there is no evidence that Livy IX 17 alludes to him, that Trogus Pompeius took his Historiae Philippicae from him. Livy's harsh judgment of Alexander is not due to Timagenes; and Curtius' criticism of the great king is due to Livy, not to Timagenes, and the same may be said of Trogus, whom Curtius may have known and may have used. In short, we know too little of Timagenes, his likes and his dislikes, to build elaborate combinations on the scant notices that survive. Timagenes having been disposed of, Reuss sets up Eratosthenes as the common source of much that we find in Plutarch and Arrian. What they are supposed by some to have taken from Strabo goes back to the geographical work of the great névrahos of Alexandria. Finally, Kleitarchos, a very popular writer among the Romans, drew on Aristobulos, not Aristobulos on Kleitarchos.

Pp. 599-609. F. Wilhelm. Zur römischen Elegie. I. Jealousy is an inexhaustible theme in Roman elegy, and the chastisement of the mistress recurs perpetually. This special feature is not necessarily taken from Greek comedy immediately. It may have come from the elegiac poets of Alexandria, who in their turn borrowed from Menander and the rest. II. A discussion of Tibullus I 2 and the consolation that lovers seek in drink.

Pp. 610-623. L. Radermacher proves the existence of Mukývnow. O. Neuhaus. Der Vater der Sisygambis. Sisygambis was not a daughter of Artaxerxes II but of his brother Ostanes.

Pp. 624-640. Miscellen.-W. Schmid concedes the attractiveness of Hense's guess that in Soph. Antig. 524 foll. Ismene appears in a new mask, but maintains that the mask represented not the flush of grief but the bloody traces of her nails, the àμvɣaì mapei@v.—A. Körte. Ein Gesetz des Redners Lykurgos.— H. Schöne. Ein Blattversetzung bei Galen.-W. Sternkopf. Zu Cicero ad Q. fr. II 3. In A Kal. Febr. omit A.-A. Schulten. Zur lex Manciana.-H. Lietzmann. Prodecessor, not 'praedecessor'.-A. Zimmermann maintains that Roman names in Pop(b) and Pup(b) are baby names, 'Lallnamen '.

B. L. G.

BRIEF MENTION.

Maeterlinck opens his 'Trésor des humbles' with a rhapsody on silence, prompted by that all-too vocal Preacher of Silence, Thomas Carlyle. But apart from Maeterlinck's esoteric doctrine, the significance and the power of silence are proverbial. Indeed, Goethe seems to think that we exaggerate its potency:

Es ist ein eigner, grillenhafter Zug,

Dass wir durch Schweigen das Geschehene
Für uns und Andere zu vernichten glauben.

Still' todt schweigen' is a recognized process in German polemics; and I have long sympathized with the unfortunate French pamphleteer who wrote a reply to the silence of his adversary. Why all this obviousness? Simply because the course of my studies has led me of late to consider more particularly certain groups of syntactical silences in Greek; and I have been tempted to give some of my meditations on this subject the Farraresque title, 'The Silences and the Voices of Greek Syntax'. Every investigator, it is true, notes the emergence and disappearance of constructions, but emergence and disappearance do not mean birth and death; and the absence of a construction does not mean that it is not yet born. What is set down to nondevelopment may be due to suppression. Hence the especial interest of the syntactical silences of Homer. How these silences are to be interpreted will depend largely on one's aesthetic code. How far back shall we push the reign of conscious art, how far the evolution of the epos? Thus a mere syntactical inquiry brings us face to face with the Homeric Question; so that in reading M. BRÉAL'S brilliant brochure, Un problème de l'histoire littéraire, I have been reminded more than once of such problems as the absence of the historical present, of the articular infinitive, of the consecutive sentence, to cite only some of the most familiar instances.

Homeric theory is a rough shore, and one shudders when one thinks what might have happened, if one had followed the fashionable guides of fifty years ago and had insisted on landing:

ἔνθα κ ̓ ἀπὸ ῥινοὺς δρύφθη σύν τ' ὀστέ ̓ ἀράχθη,

whereas your floater can pass readily from the unitarian preachment of TERRET (A. J. P. XX 87) to the remorseless analysis

of Robert (A. J. P. XXII 467), or else allow himself to be rocked Kuμáтwv év ȧykáλdais by M. BRÉAL'S attractive handling of the Homeric Question, in which the silences of Homer receive due attention. In the brief summary, the brief neutral summary I shall give here, the brilliance of M. BRÉAL's essay will be lost, but the practical lesson will abide. On M. BRÉAL'S theory the young student will be able to enjoy his Homer without the importunate intrusion of many problems that are forced on the schoolboy before he can fairly enter on the most precious literary heritage of the ages. In short, M. BRÉAL'S student will be as happy as some of us were in the first half of the last century when we read Homer, Vergil, Ariosto and Tasso without much concern for literary theories.

1

M. BRÉAL does not believe with Schlegel that the epos simply grew, nor with Jakob Grimm that it made itself. He refuses to be mystified by organic growth' and the word 'dynamic' has no charm for him, nor does he show any acquaintance with Professor Gummere's lucubrations. Even the excavations of Hissarlik, Mykenai, Tiryns leave M. BRÉAL cool, if not cold. Ever since Schliemann began to dig, the grave-digger's song in Hamlet has been the burden of the Homeric scholar. But 'a pickaxe and a spade, a spade', is followed by the call for a 'shrouding sheet', and that shrouding sheet has shrouded much besides the solar theory'. Nothing more tragic to me than the traces of Schliemann's eager demolition of the real Troy, the real Troy of to-day. Now, according to M. BRÉAL, the great lesson taught by these layers of pre-Homeric civilization is the nearness of Homer to our own times. What used to be very distant is but the past of yesterday.

