known to us by its modern name of Santorin, an island which was certainly occupied first by the Phoenicians and then by the Greeks at a very early period, even if we do not implicitly accept the date claimed for these settlements on geological evidence which seems to require further sifting. The inscriptions of Thera exhibit an alphabet very much less developed than the one which, as I have shown, prevailed in Ionia in the sixth century, wanting the four double consonants έ, 4, 4, x, which, as we know, the Greeks added to the Phoenician alphabet by borrowing them from some other source.

It is on these grounds that Kirchhoff considers the most archaic of the Santorin inscriptions at least as early as Olymp. 40 (B.c. 620— 617) if not earlier. The few archaic inscriptions which Attica, Boeotia, and other States of the mainland of Greece have as yet contributed, are not so remarkable for the interest of their subject as to be worth noticing separately here. Corinth was doubtless one of the places where writing was used at a very remote period, and was thence transmitted, with other arts of the mother State, to her colony, Corcyra. This transmission probably took place not long after the founding of Corcyra, B.C. 734, because two very archaic inscriptions may still be seen at Corfu; one of these is engraved round a circular tomb, which, after having been immured for centuries in the foundations of a Venetian fort, was brought to light when that obsolete defence was demolished in 1845. Both these inscriptions are in hexameter verse. One commemorates the death of a certain Arniadas who fell in a sea-fight off the coast of Epirus. The other tells us that the circular tomb was erected at the public expense to a certain Menekrates, a Locrian, who was proxenos and much beloved by the people, and who perished at sea. This inscription proves the high antiquity of the office of proxenos, concerning which I shall have more to say shortly. We have no certain means of fixing the date of these two inscriptions. Kirchhoff carries them as far back as Olymp. 45 (B.C. 600-597). Franz assigns the one relating to Arniadas to a period ranging from Olymp. 50 to 60 (B.c. 580-540); while the other he places as low as the beginning of the fourth century B.C.

The most interesting inscription of the archaic period which the Morea has produced is the celebrated bronze tablet which Sir William Gell obtained from Olympia and on which is engraved a treaty between the Eleans and Heræans. The terms of this specimen of ancient diplomacy are singularly concise and to the purpose. Put into plain English it runs thus :

"The treaty between the Eleans and the Hereans. Let there be an alliance for one hundred years commencing from this year. If there be need of conference or action, let the two States unite both for war and all other matters. Those who will not join shall pay a fine of a silver talent

to the Olympian Zeus. If any, whether citizen, magistrate, or town, destroy what is here inscribed, the offending party shall be subjected to the fine here specified."

Kirchhoff places this inscription before Olymp. 75 (B.c.480). Böckh and Franz assign it to a much earlier date. In any case we may regard this as the oldest extant treaty in the Greek language. The oblong bronze tablet on which it is inscribed has two loops by which it must have been originally fixed on the wall of some temple at Olympia. By this simple expedient, the substitute for our modern gazettes and blue books, the ancients ensured for their public documents notoriety and custody as safe as human forethought could then contrive. The Hellenic cities in Sicily and Magna Grecia have not as yet yielded many noteworthy inscriptions of the archaic period. One, however, deserves special attention. It is graven on a bronze plate found in Petilia, a Greek city of Bruttium in Southern Italy, and conveys land by a form of deed of admirable simplicity. After the invocation of God and fortune, are the following words :-"Saotis gives to Sikainia his house and all the other things." Then follow the names of the chief magistrates of the city and of five proxeni, whose signatures of course legalized the deed. This primitive specimen of conveyancing is thought by Franz and Böckh to be not later than B.C. 540.

In the Hippodrome at Constantinople may still be seen the remains of a venerable trophy of the Persian War, the bronze serpent which, with the gold tripod it supported, was dedicated to the Delphian Apollo by the allied Greeks after the victory of Platea as a tenth of the Persian spoil. On the bronze serpent which served as a base for the tripod the Lacedæmonians inscribed the names of the various Hellenic States who took a part in repelling the barbaric invader. The golden tripod perished long ago in the sacrilegious plunder of Delphi by the Phocians, but the bronze serpent remained in its original position till it was removed by Constantine the Great to decorate, with other spoils of Hellas, his new seat of empire at Byzantium. Here it has remained in the Hippodrome till our own time, not unscathed, for the last of the three heads of the serpent has long since disappeared, but the list of Greek States inscribed on the intertwined folds of the body remains perfectly legible to this day, having been fortunately preserved from injury by the accumulation of soil in the Hippodrome. This earth concealed about two-thirds of the serpent till the excavation made by me in the Hippodrome in 1855, when the inscription was first brought to light. As the date of the battle of Plataa was B.C. 479 it may be assumed that the setting up of the tripod took place shortly afterwards. Thus the inscription would not be later than B.C. 476. Of hardly inferior interest

is the bronze helmet found at Olympia early in this century which, as its inscription tells us, was part of a trophy dedicated by Hiero I. of Syracuse after his great naval victory over the Tyrrhenians B.C. 474. If the German excavations now going on at Olympia continue to yield results as promising as the discoveries which have distinguished the first months of this enterprise, we may hope that many similar records of Hellenic triumphs may be found in the rich soil of the Altis.

