The recent Exhibition of works of Greek art held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club—although necessarily limited to comparatively small objects—has been sufficient to prove that the traditional wealth of our English collections of classical antiquities still remains a fact. The Exhibition, moreover, has had its use in eliciting information as to works of art on a larger scale, hitherto unknown and unrecorded, that had escaped the vigilance of Waagen and of Conze, of Michaelis and of Furtwängler, and even of our English archaeologists. Thus it was that when the Exhibition was little more than planned I learnt from the well known sculptor, Countess Feodora Gleichen, that there existed at Lyme Park, Lord Newton's Cheshire seat, three fine sculptured Stelai from the best period of Attic art. I am grateful to the owner for granting me permission to publish these inedited works in this Journal, which ought indeed to be the official gazette of the English collections. I have unfortunately been unable to avail myself as yet of Lord Newton's further permission to study the originals. But as photographs of the Stelai are now extant, I have thought it wiser not to postpone the publication for fear that it might be anticipated elsewhere. The information kindly given me by Lord Newton himself has facilitated the discussion and interpretation of the Stelai which, for the rest, are perfectly straightforward examples of their class.

It is as yet too soon to state what corrections or additions should be made to the various figures I gave in my Population of Athens as a result of new evidence since that book was published (1933), although some individual discoveries have been made and Sterling Dow has published his invaluable Prytaneis (Hesperia, Suppl. I, 1937); for the excavations in the Athenian agora are not finished–though it looks as though the hopes I expressed for the discovery of a large number of inscriptions that would throw new light on the problem will be disappointed. But two objections have been made to my treatment of the number of slaves in Athens, by Mr. Hammond in Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc, 1935, p. 1, and by Prof. George Thomson in his edition of The Oresteia, I 70, n. 1 and II 357-9, both of whom maintain that Ktesikles' figure of 400,000 must be accepted; and though the question has again been discussed, convincingly enough to my mind, by Prof. Westerraann in Athenian Studies (Harv. Stud, Suppl. Vol. I, 1940, 451-70), it is worth dealing with certain aspects afresh, especially in answer to Thomson, for some important principles are involved. Not that anything I can say will convince him; for he hopes that ‘the whole subject will be re-examined by someone who is prepared to take the ancient evidence seriously and is free from the suspicion of seeking to minimise the extent of an evil which casts a sinister shadow over the glory that was Greece.’ But I will do my best.

These notes on the beginnings of Greek sculpture contain little that has not been said before, but aim at applying a severer logic to the evidence and the conclusions drawn from it. The problems may be defined as what models were used by early Greek sculptors, why they chose those models, where the choice was made, and what the impulse was that induced them to take up this new art.

The earliest surviving Greek sculpture worth the name is of the Daedalic style, which Jenkins has analysed neatly in his Dedalica. This style began in the second quarter of the seventh century and continued into the last quarter. So much is fairly generally accepted.

The artistic influence of Egypt on Greece has been propounded since the eighteenth century, and there are still many students who see its effects in sculpture. Usually their arguments are very general, asserting similarity of types and technical methods rather than of style. Of the Archaic Greek types the kouros is most apparently comparable to Egyptian—an upright, four-square figure with arms held to its sides and one foot in front of the other. Except for the stance this is the most obvious pose for a standing figure, and there are essential specific differences, well defined by Schrader. The stock Egyptian male has a support behind the forward leg, tilts backwards, and wears a kilt; the Greek kouros stands free, has a more mobile poise and is naked (except in the Daedalic style for a belt). As for resemblances in detail, Richter and Carpenter single out the roll of stone clenched in the hand of some Greek kouroi; this does not seem a regular or very early feature, and it may be a technical coincidence to avoid hollowing the inside of the closed fist. The ‘layer wig’ of course, though of Egyptian origin, is not so common in Egyptian sculpture and was already naturalised in Phoenician and Syrian art.

Scenes from the history of Pandora are rare in works of Greek art. There have at present been published, so far as I am aware, only five representations of her, in two reliefs and three vases. These all represent her birth or her coming into being. All the vases are in the British Museum. To these I have to add a fourth vase (Pl. I.), recently presented to the Ashmolean Museum by Mr. Edmund Oldfield, and bringing before us a fresh scene from the interesting history of the strange being made by the gods for the delusion and betrayal of men.

