In the spring of 1950 my wife and I took part in an archaeological dig at Cosa, on the Tuscan coast ninety miles above Rome. Anyone who has travelled by train in daylight on the coastal line to or from Genoa and the Riviera has seen the site: the great grey polygonal walls looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamp-lands of the Maremma. During the war the Fascists had built at Orbetello, the nearest town to Cosa, a dynamite factory which became the target of the air-photographers of our Strategic Bombing Command. These air photographs appeared to reveal on the hill of Malabarba, just inland from Cosa, the characteristic large mounds which mark the site of Etruscan tombs; these mounds, which later turned out, on prosaic terrestrial examination, to be sanddunes, were the bait which attracted the archaeologists of the American Academy in Rome to the site.

The following fragment of papyrus, written in a late but careful hand, was recently acquired by Dr. Ibn Abig-sel of Plasmopolis, who has with singular generosity granted us permission to publish the text. As it may be of some general interest, it is presented here with a brief commentary based on his transcript and notes; a more detailed study will, it is hoped, appear in a papyrological journal later.

In November or December 1528 a citizen of Lyon was digging the foundations for a house on the northern outskirts of the town. In so doing he turned up the bronze tablet known to us as the Claudian Tablet. This document, copied from the Acta Senatus and displayed in the federal district at Lugudunum, is a verbatim report of the speech pronounced by Claudius in the Senate in a.d. 48 in favour of the admission to that body of certain Gallic chieftains. Forty-one years after its discovery a historian first placed it alongside the literary version of this same speech which we find in the Annals of Tacitus (xi. 24), and we have not yet exhausted the lessons which this vital juxtaposition can offer us. It is not very often that we are able to look over the shoulder of an ancient writer and see how he wields paste and scissors and box of paints. It is therefore with anticipation and relief that we turn to an undeniably authentic document known, in its original version, to Tacitus, and try to measure the historian's fidelity in using it.

Athene is mentioned in the Iliad nearly 200 times and almost as often in the Odyssey. On ninety-two occasions Homer calls her γλαυκ⋯πις. How should we translate this constantly recurring epithet? Neither Chapman nor Pope claims to provide a literal translation. Often they are content with ‘Athenian Maid’ or ‘Minerva’: but when they do attempt to render γλαυκ⋯πις they offer ‘Blue-eyed Goddess’, ‘Blue-eyed Maid’, &c. Cowper prefers ‘Pallas cerulean-eyed’, and Lord Derby ‘blue-eyed Pallas’.