special discipline, or of any number of special disciplines taken separately. The history of thought, the history of morals, the history of economics, the history of political institutions and commonwealths must be studied in conjunction for the right understanding of any one of them and their relations to the general progress of society.

Applying this method to the consideration of ancient societies the author finds that " as a result of reflection upon their decaying life the Hebrews were able to free the ethical impulse from the old social habits, the Greeks freed the idea of the end of life from the particular life activities, and the Romans, though they gave objective expression to the Greek idea of society in which common ends should be served by all, failed to organize the freed impulse into new habits having higher social ends".

The ideas had been abstracted, but the societies, which made the abstractions, perished. The Christian church which accepted the abstractions was face to face with a decaying civilization and the military mastery of the barbaric Teutons. Therefore it could not give the community idea institutional form and was compelled to compromise in organizing the social motive of love. The chief instrument employed to reach the ideal was magic. In the sphere of government it furnished administrative assistance to stem the onrushing forces of dissolution. In the sphere of industry its domains offered the models for economic development. The economic problem was conditioned primarily by the necessity of obtaining an adequate food supply. The urgency of this need compelled the abandonment of the complete control of the laborer's activity and methods which prevailed throughout the ancient world. The existence of free village communities among the Germans is not denied, but the exigencies of both war and industry soon transformed these into lordships where a servile population, whose condition was like that of the Roman coloni, performed the agricultural labor. The tillers of the soil, however, whether German or Roman, stood upon a higher plain than any industrial class of antiquity because the business of war and government carried on by rude masters and without an organized administrative system prevented any superintendence of labor processes on the part of rulers.

Thus under the feudal régime we have a novel conjunction of phenomena, viz., a society acquainted with the ideals abstracted by the ancient civilizations, but a society forced back by convulsion into an exclusively agricultural stage and disintegrated into a congery of selfdependent units.

Advancement beyond this stage depended in the last analysis upon the accumulation of capital. The production of a food supply beyond the immediate needs of consumption opened the door again to commerce. The expansion of commerce led to the growth of towns and the diversification of industry, an emancipated industry, freed from outside control of its technique, though the control of that technique under the gild system was not completely individualized.

The nature and processes of this early commerce undermined the feudal régime and the realistic philosophy. It determined the institutions and activities of the city commonwealths of Italy. It conditioned the principalities of northern Europe. As it became less and less exclusively a commerce in luxuries and more and more a trade in staples and necessaries by the creation of new wants, there ensued not only a specialization of function in the activities of the individual but also a widening of the social activities of the individual. Society discovered without wholly perceiving it a new means to realize the social ends and thus undermined the position of the medieval church and made the Reformation a matter of course.

The dawn of the modern age, however, is signalized not so much by the formal revolt against the church, as it is by the political philosophy of the seventeenth century, rooted in the deposits of an economic revolution. The national state and the law of nations are agencies employed to enable the individual to function for larger and larger communities. The exercise of these agencies in the sphere of political action and of economic opportunity gave rise for the first time to the self-conscious individualism of the age of enlightenment. The state, like the gild and the church, was forced to abandon its claim to be the social end.

In these latter days the individual has put himself forward as the end. This assertion might only stimulate anarchy were it not for the organization of modern industry with its ever more insistent demonstration that no man liveth unto himself.

The author's method and treatment offer little ground for objection. What there is of it must be a matter of difference of emphasis rather than attack upon fundamentals. The thing of real moment is that he has given a new and important elucidation of the continuity of history.

JOHN H. CONEY.

Geschichte der Meder und Perser bis zur makedonischen Eroberung. Von JUSTIN V. PRÁŠEK. Band I. Geschichte der Meder und des Reichs der Länder. [Handbücher der alten Geschichte, Serie I., 5 Abteilung.] (Gotha: Perthes. 1906. Pp. xii, 282.) WITH a new Shah on the Peacock Throne of Teheran, a written constitution, a parliament, and much talk outside as to what Persia may become or what may become of Persia, we may say that a book on the early history of Iran is more timely than usual. The author of the present work is a professor in the historical department of the University of Prague, and he has presented to us in his first instalment a learned and painstaking account of the sequence of events that took place before 500 B. C. in the lands between the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, the Tigris River, and the Indus, in other words the history. of the kingdom of the Medes and Persians whose laws knew no change down to Alexander's time.

The writer leads us by his erudition through the dark mazes of the "Proto-Iranian and Proto-Median" periods, which might possibly have been lightened a little more at one point if he had made use of the less-known fact that "Median", as an adjective, really occurs in the Avesta as Mazainya—(“the Mazanian demons" whom Zoroaster anathematizes)—and then he passes on to the beginnings of Media itself as a power.

In the face of such learning it may seem like carping or ungracious fault-finding-although one is none the less appreciative of the author's scholarship and critical acumen—to say that a large part of the Median portion of this history, or nearly half of the section lying before us, reads too much like a succession of deep and minute disquisitions, presenting argumentation as to the relative value of the various sources employed, discussion of views of previous writers, the pros and the cons, in short a sort of learned prolegomena, although the abundant bibliographical references in the foot-notes are always welcome. But much of this material of research would have found its place more appropriately in the publications of some special historical journal or the transactions of an academy, than in a book designed as well for the general student of history as for the professed Orientalist. It would have been really better to have published these portions separately as preliminary investigations, just as Professor Prášek has done on several occasions, and to have confined the present work more to results in those particular sections to which the reviewer is alluding.

