The five stones here described and illustrated I found, along with a few other carved pieces, at Bignor Park, Sussex, in November, 1926, built into the walls of a garden house by the late owner, Mr. Johnstone. They were almost certainly brought over to England by Mr. John Hawkins, who travelled extensively in the East, Greece, and Italy, and afterwards, settling down at Bignor Park in 1806, lived there till his death in 1841. Incidentally, he had an important share with Samuel Lysons in excavating the Roman villa at Bignor between 1811 and 1819. I have failed to find any printed record of these stones, except of No. 3, and think that their belated publication may be of interest. The present owner, Lt.-Col. the Hon. Clive Bigham, has given me every facility for photographing, and making squeezes, casts, and rubbings of the inscriptions. In order to preserve the stones, he has had a wall specially built overlooking a garden, with a seat below; and in this wall they are effectively arranged.

Herodotus has several references to the orders or companies of gods in Greece and Egypt, and they involve a comparison and a contrast.

They may be arranged, in translation, as follows:

(1) II, 4, 2. ‘They say that the Egyptians first used the names of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks adopted them from them.’

(2) II, 7, 2 mentions ‘the altar of the twelve gods at Athens’.

(3) II, 43, 2. ‘Concerning Heracles I heard this account, that he was one of the twelve gods.’

(4) II, 43, 4. ‘But to the Egyptians Heracles is an ancient god; and as they say themselves, there were seventeen thousand years to the reign of Amasis since the eight gods produced the twelve, of whom they consider Heracles to be one.’

(5) II, 46, 2. ‘The Mendesians hold Pan to be one of the eight gods, and they say that these eight gods came into existence before the twelve.’

(6) II, 145, 1. ‘Among the Greeks Heracles and Dionysus and Pan are considered to be the youngest of the gods, but among the Egyptians Pan is considered very ancient and one of the eight gods said to be the earliest, while Heracles is one of the second group, and Dionysus one of the third group, who were produced by the twelve.’

The past year has not been one of startling discoveries. The effect of the disastrous war has been a paralysing one and the difficulties in the way of archaeological work have been great. While the political situation was so complicated, new undertakings were almost out of the question: it is to be hoped, however, that the report on 1898–9 will be able to speak of Crete as having been thrown open to the scientific world. The most interesting archaeological event has been the foundation of a new Austrian Institute, under the guidance of Prof. Benndorf in Vienna. Dr. A. Wilhelm, the wellknown epigraphist, and Dr. W. Reichel, whose brilliant essay on Homeric Armour has won for him a prominent place among archaeologists, are permanently stationed at Athens, and a building is contemplated in the near future. Dr. R. Heberdey will be stationed at Smyrna and Dr. Kalinka at Constantinople, so that the new Austrian Institute will be a powerful agency for the discovery and preservation of Hellenic antiquities. The old publication ‘Archäologisch-epigraphische Mittheilungen aus Oesterreich’ is now brought to a conclusion, and is replaced by the ‘Jahreshefte des österreichischen Archäologischen Institutes,’ of which vol. i. has appeared. The contemplated international congress of archaeologists at Athens, which the war of 1897 rendered out of the question, was announced for Easter 1898 to synchronize with the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the French School, but this year as before practical difficulties caused its postponement. The adjourned festivities at the French School took place as arranged. If the congress is to assemble at a future date, it will be necessary that arrangements should be made for it long enough beforehand to ensure its success.

To attempt a new restoration of the Tomb of Mausolus may seem to some a hopeless, and to others an unnecessary, task. But I have never felt satisfied with any of those hitherto proposed; and only that of Cockerell (dating originally from before the excavation of the monument by Sir Charles Newton in 1857) and that of Mr. J. J. Stevenson appear to me to explain in any way its reputation in antiquity, especially for lightness and beauty, or its inclusion among the ‘Seven Wonders.’ The sources of evidence as to the construction of the building are the well-known description given by the elder Pliny and the facts disclosed by Newton's excavation; it will be best therefore to quote the passage and briefly to state the facts. Pliny's words are: Scopas habuit aemulos eadem aetate Bryaxim et Timotheum et Leocharem, de quibus simul dicendum est quoniam pariter caelavere Mausoleum. Sepulchrum hoc est ab uxore Artemisia factum Mausolo Cariae regulo, qui obiit Olympiadis CVII anno secundo. Opus id ut esset inter septem miracula hi maxime fecere artifices. Patet ab austro et septentrione sexagenos ternos pedes, brevius a frontibus, toto circumitu pedes CCCCXI, attollitur in altitudinem xxv cubitis, cingitur columnis XXXVI. Pteron vocavere circumitum. Ab oriente caelavit Scopas a septentrione Bryaxis a meridie Timotheus ab occasu Leochares, priusque quam peragerent regina obiit.