The true Homer, continues M. BRÉAL, is to be sought not in the narrative, nor in the imaginative part of the poems, but in those portions in which the poet addresses himself to men and not to grown-up children, desirous of being diverted and amused; and he thinks it quite as extravagant to suppose that Homer's audience believed the fairy tales of the Homeric narrative as to suppose that the Italians of the fifteenth century accepted the adventures of Orlando as a chapter of their history. And so, in the teeth of Homeric scholars, he contends that we are not to discard the Πρεσβεία πρὸς ̓Αχιλλέα and the "Εκτορος λύτρα in favor of any Ur-Ilias. Not that M. BREAL believes that there has been no interpolation. Much has been added to the original stock, whole books, in fact, mere repetitions of old phrases, old situations. But the passages that forward the action, that bring about the necessary conclusion, that paint situations or reveal

characters-these are not additaments, and M. BRÉAL protests against the criticism that would rob us of the best things in Homer under the pretext of carrying us back to the primitive form.

The primitive effect, according to M. BRÉAL is due partly to the mise en scène, partly to modern theories; and the mise en scène has to do with the silences of Homer. Of the great antiquity of writing there can be no question. True, only a few years ago it might have been said that the incontestable existence of writing in Egypt and Assyria proves nothing for Greece. But Evans has made that position forever impossible. The mention of writing is suppressed, and suppressed in order to keep up the heroic atmosphere. The obscure mention of those characters of hell', the onμara λvypá, shows nothing but the embarrassment of the poet. Statues and paintings are found in the palace of Minos centuries and centuries before Homer. Why does Homer simply leave us to infer their existence? For they must have existed in his time. The Apollo of Chryses was doubtless a statue, and the knees of Athene, on which Andromache spread the precious Téяλos (Il. 6, 303), were the knees of a statue. Decorative art abounds. Why should there be no religious art? Why the elaborate adornment of the shields of Achilles and not a single statue of a deity? As there is no direct mention of sculpture, so there is no direct mention of painting. But xpvoó@povos Ηρη and κυανοχαῖτα Ποσειδάων and the nimbus about the head of Achilles are evidences that painting was known to Homer. So the Homeric poems affect to be ignorant of coins. It is pure affectation. Coins had been in use three thousand years before the Christian era and M. BRÉAL refuses to accept payment in kind. It is a mere tradition of the school; and so imperative is the tradition that in the youngest part of the Iliad, the twentythird book, tripods and basins are employed as the medium of exchange and not money current with the merchant.

Fénelon's 'aimable simplicité du monde commençant' is a pretty phrase, but it is nothing more. Odysseus builds his bridal couch with his own hands, and proceeds to adorn his backwoods bed with gold and silver and ivory and purple. He is as inconsistent as Vergil in his description of the humble cottage of good Evander, as Fénelon himself in his description of the grotto of Calypso. The equipment does not match the abode in either case. Nausikaa, the divine washerwoman, is the daughter of a king who is surrounded by a splendid court and holds games like those of Olympia and of Delphi. It is time for us to stop laughing at Mme. Dacier, who, in translating the

Iliad, saw everywhere nobles and princes. She was nearer the truth, she was more in touch with the spirit of Homeric society than those who make of the Greek and Trojan warriors contemporaries of an age of blood, the coarse types of a period of barbarism and murder.

The heroes of the Iliad were not only valorous as became warriors of such lofty lineage. They were eloquent. The eternal antithesis of word and deed is present in Homer. Cheiron δικαιότατος Κενταύρων, the master of Achilles, and the undying type of the teacher, taught both, taught what was afterwards known 25 μουσικὴ καὶ γυμναστική. The life of the αγορά is fully established. The ceremonial is fixed. The herald puts the staff in the hands of the orator who has the floor. The styles of the various speakers, Menelaos, Odysseus, Nestor, are characterized by Homer himself. ayopeve, 'to harangue' becomes so common a word for speaking that Penelope 'harangues' her nurse in secret. There are schools and schoolmasters. As Achilles is the pupil of Cheiron, Telemachos is pupil of Mentor, Aineias of Alkathoos. The Iliad is full of types and models. It is a mirror of magistrates, of kings. <When Robert Stephens dedicated his Homer to Francis I, ἀγαθῷ βασιλεῖ τ ̓ ἀγαθῷ τ' αἰχμητῇ, he justly recognized the typical character of Agamemnon >. We are not far from gnomic poetry in Homer.

But after all there is a decided antique coloring, and great part of this is due, as M. BRÉAL insists, to the style of fighting. The military art of Homer is very different from what we find in the literary remains of the seventh and sixth centuries, Archilochos, Alkaios, < not to say > Tyrtaios, < who is not in very good repute just now >. The cavalry arm is notoriously absent. We have only war chariots, and these war chariots are descended in more or less direct line from the monuments of Egypt and Assyria. Even the swift-footed Achilles mounts a chariot occasionally. Agamemnon, Menelaos, Idomeneus, become heroes after the Egyptian pattern. The consequence is that at a time when large and disciplined armies were operating in Asia, the Homeric battles resolved themselves into a series of single combats. <ROBERT recognized the fact that some of the Homeric armour was Brummagem stuff> (A. J. P. XXII 468). According to M. BREAL it is all Brummagem. The minute description of contemporary equipment belongs to a much later stage of art.

In the Homeric style there are two factors, the one the poet, the other tradition. To the poet we owe the greatness of the