Approach.: The subject of this talk is in one sense a rather personal one. I am venturing to say something about my own approach to History. I had the good fortune to be born just not too late to come in for the old-fashioned ‘Early Modern Western’ education in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures; the first grown-up job that I did was to teach Greek and Roman history for the School of Literae Humaniores at Oxford; and, in afterwards exploring other provinces of history, I have always found my way into them through a Greek gate. Greek history has been, for me, the key to world history.

What was the nature of the revolution in the manner of laying out a new town associated with the name of Hippodamos of Miletus? Aristotle suggests that it was simply a matter of regularity. The old way was to build irregularly, the new way to build regularly after the manner invented by Hippodamos. If this is true, how came it that the regular manner was adopted, presumably, in the first half of the fifth century? What movement of ideas brought it into favour? To what special circumstances did it constitute a response? Why had it not developed earlier as an obvious consequence, for instance, of the founding of new cities in the great age of Greek colonisation? And if the new colonial cities of the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries were not planned in a regular fashion, how were they planned?

The following abbreviations have been used, in addition to those already used in the Annual.

Arias. P. E. Arias, Il teatro greco fuori di Atene, Firenze, 1934.

Bieber, Denkmäler. Margarete Bieber, Denkmäler zum Theaterwesen, Berlin and Leipzig, 1920.

Bieber, H. T. Id., History of the Greek and Roman Theater, Princeton, 1939.

Bulle. H. Bulle, Untersuchungen an griechischen Theatern, München, 1928.

D-R. W. Dörpfeld and E. Reisch, Das griechische Theater, Athens, 1896.

Defrasse. A. Defrasse and H. Lechat, Epidaure, Paris, 1895.

Fiechter, A I, A III. E. Fiechter, Das Dionysostheater in Athen, I, III (Antike griech. Theatergebäude, Stuttgart, 1930–37).

Fiechter, Eretria. Id., Das Theater in Eretria (same series; similarly Fiechter, Megalopolis, Oropos, Sikyon).

Guide Bleu. Guide Bleu, La Grèce, 1935 ed.

Thera. F. Hiller von Gärtringen, Thera, 1899–1902.

Thanks are due to the editors, and to Mr. A. M. Woodward (on the subject of the theatre at Sparta), for their kind help and criticism.

This article is intended to form a supplement to The Greek Theatre Cavea in BSA XLIII, 125 ff. In the case of the theatre of Dionysus at Athens a detailed description is not necessary, as the works of Fiechter and Pickard-Cambridge cover nearly all the ground; comment is therefore confined to measurements of seats, etc. Theatres visited in Greece and the Aegean only are included.

In a note at the end, of his preface to Perachora I (1940), Mr. T. J. Dunbabin mentions a new site which he had discovered on the summit of Mount Lutraki. I visited the site (cf. Fig.) in July 1949 and found a good fragment of a sima lying among the débris on the small platform (Plate 6(a)) immediately S.W. of the summit. The platform measures barely six feet by four feet in its present state, but there is reason to suppose that it was formerly larger.

Scholars since Lethaby have tended to see the hand of one architect in three famous buildings, the Hephaisteion at Athens, the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion and the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous. All three belong to a very widespread type, the hexastyle temple with pronaos, cella and opisthodomos. But their similarity beyond this is held to necessitate a common authorship. It has proved impossible up to now to collect and review their points of resemblance; which is perhaps one reason for the long dispute on their dating and sequence. I hope to contribute towards this much needed collation, and I believe that, as things are, it would prove useful to compare the main lines and dimensions of all three buildings.

The origin of the Doric triglyph has been long a subject of dispute, and the problem is briefly this. The earliest stone triglyph that we have is dated to circa 600 B.C., and there is no direct evidence for earlier examples in other materials except in the temples at Thermon and Calydon, where terracotta metopes were found dated by their style to circa 640 B.c., the Calydon examples being slightly the later of the two. Undecorated terracotta metopes were found in the seventh century temple at Gonnos; on these see below. The spacing of the columns in the Heraion at Olympia, which shows contraction at the angles, has been adduced as evidence of a triglyph-frieze; but the earliest stone column cannot have been put in before 600 B.C., and the existing contraction may be the result of a later arrangement. Pottery of 600–590 B.C. has been found beneath the present structure. Yet the form of the Doric triglyph remained without variation for over four centuries, although it gives many indications of being unsuited to the material in which it has survived. This, it is argued, points to at least as long a period of development before its appearance in stone at the end of the seventh century. What determined this form, and in what material it was developed, are the two questions confrontine students of this problem.