The tale of Pandora, as it appears in Hesiod, is so well known that I need only glance at its main features. When Prometheus had stolen for men fire from the gods, Zeus, determining to punish him, caused Hephaestus to make of earth a beauteous woman, whom, the goddesses adorned with ornaments, but in whom Hermes implanted a deceitful heart and a treacherous tongue.

The coin of Sicyon, of the obverse of which a drawing by Mr. F. Anderson (made over a photograph) is given here, has been twice published both times by Professor Percy Gardner.

The inscription on the obverse, which lends special interest to this piece, is unique among adscititious inscriptions upon Greek coins, not only in its elaborate character, but in the manner of its execution. Such inscriptions are in other cases graffiti, scratched with a point; this is pricked into the metal with a pointed instrument.

In my article in the previous issue of this Journal (JHS lxxviii (1958) 12) one of the points I tried to make was that the two-level ship was not, as is usually thought, a transient phase between the single-level ship and the trireme, but that representations of it appeared not long before 700 B.C. and continued until after the trireme is thought to have been introduced into Greece, i.e. during the third quarter of the sixth century.

This article offers the first comprehensive presentation of a monumental funerary lion found approximately 60 years ago in Thebes. Remarkably, the stone lion’s breast is inscribed with the name of the deceased, Ϝαστίας. On numismatic, epigraphic and historical grounds, I identify this Wastias as the homonymous magistrate appearing on staters of the Boiotian koinon in ca. 400 BC, but also as Astias, one of the leading Laconizing Theban politicians on the eve of the Corinthian War (Hellenica Oxyrhynchia 20.1–2). Wastias’ death can be very plausibly placed in 395 BC, the year of the battle of Haliartos. The proposed association is supported by a stylistic analysis of the monument, which thus becomes one of the best-dated sculpted lions of the Classical period. My contextual analysis of the monument reaffirms the notoriously oligarchic orientation of Theban politics. It also prompts a re-examination of other funerary lions, most notably its regional successor in the lion of Chaironeia. It concludes with a reflection on the nature of individual versus collective commemorative practices.

Lucian's Timon accuses Zeus of negligence: even his statue at Olympia has not punished the temple-robbers who despoiled it, although it had a δεκάπηχυν κεραυνὸν ἐν τῇ δεξιᾷ(Tim. 4). But according to Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias (v 11.1), the Zeus at Olympia possessed no such weapon; it held a Nike in the right hand, a sceptre in the left. A. M. Harmon (LCL Lucian ii 331) notes that since Pausanias’ testimony is confirmed by numismatic evidence, Lucian must be wrong and ‘the error is odd in so good an observer’. In fact Lucian could be rather careless over such details; but in this case we can hope to account for his mistake. While he must have seen the Zeus at Olympia at some stage, the statue was also an obvious subject for rhetorical ecphrasis and literary elaboration: one thinks of Dio Chrysostom’s Olympicus (Or. xii); and Lucian may well have been as bookish in his approach to works of art as he was in so many ‘cultural’ subjects. In this case the error would easily have arisen if he had read, misread, or misrecollected an accusative of σκηπτός (‘thunderbolt’) for σκῆπτρον (‘sceptre’) in a previous written source; he would then only have had to supply a synonym κεραυνός for the wrong object. The fact that the thunderbolt is in the wrong hand would then have followed easily from the initial error: one does not hurl thunderbolts with the left hand! The obvious risk of confusion between σκηπτόν and σκῆπτρονσκῆπτρον is illustrated by the problem at Plutarch, de Alex. fort.ii (Mor. 338b), where Clearchus becomes tyrant of Heraclea, takes to carrying a σκῆπτρον and calls his son Κεραυνός. The Teubner editor rightly adopts Valckenaer’s σκηπτόν for MSS σκῆπτρον: a tyrant sufficiently uninhibited to call his son Thunder would also be uninhibited enough to carry a replica of a bolt.