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The attack on the ATL version began soon after the publication of the first volume in 1939. Gomme challenged it in a note in CR, LIV (1940), 65–67 as did S. Dow in AJA, XLV (1941), 642. Dow took up the cudgels (an apt image, considering the tone that the attack has sometimes taken) for 447/6 as the missing year in CP, XXXVII (1942), 371–384 and XXXVIII (1943), 20–27, a position that Silvio Accame had already set forth before the first volume of ATL had appeared (Riv. di fil., XVI (1938), 412–413. Merritt disposed of that suggestion, to my mind decisively, with his article in CP, XXXVIII (1943), 223–239. He had already retreated from his original position to the extent of saying that the missing list need not mean that no tribute was collected in that year (The Greek Political Experience, Studies in Honor of William Kelly Prentice [Princeton, 1941], 53). In the 1943 article he defended the premise that the missing year was 449/8, but did not insist that no tribute was collected. By 1944 he still had his doubts (B. H. Hill and B. D. Meritt, Hesperia, XIII [1944], 9), but by the time of the publication of Volume III in 1950, the authors of ATL were again unanimous that no tribute had been recorded for 449/8 because none had been demanded or collected. In 1954, D. M. Lewis, assisted by W. G. Forrest (BSA, XLIX [1954], 25–29), studied the Lapis Primus on which the first fifteen years after 454/3 are preserved and questioned the readings that the ATL authors had interpreted as a prescript for list 9. This provoked a reply from Malcolm F. McGregor (Phoenix, XVI [1962], 267–275), who conceded that the reading of a prescript from the questioned letters was not certain, though he still believed it to be correct. In any case, he continued to insist that there is a missing list, chiefly because no fragments from it have been found.
Recently W. K. Pritchett has launched an attack on the ATL (Historia, XIII [1964], 129–134), which argues on technical epigraphical grounds that “there may have been space for fifteen complete lists.” He is answered vigorously by B. D. Meritt (Hesperia, XXXV [1966], 134–140) and M. F. McGregor (Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, VIII [1967], 102–112). Even if Pritchett is right, it still remains to prove that that space was used for the “missing” list, and for that I know of no evidence. The sophistication of the debate has come to the point where Pritchett has employed a “Professor of Geology and an expert crystallographer, to examine the stone with a hand lens.” He himself spent three days building up a thin coating of latex to obtain the best possible impression of the debatable letters. Teams of scholars have been sent to examine the stone and the readings in question, and yet there is no agreement. Into this epigraphic battleground the civilian dare not venture.