The date of these two inscriptions on bronze is so accurately fixed that they may be regarded as cardinal examples in the history of palæography by which the age of several other monuments of the same period may be approximately fixed. The next document I have to mention has a special interest from its connection with the principal incident in the life of Herodotus, his expulsion from his native Halicarnassus, to escape the tyranny of Lygdamis. This inscription, which I found built into a Greek house at Budrum, and which is now in the British Museum, contains a law, the enactment of which must have been the result of some kind of political convention between Lygdamis on the one hand, and the people of Halicarnassus on the other. The object of this law is to secure certain persons in the possession of lands and houses, by assigning a term after which their titles could not be disturbed. It is probable that the lands in question had belonged to political exiles, and had on confiscation been purchased by other parties. To guard against the possibility of the repeal of this law, it is enacted that, if any one tries to invalidate it, he is to be sold as a slave, and his goods are to be confiscated to Apollo, the principal deity of Halicarnassus. Another inscription since found at Budrum, but not yet published, seems to relate to the same transaction. In this document the sale of various lands is recorded, together with the names of the purchasers, and the titles of the lands so sold are guaranteed in perpetuity by making Apollo himself and other deities parties to the sale, and chief sureties, or ßeßauraí. The date of the first of these two inscriptions is probably about B.C. 445. If we pass from the west coast of Asia Minor to Northern Greece, we find a specimen of a different sort of public document, in the bronze plate which records a treaty between two cities of Locris, Oianthe and Chalion, and which was formerly in the possession of Mr. Woodhouse of Corfu. It is stipulated in this document that neither of the parties to the treaty shall enslave the citizens of their ally. It shall be lawful for the citizens of both States to commit piracy anywhere except within their own or their ally's harbours. The date of this inscription is probably not earlier than B.C. 431, and the barbarous character of its enactments about piracy is a confirmation of what we know from other evidence, that the Western Hellenic States

βεβαιωταί.

outside the Peloponnese did not participate in the general advance in civilization which took place in the rest of Greece after the Persian War. The dialect in which this treaty is written is as rude as its enactments.

Tracing the progress of Greek writing downwards, from B.C. 600, we have now arrived at the epoch when Athens becomes the centre of political interest; and most fortunately, from this epoch onwards till the time of Alexander the Great, the series of Athenian records on marble is singularly full and instructive. Some of these are still inscribed on the walls of the Parthenon; others have been put together out of many fragments extracted from the medieval and Turkish buildings on the Akropolis, or from excavations at Athens and the Piræus.

Of the public records preserved in these inscriptions, the following are the most important classes-the tribute lists, the treasure lists, and the public accounts. The first of these classes contains a register of the Greek allies and dependencies from whom Athens exacted tribute, under the pretext of maintaining a sufficient naval force to protect them against the Persian king. These records, so far as they have yet been recovered, range from B.C. 454, when the Delian confederacy transferred its treasury to Athens, to B.C. 420, and contain lists of the Athenian tributaries, the quotas at which they are assessed being placed opposite their names. In the registers the tributaries are arranged in classes, according to their geographical and political relations. Generally the rate is levied on single States; sometimes several neighbouring cities are included in one common group for assessment. In the greater part of these registers the quotas levied are so small that they evidently do not represent the amount of tribute actually paid, but that portion of it which was appropriated as an anathema or offering to Athene herself, as the goddess of the ruling State. This quota was in the proportion of a mina for every talent of tribute, or, in other words, it was a sixtieth of every talent. There is, however, one of these inscriptions which differs altogether from the rest, and which Köhler has put together, with wonderful patience and ingenuity, out of many fragments. This contains an assessment of the tribute itself, made B.C. 425, at which time, according to the Orators, the tribute was doubled, it is said by the advice of Alkibiades. This statement has been doubted by Grote because it is unnoticed by Thukydides, but it is in the main corroborated by the evidence of the inscription already referred to.

The measures taken by the Athenians for the scrutiny and record of the public accounts show the same methodical care and vigilance which they exercised in the custody of the treasures of the State. Specimens of the laws regulating these accounts, as well as the accounts themselves, are given in the inscriptions pub

lished in the second volume of Böckh's "Public Economy of Athens." It is to be regretted that the fragmentary condition of these renders it very difficult to make out the system adopted in keeping these accounts. It seems certain that bills were drawn on the Athenian treasury by generals on foreign service; and, in accounting for the produce of these bills, the rate of exchange in the place where they were negotiated would have to be allowed for before a final balance between receipts and expenditure could be struck. Again, much foreign money was received into the Athenian treasury through the payment of tribute, or through other transactions with foreign States; and in the public accounts this money would have to be converted into its countervalue in Athenian drachmæ. The profit or loss on exchange in each of these cases would form an item in the account. The navy with which Athens had to maintain her powerful maritime supremacy necessarily involved a constant outlay in the building and fitting out of ships of war, and by a happy chance we possess a few relics of the ledgers and registers of the Board of Admiralty by which the dockyards and arsenal at the Piræus were administered. In other words, we possess a number of fragments of inscriptions relating to the state of the navy in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., which were found in the ruins of a Byzantine building in 1834, and have been published by Böckh in the third volume of his "Public Economy of Athens." Nearly all these marbles are fragments of inventories, similar in character to the treasure-lists, and forming an exact and minute register of the ships and stores handed over from one Board of Admiralty to their successors. In these curious returns are entered the name of each ship and of its builder, and its actual state of completeness or deficiency in respect to masts, spars, rigging, anchors, cables, &c. Ships or gear found to be unfit for service are condemned, and the proceeds of their sale are noted. The fitting out of war-ships was one of the public burthens, leitourgiæ, imposed on the richer Athenian citizens. We learn from one of these inscriptions that to encourage promptitude in the discharge of this duty special honours were decreed to those who soonest fitted out a trireme; a gold crown of the value of 500 drachmæ about £20 was the first, a crown of inferior value the second prize, and so On the other hand, all defaulters who owe money to the State on account of ships are duly noted. The date of these documents ranges

on.

from B.C. 380 to 323.

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From the Athenian Board of Admiralty we will pass to their Office of Works. Of the archives of this Board we possess only three documents sufficiently complete to be worth noticing here, but these three are of very high interest. There is, first, the survey of the Erechtheum, made by a special commission, who