When, in 1913, I published in this Annual (XVIII, 98 ff.) an account of the acrophonic numeral system in the Greek world, I hoped that within a short time I should be able to give a similar description of the other main system, the alphabetic. Owing to unforeseen difficulties, including two World Wars, that hope has not yet been realized, though I have contributed to the Annual two supplementary articles on the acrophonic numerals (XXVIII, 141 ff., XXXVII, 236 ff.), nor can I even now offer more than a first instalment of my study of the alphabetic system, in which I confine myself strictly to Attica, leaving to a separate article (which will, I hope, follow without undue delay) some account of those numerals as used elsewhere.

Two inscriptions commemorating the battle of Marathon and set up soon after 490 have come down to us. Both are epigrams and both have profited by recent discovery and research. The one, IG I2 763, has had its left-hand portion added by a fortunate find in the Agora, giving the beginnings of four hexameters: the other, IG I2 609, an inscribed column formerly carrying a statue, has now, as a result of recent study, been reunited with the dedication it once bore, a winged woman, a Nike, it is thought. The group is one of the more spectacular fruits of the long-sustained and still continuing attempt to reunite the scattered pieces of the ‘Perserschutt’. The reasons for dealing again with this latter dedication are new readings offered as a result of an examination of the inscription in the Epigraphical Museum in Athens.

In March 1937 peasant digging on the lower south-east slope of Monasteriako Kephali, by Knossos, discovered various sherds which included a few kiln wasters. It was clear that there had been a kiln site near and it seemed best to try to find it at once and so anticipate its being accidentally destroyed. Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Dunbabin and a few students, including myself, supervised a brief excavation. A short description of the remains of the two kilns discovered appeared in the JHS summary of that year's excavations. Before the war I had intended to publish a further short account of the site and of some pottery connected with it; and in spite of the loss of some relevant notes and illustrations in the intervening years it still seems worth recording such data as I have.

In Plate 17 and Figs. 1–2 I publish a bowl formerly in the possession of Humfry Payne, which passed to me from Mrs. Payne. It was bought in Athens and was, I believe, found in Attica.

The shape is common in Attica in the late seventh and early sixth centuries, not elsewhere, unless perhaps in Boeotia. That this vase is Attic is made certain by the clay, which is a warm brown with a tendency to red. The surface is well polished. The paint is good, rather lustrous, and brown where used thinly. The applied red is exactly that of many Attic vases of the period.

The following is the first instalment of the report of the excavations at Mycenae in the summer of 1939, undertaken by an expedition, largely from Cambridge, under the aegis of the British School at Athens. A preliminary account of the main results appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1939, 210 ff. The following students of the British School at Athens took part in the work at Mycenae: Miss Helen Thomas and Miss Vronwy Fisher of Girton College, Mr. F. H. Stubbings, Fellow of Emmanuel College, and Mr. Arnold Silcock, F.R.I.B.A. Other members of the expedition who undertook various parts of the work were Mrs. Alan Wace, Mr. Joseph Last, Mr. Michael Fuller and Mr. Colin Kraay of Oxford, and Dr. and Mrs. F. W. Goethert of Berlin. Miss Elizabeth Wace was actively present throughout. Orestes Dasis was foreman and Ioannis Katsarakis was mender.

The phrase ‘Homeric Art’ is ambiguous. It may mean either the poet's description of works of art familiar to himself and his audience, or transmitted to them as the furniture of the legends; or the poet's own style of presentation, in relation to other modes of craftsmanship in his time. There is also the reproduction, by painting or otherwise, of episodes from the poems, and as these may be contemporary as well as later, the study of them merges in that of Homeric representations, either of scenes of combat, or of the wild life which inspired so many of the similes.

The village of Kalývia Sokhás lies against the base of one of the massive foothills in which Taygetus falls to the plain three or four miles to the south of Sparta (Plate 26, 1). It is bounded by two rivers which flow down in deep clefts from the mountain shelf. The hillside above rises steeply to a summit which is girt with cliffs on all but the west side and cannot be much less than four thousand feet above sea level; this von Prott believed to be the peak of Taleton. Its summit is crowned by the ruins of a mediaeval castle which was undoubtedly built as a stronghold to overlook the Spartan plain; the only dateable object found there, a sherd of elaborate incised ware, indicates occupation at the time when the Byzantines were in possession of Mystra. The location of the other sites mentioned by Pausanias in this region remains obscure, but fortunately that of the Spartan Eleusinion has not been in doubt since von Prott discovered a cache of inscriptions at the ruined church of H. Sophia in the village of Kalývia Sokhás. In 1910 Dawkins dug trenches at the foot of the slope immediately above the village and recovered a fragment of a stele relating to the cult of the goddesses and pieces of inscribed tiles from the sanctuary. The abundance of water in the southern ravine led von Prott to conclude that the old town of Bryseai with its cult of Dionysus also lay at Kalývia Sokhás; but no traces of urban settlement have come to light at the village, and the name rather suggests copious springs such as issue from the mountain foot at Kefalári a mile to the north where ancient blocks are to be seen in the fields.