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A N ANCIENT TRAVELLER who visited Athens in the early third century B.C. was plainly recording his own impressions when he wrote that anyone approaching Athens for the first time would find it almost incredible that a city so poorly laid out, badly supplied with water, and crowded with mean little houses could really be that famous Athens of which he had heard so much-until he saw its wonderful public buildings (FHG 2.254). And on several occasions the fourth-century orator, Demosthenes (3.26, 13.29, 23.207), rhetorically called attention to the undistinguished simplicity of the homes of the great leaders of early fifth-century Athens, the men who had saved Greece from Persian tyranny. Remarks such as these, too hastily and uncritically accepted, have furnished generations of compilers of books on Greek Life with a splendid opportunity to laud the Athenians for practising such noble self-restraint in their private lives, satisfied themselves to live in plain little mud-brick huts on crowded, narrow alleys so long as they might with marble Parthenons glorify their city and their gods. This impression that living-conditions, not only in Athens but in Classical Greece in general, were about on a par with our modern big-city slums, has not yet disappeared' in spite of the discovery nearly half a century ago of large and commodious houses at the site of the small north-Greek town of Olynthus, houses that can be dated to the threequarters of a century between the synoikismos of the city about 432 B.c. and its destruction by Philip of Macedon in 348 B.C. Most of the hundred houses excavated at Olynthus in four campaigns between 1928 and 1938 by expeditions from the Johns Hopkins University-the author participated in the campaigns of 1931 and 1934-measured nearly sixty feet square and were trimly arranged in rectangular blocks three hundred feet long by one hundred and twenty feet wide intersected by streets seventeen, or in one case twenty-four, feet broad. Each block of ten houses was constructed as a single unit with common walls between the individual houses which adhered to a general pattern evidently laid down by the supervising architect or architects (Fig. 1). Yet the prospective resident was evidently permitted to modify the details of the plan to suit his own taste and requirements, for no two houses have exactly the same arrangement of rooms.2

IN Phoenix 14 (1960) 146-150, we published a number of photos, with brief explanatory text, of the Acropolis Model recently completed for exhibition in the Royal Ontario Museum. This model was basically a copy made in Athens of the plaster model produced under the direction of G. P. Stevens during the last war; but under my supervision our Museum artist, Sylvia Hahn, did a great deal to make the model more realistic and certainly more effective for a public museum. The making of this model was commenced in the summer of 1955 but it was not ready for shipping to the Museum until rather over a year later. In the meantime we had conceived the idea of utilizing the model as one of the key exhibits in an entirely new gallery which should attempt something the ordinary, or even the extraordinary, museum of classical antiquities could not adequately do. We would attempt to present, in as realistic a form as possible within the available space, various aspects of the public life of Ancient Greece and its achievements in the major arts of architecture, sculpture, and literature. For unity of presentation, it seemed best to concentrate on the "school of Greece," Athens itself, and since very few original objects were available to us for the purpose it was decided to show in the gallery only casts, reproductions, and replicas. This however would require a great deal of highly skilled labour by model and diorama makers, sculptors, painters, metal-workers, carpenters, and others. Our Museum has a limited number of expert cabinetmakers who have produced, for example, the handsome wooden showcases for which the Museum is well known, but our supply of artists has been entirely inadequate. Progress for several years was therefore limited mainly to the completion of the Acropolis model and to the acquisition of casts of four metopes and some twenty-seven feet of the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon, and to the setting of these in place just under the ceiling at either end of the room within an accurately reconstructed architectural frame of triglyphs, cornice, and mouldings. Early in 1961, however, it was decided that this gallery should be completed as part of the celebration of the Museum's semi-centenary in the following year. The generous donor of our Acropolis Model, the late Walter C. Laidlaw of Toronto, again came to our aid with a grant, later supplemented by another from the Laidlaw Foundation, to assist in the hiring of additional staff to accelerate the work. We were fortunate in acquiring the services of a talented sculptor

IT WOULD BE impossible to review, or even to summarize, the twenty-two articles presented in this attractively bound, carefully printed and edited, and excellently illustrated volume within the allotted space. The title suggests that there is a greater thematic unity to this "Festschrift" in honour of a very distinguished and highly respected American archaeologist than is usual in such volumes-and that is true. Most of the articles are concerned with some phase of the relations between Greece and the Near East. A number are rather specialized archaeological studies of objects or classes of objects such as those from the royal burials at Alaca Hfiytik by Kosay and by Mellink, of clay sealings from Cyprus by Benson, of Canaanite Jars by Virginia Grace, of Mycenaean figurines by Mylonas and by Frances Jones, of a class of pottery found at Tarsus (Miss Goldman's most important excavation) by Hanfmann, of bronze cauldrons with bull protomes by Amandry, and of Islamic coins from Tarsus by Miles. The articles of most immediate interest to readers of The Phoenix will probably be a study of the "Epigrams from the Battle of Marathon" by Benjamin Meritt; "The Persian Spoils in Athens" by Dorothy Thompson; and "Arachne of Lydia at Corinth" by Saul and Gladys Weinberg. The last plausibly identifies the sketchy scene on a small Corinthian aryballos of about 600 B.C. as the earliest, in fact the only, Greek representation of the tale of Arachne and her weaving contest with Athena. Dorothy Thompson helps us to visualize the spoils captured from the Persians, especially at the Battle of Plataea, many of which were long displayed in the Parthenon to recall "the triumphs of their finest hour." Meritt publishes a fragment of a late fourth-century inscription containing the closing words of four metrical lines which he demonstrates form part of an epigram on Marathon of which two other fragments of the original fifth-century text are known; a combination, with comparatively little restoration, at last provides a satisfactory text of the whole epigram. Albright of Johns Hopkins contributes an important study on the "Northeast-Mediterranean Dark Ages and the Early Iron Age Art of Syria." Two quotations will be of especial interest to classicists: "The beginning of strong Phoenician influence on Greece is set by the borrowing