The real interest in the present book, though not necessarily in fact, begins with the chapters on Cyrus, in treating of which the author lays special emphasis on the great ruler's grandly conceived idea of forming "a Kingdom of Countries"-a kind of Asiatic United States. It is to be regretted that when the Prague professor, at pages 204-205, places the date of Zoroaster's entering upon his ministry in the same year (559 B. C.) as that in which Cyrus began to reign, he does not show acquaintance with the special contributions on the life of the prophet of ancient Iran that have appeared since Floigl, whom he follows, wrote, more than twenty-five years ago.

It would come only within the province of a more technical review than this can be to point out minor details in which the Iranian specialist may take exception to the interpretation which the author has adopted for certain moot passages, or the view he maintains on certain disputed matters. It is not without interest, however, to observe that he finds reason for giving a higher estimate of the character of Cambyses than that which is commonly accorded to the mad monarch of Herodotus; in fact, a portion of his chapter on Cambyses reads like a whitewashing, but Dr. Prášek does not leave his reader without a chance to look up for himself the references on which this more favorable judgment is based, even though he may not agree with it. Yet de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

The section of the book lying before us for review ends with the overthrow of Smerdis, the Magian usurper; we shall look with interest for the next fascicle which promises to trace the career of the great organizer, Darius, and the sequence of events down to the momentous invasion of Iran by Alexander the Great.

A. V. WILLIAMS JACKSON.

Woman; Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, and among the Early Christians. By JAMES DONALDSON, M.A., LL.D., Principal of the University of St. Andrews. (New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company. 1907. Pp. iv, 278.)

SIR, I give you woman ", cries the bagman in Thackeray, as he lifts his glass. The Principal of the University of St. Andrews gives us the woman of Graeco-Roman and early Christian antiquity in five or six agreeably written papers reprinted from the Contemporary Review of twenty-five or thirty years ago and supplemented by a useful bibliography and a few notes on the modesty of Homeric bathing, the character of Sappho, the relative dates of the Ecclesiazousae and the Republic, and similar topics of perennial controversy.

Good taste, a pleasant if somewhat Bowdlerized style and a sufficiency of sound though not very painstaking scholarship redeem this volume from any malicious comparison with the lectures which M. Maurice Lefévre delivered to ces dames in the presence of an Auditrice auguste and published with the title La Femme à travers l'Histoire. But the author himself would hardly claim for it the place of a serious historical monograph. He discourses pleasantly of the freedom enjoyed by the Homeric woman, of the lenient fatalistic view which the Homeric man took of her peccadillos, of the inevitable Nausicaa idyl. He attributes the succession for about four or five hundred years at Sparta "of the strongest men that probably ever existed on the face of the earth" to the purity and the gymnastic training of the Spartan girls. He protests against the villanous tales with which Athenian comedians have besmirched the name of Sappho, and commends the prototypes of the bachelor girl whose soul revolted at the sordid cares of housekeeping and sought refuge in her school from the low drudgery and monotonous routine to which it appears those women's lives were sacrificed in Lesbos. He ascribes the decay of Athens to the subjugation of her women, deduces the hetaira as the veritable complement of the unattractive Athenian wife, and takes the favorable, Professor Wilamowitz would say, the sentimental view of Aspasia. He shows us the good and the evil side of the Roman matron's life, describes her gradual emancipation, and sets forth the main features of the laws of marriage and divorce at Rome.

Lastly he shows how the position of woman declined with the decay

of the Empire through the early Christian centuries, and ascribes the failure of Christianity at first to elevate her condition to the fanatical asceticism of the more narrow-minded Christian fathers.

In all this there is little to praise or censure. The original sources have been consulted, but are not cited with sufficient fullness or precision to make the book a valuable work of reference. Sophocles does not represent one of his characters as regretting the loss of a brother or sister much more than that of a wife (p. 33). On the contrary, it is a woman, Antigone, who says that she could more easily replace a husband than a brother. In his account of the supposed speeches of Cato and L. Valerius in the Oppian Law Dr. Donaldson hardly appreciates the delicious humor of Livy. In citing Horace's Nullis polluitur casta domus stupris as proof of the success of the Lex Julia he takes an optimistic view of the evidential value of court poetry. It is not quite certain that Erinna was a pupil of Sappho; nor is it more than a conjecture that her poem, the "Distaff", sings the first revolt of the college girl against household drudgery.

But these are trifles. Dr. Donaldson's readable little book is perhaps quite as useful as a work of more solid erudition would be. Woman is half the world, as Plato said, and cannot be profitably studied, as some think she cannot study, in falsifying isolation from man. It is possible to tabulate for reference the laws and customs which from age to age have regulated the status of daughter, wife, widow or hetaira. But what generally passes for the study of woman is simply the study of sex-an essentially unhistorical theme for plus ça change plus c'est la même chose. PAUL SHOREY.

Genseric, la Conquête Vandale en Afrique et la Destruction de l'Empire d'Occident. Par F. MARTROYE. (Paris: Hachette et Cie. 1907. Pp. vii, 392.)

THIS work is based on a careful use of all the available sources and presents a satisfactory account of the Vandal kingdom to the death of Genseric, 477.

The introduction is devoted mainly to a narrative of the Donatist controversy, the recital of which is used by M. Martroye to portray the separatist tendencies in Africa and the wretched condition of the African provinces. Chapter 1. (La Conquête, pp. 78-136) covers the period from the death of Honorius, 423, to the treaty of 442 between Theodosius and Genseric. The events narrated are the rivalry of Aëtius and Boniface, the earlier wanderings of the Vandals, the career of the Visigoths under Ataulph and Wallia, and the conquest of Africa, 429-442. Some of M. Martroye's conclusions should be noticed: he is inclined to accept the story of the treason of Boniface and its motives as given by Procopius; he reckons the effective force of the Vandal army as 50,000 men at the most; the portion of Africa promised to