily explained the existence of two well-supported dates for the foundation of Selinus, which is an important point of history and vital for absolute archaeological chronology. So her arguments and the dating of vases and graves on which she bases them deserve a rigorous examination. From such an examination it will appear that the date of the two graves and of most of their contents is substantially lower than she allows.

Personal names of animals, mostly of dogs and horses, are, as everyone is aware, recorded in the literature and archaeological monuments of archaic, classical, and hellenistic Greece. A few examples must suffice here, by way of preface to our present study. The most familiar of Homeric named beasts is, of course, Odysseus' faithful hound Argos (‘Swiftfoot’: Od. 17, 292). Hector's steeds (Il. 8, 185) were Xanthos, Podargos, Aithon, and Lampos—Tawny, Swiftfoot, Flash, and Fire: Achilles drove Xanthos and Balios—‘Tawny’ and ‘Dapple,’ offspring of the mare Podarge (Il. 19, 400); and Menelaus yoked Agamemnon's mare Aithe (Bay) and his own horse Podargos (Il. 23. 295). Names of classical hunting-dogs are quoted in Xenophon's Cynegeticus (7, 5). In hellenistic times the best-known animal-name is that of Alexander's favourite charger Boukephalas (‘Oxhead’) (Strabo 15, I, 29; etc.). Theocritus records the names of two heifers, Lepargos (‘Whitecoat’) and Kymaitha (Plumpling ?) (4, 45–46), and of a bull, Phaethon (‘Brightcoat’) (25, 139): the author of Idyll 8 tells us of Lampourgos (Firetail), a sheep-dog (65); while among metrical epitaphs on dogs dating from this age we have that of Philokynegos (‘Chasseur’) of Pergamon, accompanied by a portrait of the deceased and dating, probably, from the third century b.c.

The inscriptions of Christian, Lombard and Carolingian Italy have been collected and studied continuously almost from the date of their execution until the present day. This accumulation of secondary sources over a period of a thousand years has rendered the complication of the subject extreme.

The history of the clarification and scientific arrangement of Christian epigraphy in Italy begins with the work of de Rossi in the second half of the last century. He separated, and was therefore able to co-ordinate, the study of the inscriptions themselves, and the study of the collections of inscriptions. The first collection of Roman inscriptions possibly dates back to the end of the V century, and was of classical material; the collections of Christian inscriptions begin in the VII century.