Many Athenian magistrates, including the Secretaries, were taken from the several tribes in cycles following their official order. These Tribal Cycles, first discovered by the author in 1898, serve during the Hellenistic Age as the basis for establishing the list of annual archons by means of which the sequence of events is fixed. For the periods before 262 B.C. and after 145 B.C. the author accepts the cycles constructed by Professor Dinsmoor in his recent book on The Archons of Athens in the Hellenistic Age. He rejects those for the intervening period and adduces new evidence to sustain an alternate scheme of cycles. Besides furnishing a more exact chronology for the history of Athens during the Macedonian epoch, the monograph contains epigraphical and historical interpretations of numerous documents and throws fresh light upon the theory and practice of Athenian democracy.

Designed primarily for specialists in Ancient History, this monograph contains a history of the Athenian temples, of the properties entrusted to their care, and of the accounts and inventories which they inscribed on tablets and set up on the Acropolis. The author has been able to enlarge and strengthen knowledge of the general history of Athens in several directions, among these being the range of the so-called “secretary cycles,” the chronology of the last five years of the Peloponnesian War, and the administrative activities of Androtion and Lycurgus. The concluding chapter is an account of Athenian war finance from 434 B.C., to 295 B.C., the limits of the study.