The most remarkable characteristic of the temple built in the sixth century was the figure sculpture which surrounded the lower drums of the columns on one or both of the fronts. This feature was certainly not an architectural freak, and the band of figures must either have been thought of as a sculptured dado or derived from Egyptian prototypes such as the sculptured columns of Medinet Abou. Both antecedents may have influenced the choice, but the former was a sufficient and the more probable source. The sculptured dado was the first form of sculptured ‘frieze’; in ‘Mycenaean’ palaces dadoes of plain or sculptured slabs faced and protected the lower parts of crude brick walls. The two fragments of slabs with reliefs of oxen from Mycenae in the Elgin collection formed part of such a dado.

In the last pages of the Theaetetus Socrates is made to present four versions of a final attempt to define knowledge, as true opinion accompanied by logos, and to reject them all; yet in earlier dialogues ‘ability to give account’, λόγον ἔχειν or λόγον διδόναι δύναδθαι is closely associated with knowledge, not always, or not necessarily, knowledge of Forms, and in the Republic it is said to be the essential mark of the dialectician. These facts are exceedingly hard to interpret. In recent years the passage has been read as an indirect defence of the earlier theory of Forms, as the statement of a problem answered in the Sophist by a revision of that theory and as a piece of radical self-criticism. No one of these interpretations seems tome without difficulty, and in this article I shall attempt to argue for yet another solution which owes something to all three.

Professor Cornford, pressing the fact that Socrates draws all his illustrations from the world of concrete things, believes that Plato intended by criticism of the different versions to point the way to an old and invulnerable sense of λόγον διδόναι, which implies that the proper objects of knowledge are Forms. This is the statement or understanding of grounds for judgments which in the Meno is said to turn true opinion into knowledge. A rather similar line has been taken by Professor Cherniss. Professor Stenzel thinks that the earlier theory of Forms is vulnerable to Socrates' criticism of what I call ‘the first version’, the ‘dream’, but he believes that all three of the later versions ‘recover their meaning’ when the problem of definition has been solved in the Sophist with the help of the method of diaeresis; and so restated they can be shown to apply to particulars as well as to Forms.

The Iberian archaeological record is particularly rich in asynchronous (i.e. chronologically mixed) assemblages including Athenian pots that predate the other items by a couple of decades or even a few centuries. Recent scholarship on keimëlia, or ‘curated objects’ in modern parlance, has shown the potential of such objects to investigate questions of identity, agency and history-making among the receiving communities, but also to shed light on the role of Athenian pottery among them. This article analyses this phenomenon within the Iberian peninsula, focusing on drinking cups, both black-gloss with inset lip (Cástulo cups) and red-figure type B cups. Using case studies from necropoleis and settlements of the southeast and east of the peninsula, the article explores the reasons and meaning of this consumption practice. It is argued that the occurrence of ‘heirloom’ vases in Iberian tombs and their extraordinary survival in some settlements is the result of a conscious and deliberate choice indicating the existence of mechanisms of social distinction based on a diacritical use of material culture. It is further argued that different motivations might lie behind their delayed deposition: when the chronological gap between production and disposal dates is small, one or two human generations, curated Athenian vases worked similarly to non-curated ones, being emblematic of economic success, social affiliations and political rank. But when the interval is longer, Athenian pots became symbols of ancestry and elite status, possibly acquiring the same legitimizing role earlier bestowed upon Orientalizing artefacts. Supplementary material is available online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426921000094) and comprises a catalogue of case-study objects.

The fragmentary biographical work by Damascius, known as either the Life of Isidore or Philosophical History, appears to have begun with the myths of the dismemberment of Osiris and Dionysus. These programmatic allusions establish an important theme in the text that followed: ‘becoming a Bacchus’. This, as is clear from Damascius’ Phaedo Commentary, refers to the process of unifying and liberating oneself from the body at the ‘cathartic’ stage in the Neoplatonic scale of virtues. The acquisition of likeness to this specific deity is, therefore, a vital though far from final stage in the progression towards the ultimate goal of late antique Platonic philosophy: ‘becoming like god as far as possible’.

The northern coast of the Black Sea has produced an abundance of documentary texts dating from the sixth through fourth centuries BC. Of great value to the epigraphist and historian are dozens of Greek letters, receipts and curses inscribed on lead and ceramic media. When placed in dialogue with one another, these texts yield new insights into daily life and literacy in communities for which literary sources are scant or absent. They document the bustling trade in saltfish, enslaved persons and textiles, and the web of relations between Greek and non-Greek individuals in north Pontic cities, from marriage to commercial ties with indigenous groups of the Pontic interior. This article demonstrates how trade could drive literacy in non-elite communities of the northern Black Sea. Literacy and mercantile activity were very much entwined, and developed in parallel with one another and with other civic and social institutions within these port communities.